SINISTER 2 Set Visit Interviews with Scott Derrickson, Ciaran Foy, Shannyn Sossamon, and James Ransone

Last August, I was invited to the set of Sinister 2, where it was instantly apparent that Bughuul was leaving his mark on a new family. While the snuff film-obsessed Bughuul was nowhere to be found, we were greeted by quite a few child actors who were playing his little killers in the new movie.

The movie takes place in a new house and with a new family, but "Deputy So and So" returns and appears to be on the trail of the pagan god who caused so much suffering in the first movie. The scenes I watched mainly revolved around Shannyn Sossamon and twin brothers Robert and Dartanian Sloan, who teased something strange going on at a church. We also got to see a handful child actors who were made up as Bughuul's killer children and were haunting (or helping?) the new family.

I was among a handful of journalists that were invited to watch filming and, later in the day, we all took part in an interview session with director Ciaran Foy, co-writer and Sinister director Scott Derrickson, and stars James Ransone and Shannyn Sossamon. While they were tight-lipped on some of the major plot points, they teased expanding the Bughuul mythology, additional sequels, and we learned about how Ciaran Foy became the new director:

While Scott Derrickson came back to co-write the sequel, he handed directing duties to Ciaran Foy after a long search for the right director:

"It was more difficult than I thought it was going to be. I’ve seen a bunch of low budget horror and I watch it pretty frequently, so I went back and I watched everything that I knew that I liked. There were only 2 or 3 directors that I thought worked at this budget level or something close to it, which I thought was important because it’s this special kind of filmmaking to be able to make a movie work at such a low budget. Ideally, I wanted somebody who had some experience working with kids, but that wasn’t a must and then just the ability to horror tension with an emphasis on performance."

Sinister 2 director Ciaran Foy mentions that he wouldn't have even gotten the job if it were not for social networking and Netflix:

"I actually have Twitter to thank for getting this gig. It was just a bizarre sort of thing where by I follow Scott on Twitter and he tweeted that, "I just watched this movie, Citadel on Netflix everyone’s got to check it out." So I replied to that I was like, "Hey man, glad you liked it I’m the guy who made it." And then he started following me and started direct messaging and asking me specific questions about it. Then it was like, "Would you be interested in reading the script for Sinister 2?" and then sort of spoke to him for the first time on Skype. So, Twitter, Skype Netflix... if this had been 5 years ago, I wouldn’t be here. (laughs)"

Both Ciaran Foy and Scott Derrickson mention that the twin boys in this movie play a much bigger role than the children from the first movie:

[Ciaran] "This is the story of two brothers and it's interesting from that point of view. It’s not a female version of Ethan Hawke in this movie. The family are kind of like co-protagonists."

[Scott] "The new family that’s involved into the first one in certain ways, but obviously it’s a female lead and the children play much bigger roles. The children’s point of view in the movie is much more significant than it was in the first one."

Scott Derrickson on the importance of keeping the Super 8 kill films in Sinister 2:

"Going into the process of writing the script, the thing I was most adamant about was that we kept both Bughuul and these kill films. The creation of these homicides through art was I think what made Sinister, so that’s still going to be there."

We learn more about the main characters in the movie from Shannyn Sossamon, who mentions that her character is on the run:

"My character's very protective of her two boys. They’re going through something much more intense but she’s on the run from their very abusive father and her ex-husband. We’re hiding out in this house because my ex-husband’s very powerful where we’re from."

James Ransone is the only one to make it out of the events of Sinister, but he's back in the middle of the action in Sinister 2:

[James] "My obsession picks up where Ethan’s ends. What first starts like a guilty conscience actually becomes like trying to correct some mistakes of the past."

[Shannyn] "Also, I think it can be said that he doesn’t expect us to be in this house. We’re hiding out in this house because my ex-husband’s very powerful where we’re from."

While the cast and creators were tight-lipped about some of the movie's big scenes, I did hear a church mentioned often while watching them shoot, so I asked Scott Derrickson about how it factors into Sinister 2:

"I'll start by saying that the church in question isn’t what you'd imagine. It actually was inspired more by a visual of the place where I grew up in Westminster, Colorado. There’s this red church that was on the top of a hill and it’s supposed to be notoriously haunted. It overlooks the whole area where I went to both grade school and middle school, and it was always a really frightening. I used to have nightmares about it when I was a kid.

Courtney, the character that Shannyn plays, ends up spending a lot of time there and has reasons to be there. It has a dark history that ties into the Bughuul mythology."

Are more sequels planned? Scott Derrickson talks about the challenges of creating the right horror sequel?

"I’d like there to be 10 of them, but it really it depends on how this turns out. The reason the script took so long was because both Cargill and I have seen so many horror franchises. We’re really familiar with how they tend to work and what the bad tendencies are. We both were really committed to writing the kind of horror sequel we would like to see and that proved to be a lot more difficult than I think either of us were expecting.

The trick of it was finding a different point of view to get into it because the horror sequels that I have really liked tend to expand the mythology, but also deepen your appreciation of the original in unique ways. They give you some elements that you loved from the first one, but they also will surprise you."

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Look for more special coverage of Sinister 2 leading up to the movie's release on August 21st.

"The sequel to the 2012 sleeper hit horror movie. In the aftermath of the shocking events in “Sinister,” a protective mother (Shannyn Sossamon of “Wayward Pines”) and her 9-year-old twin sons (real-life brothers Robert and Dartanian Sloan) find themselves in a rural house marked for death as the evil spirit of Bughuul continues to spread with frightening intensity."

Directed by Ciarán Foy and written by Scott Derrickson & C. Robert Cargill, Sinister 2 stars James Ransone, Shannyn Sossamon, Lea Coco, Robert and Dartanian Sloan.