Fridge / Sinister

Per wiki policy, Spoilers Off applies here and all spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned.

Fridge Brilliance

• The Irony of the ending is pretty brilliant in retrospect. Normally in haunted house films, the obvious action for a family to take (i.e. that they almost never do) is to move out of said haunted house. In this one, the Oswalts do do the sensible thing and move out, but not only is it not the house that's haunted, moving out of it is the very thing that kills them.
• So, the sequel explicitly identifies Bughuul as the boogeyman. Except isn't the boogeyman supposed to only punish the bad kids? Well, to answer that, Bughuul is the source of the myth. Unlike his mythological counterpart, he doesn't punish kids for bad behavior. Instead, he is the cause of their behavior, as he needs them to to be corrupt in order to feed on them.
• The setup of all the tapes follows a specific pattern every time, since they start off showing the family (and potential victims) having a normal, even happy day together, and then shows them all being gruesomely murdered in a way that parallels the happier moments. This reflects what Bughuul does; he corrupts the innocent. The beginning of the film is “innocent” and the second, more gruesome half is the part that’s corrupted.
• In a way, the movie's filmmaking style is reminiscent of the in-universe projector's home videos: numerous quick cuts, repeated actions, occasional sped-up actions as if the camera had glitched and was "catching up to itself". Because ultimately, the film ends with the family being another of those home videos...
• At one point in Dylan's nightmare sequence, he screams in absolute horror. At that exact same point in Zack's film, he mockingly emulates Dylan's scream. It comes off as odd and out-of-place until you realize exactly what is going on, and raises some interesting questions in regards to how the children come up with their murder plots.
• The first film is shown from the perspective of a parent. The second film is a look at the corruption process of the child.

Fridge Horror

• Bughuul lives in images and kills the people who see them. How many people saw this movie?
• Bughuul and the kids he possesses live in videos of the families being murdered. Depending on how that works, it's possible that the families get murdered all over again every time someone watches the movies.
• The tapes that wind up in Ellison's attic both times. If Bughuul's servants still exist on the physical plane, this means they're likely the ones actually physically leaving them. While the supernatural factor is scary enough, the idea that there are people physically breaking into your house is...unsettling.
• In the sequel, although Deputy So-and-So is burning down houses that the murdered families had lived in, Super 8 kill tapes are still being made (some of the new ones look very recent). That with the Norwegian broadcast on the HAM radio heavily implies that there are or were several strings of Bughuul-influenced, Super 8-filmed murders happening at the same time.
• A non supernatural example, but the lives of the families in both films are less than idealistic (the first is a family with parents in a rocky marriage and a father consumed by his obsessions and two kids forced to deal with them while having issues of their own, and the second has an abusive father, meek mother, and a child suffering trauma and his brother bullying him). And yet, their home movies demonstrate them having a happy family bonding moment, in spite of all their issues. Suddenly, this implies that the families in all of the other movies might not have been as pleasant as previously thought.