10 Movies That Explained Way Too Much

One half of Sinister is an excellent horror film. For the first hour or so, the film is effective and frightening. It has some of the most striking images in any recent, blockbuster horror and creates a general, vague but palpable sense of terror. Then, like in The Ring, we start to learn the rules in detail. We also start seeing the monster more and more. The monster’s mythology also starts to get revealed with increasing clarity.

The problem here is the problem of many horror films. The more you explain the less scary things often become. That’s not always the case, but it is frequently so. The issue is that when you can explain something, you can more easily contain it within the screen you are watching it on. It is less able to feel as if it is lurking or spreading outside the bounds of the television (or film screen or laptop).

The more I understand of Bughuul, the monster of this film, the more he paradoxically seems less applicable to my own life. Whereas before, the film teemed with a generalized fear about a power that can exert control over children, turn them against their families, who can wreak havoc, now the film has a knowable monster who can be named, identified at first sight, and whose horror seems less applicable to the viewer. It’s much easier to be scared of losing control or having someone around you lose control or to be scared of family members becoming something unrecognizable or to fear stumbling upon something you should never have borne witness to than, a particular monster whose face you recognize and who obeys specific rules in a movie you saw once.

That’s not to say this is the case in every horror film - we can all find examples where learning more about the monster kept the film horrifying. But here, we learn so much about it and, as a result, the film loses the fear it so expertly built up in its first hour.