FAQ

No, but the first one does explain who Ellison Oswalt is in more detail and what led up to the second film.

The movie camera used in Sinister 2 is a 16mm film camera. In the first Sinister film it was a super 8 camera.

Ellison Oswalt and his family were all killed, except for his daughter Ashley, in 2012. Oswalt was a washed-up true crime writer investigating a family that was killed in his new house, and he finds a box of super 8 snuff reels left by Bughuul. He lets Deputy So & So help him with the case, but then he suddenly moves away and is killed.

The actors portraying them would look noticeably older, so a new set of dead kids was introduced. Also, it's implied that the kids from the first film were destroyed when the deputy burnt down the Oswalt house.

No, but it is a homage to Children of the Corn. Milo is based on Issac from the 1984 version of Children of the Corn, and the whole setting was made to have the same atmosphere. The implication is that Bughuul was what influenced all the kids in Children of the Corn to murder their parents.

It hasn't been explained by the filmmakers why this is so. It's likely either because they couldn't obtain the rights to the full song, because viewers of the trailer thought it was a bad idea, or because it wasn't considered scary enough.

Yes, to many viewers it does take away from the aesthetic nostalgia and vintage film grain look. But it just wouldn't be possible to pull off a real alligator eating an entire family - alligators cannot eat three people at once and it would be dangerous to the actors in the home movie. A CGI alligator looks cheap, but it saves the film budget for other things. It also depends on the opinion of the individual viewer. Some viewers hate CGI and think it looks fake, some think that it looks out of place, but other viewers don't care.

Courtney was being abused by her husband and he was beating up her sons, so they left him. Their codeword for "run away" in case he ever managed to locate them again was "rutabaga", a word that the husband wouldn't know the meaning of.

A ham radio is a licensed hobbyist amateur shortwave radio. Unlike CB radios of the seventies, or commercial radio, shortwave allows low-fidelity communications over long distances. They are still popular among hobbyists, and have been used during disasters when normal telecommunication is down. Shortwave has been long-used by intelligence agencies to send coded messages. These include the so-called "numbers" stations, which - since the 1950s - infrequently send strings of seemingly random numbers or words. Sinister 2 makes allusion to these weird broadcasts.