In Sinister 2, opening this weekend, two boys are seduced by the ghosts of dead children, each of whom possesses a film reel detailing the grisly murders of their families.Matt Kennedy
The story goes like this: When French filmmakers Louis and Auguste Lumière first screened their 1895 short The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station, audiences freaked out. Seeing a life-sized steam engine lumbering toward them, and somehow thinking it was the real deal, crowds across Europe screamed, panicked, flipped their proverbial lids. It's an anachronism, a handed-down urban legend, even a founding myth of the medium, as film scholar Martin Loiperdinger puts it. Even if the story is false, it proves useful – speaking to the power, the sensationalism, of what Loiperdinger calls the "undiminished vitality" of cinema itself.
This claim of cinema's ability to arouse, excite, even terrify audiences has a history as long as the medium itself. In the U.S., anxiety around the movies' power to thrill was codified by a 1915 Supreme Court ruling, which declared that films shouldn't have the sorts of First Amendment protections enjoyed by literature or theatre. According to Justice Joseph McKenna, "their power of amusement make them the more insidious in corruption." Movies appealed to a "prurient interest." Movies were too powerful, too sensational, too ready to excite susceptible viewers (read: women, children, the uneducated and working poor). Film historian Tom Gunning claims this ruling speaks to "an essential suspicion of cinema." And for Gunning, movies weren't just sensational or vivid or undiminished in their vitality. They were something more, something nastier. They were evil.
Sinister 2, opening this weekend, finds itself in a long tradition of films (and fiction more generally) about the corruptive, fundamentally evil, sway of movies. In the film, two young boys are seduced by the ghosts of dead children, each of whom possesses a film reel detailing the grisly murders of their families ordered by the series' central monster, an ancient demon called Bughuul (the boogeyman, basically). Each crackly movie is grislier than the last, and meant to embolden the boys to murder their own family. Simply seeing evil begets more evil.
It's a common theme. Films such as Hideo Nakata's Ringu (about a haunted video cassette), Lamberto Bava's Demons (about a film that transfers a demonic curse onto its viewer), David Cronenberg's Videodrome (in which a pirated TV signal causes lethal brain tumours) and John Carpenter's Cigarette Burns (an entry into the Masters of Horror TV series about a film print that drives viewers into a violent frenzy) tackle this essential suspicion.
Literature, too, has broached the theme. The most obvious example is David Foster Wallace's epic Infinite Jest, which deals (in part) with a video cassette so totally absorbing and entertaining that anyone who views it compulsively rewatches it, eventually dying in a pile of their own excrement.
The history of evil and occultism is full of similar misgivings about images, in which the representation of a thing comes to stand for the thing itself. In ancient Egypt, sorcerers used wax puppets to inflict damage on victims. The Lakota leader Crazy Horse was suspicious of ever having his photo taken, worried that his essence would somehow be stolen or captured. The whole record of so-called "black magic" is rich with similar devilry. Where many religions deem graven images blasphemous, the Devil and his many scions and servants are represented by signs and sigils – images meant to entreat the real thing. To represent evil is to invoke evil. (Solomon, an ancient king of Israel, is believed to have captured many of these demons in his ceremonial magic circle, recording their names and corresponding sigils.)
And yet, films like Sinister 2 are drained of any real threat of evil. All these examples – 16-milimetre film reels, ancient wax puppets – require something material, a referent that they represent or index. As the French film theorist André Bazin understood, the material quality of cinema staged a transfer from reality to the reproduction. Something meaningful, maybe even something evil, can be captured in these physical media, like King Solomon trapping a demon in his magic circle.
Films shot on digital (to even call them "films" is something of a misnomer), augmented by CGI effects, lack this real-world referent. Something like Sinister 2 can merely depict or represent evil. But it can never be evil itself in the way that a cursed VHS tape or maddening reel of celluloid can seem truly, essentially evil.
Maybe this is why Sinister 2 – like The Conjuring movies – exhibits this old-fangled nostalgia for dusty film reels, snapping vinyl records, and the sizzle of burning flash bulbs. This new crop of horror films serves as digital odes to the physical. They yearn for that long-gone time when that "essential suspicion of cinema" proceeded in some way from the material of cinema itself; when movies could somehow make you believe that a vengeful Japanese ghost could crawl through your TV, or that a slow-moving locomotive may barrel out of the screen and blast straight through you.