Spoiler alert: If you’ve never seen Sinister, this will ruin the ending for you
There are clowns today, and yesterday Slender Man was in the news. Two young girls stabbed their friend in the woods 19 times because they thought the internet-born Slender Man told them to. Someone stabbed a 16 year old kid at the end of September because of something to do with a clown mask. People are seeing clowns everywhere. There might be one in your neighborhood, too. The question, now as ever, is what will be done about it. Perhaps we will take an example from a scary movie as we seek an answer for this question.
In the movie Sinister, a true-crime novelist moves his family into a house where four of the previous occupants were hung to death from a tree in the backyard. One of the daughters was never found, and was still technically missing when they moved into the house. When they buy the house, the novelist is the only one in his family that knows that it is the house where the dead family lived and eventually were killed—his wife thinks they are few houses down the road.
The novelist spends a lot of time in the house, absorbing the atmosphere for his new book. Pretty soon he finds a box of home movies in the attic, with seemingly inconspicuous titles like “Lawn Work” and “Pool Party” and “Family Hanging Out”. He finds a film movie projector as well. Curious, he plays the movies and discovers that they are all depicting different families being murdered. In “Lawn Work”, someone unseen takes a lawnmower to the heads of all the family members, except for one of the children. “Family Hanging Out” is a video of all the family members who lived in the novelist’s house before, being hung from the tree in the backyard, excluding the missing girl.
Seeing this, it is possible that one would be skeptical of the home movies. They might be fake or placed as a joke or something. With all the internet hoaxes constantly cropping up, it is possible that people are more skeptical of videos and primary source. Regardless, the novelist continues his information gathering and begins research to find when and where each of the families met their end--while also studying the films closer.
In one of the movies, there is a quick shot of a creepy man with a skull-like face and long black hair, looking on the scene of the family’s death. Just as slender man has a suit and tentacles and clowns have their fake smiles and funny outfits, this guy has a sort of groundskeeper/ metal-head from hell look to him, with some kind of mask over his face to hide his mouth, if he has one. In a few of the movies there is a glyph, like a ram’s skull, painted somewhere.
The novelist contacts a professor of ancient cultures about the glyph, and he says it represents a very old deity called Bughul, who kidnaps and slowly eats the souls of children. Slender man, for what its worth, was first depicted surrounded by a circle of children in the background of a “found” photograph. Clowns are, of course, associated with children’s birthday parties. Lately, most everybody has been reminded on the news of the serial killer John Wayne Gacy, who was a birthday party clown named Pogo.
Gacy killed a bunch of people and hid them in his crawl space. His day job was being a clown. How does any group of people know they have a killer in their midst, if the information is well-concealed and you are trying to have normal, trusting relationships.
Eventually, the novelist’s wife finds out that they are living in the house where the last family was killed. After she berates him a lot and more scary stuff happens, they come to the decision to move to a new house and leave behind the scariness. However, as soon as they get to the new house, the professor calls with some urgent news. The only way to beat the demon they have been cursed with is to stay in the house where the last family died, because of some ritualistic reasons and because the deity cannot kill in the same house twice. The videos were all shot in different houses. It was only until they moved and changed their home that they were in real danger of dying. And that is where they meet their end, except for the novelist’s daughter, who is taken into the spirit world.
There have been a lot of movies where I have said, “JUST LEAVE THAT HOUSE!” A lot of times that would seem to save the protagonists in other scary movies. But that was the worst thing the novelist and his family could have done in this case. They didn't know, they were too late. Getting back to these clowns and slender man, the thing that seems to be present here is the idea that you’re damned if you do, and you’re damned if you don’t.
If you go out looking for clowns, are you doing what the people who started this are asking for? If you ignore it, will it get worse?
The two girls who stabbed their friend were supposedly under the sway of something that a lot of parents might never have even heard of. Slender Man has come to prominence with the power of the deep recesses of the internet. There are a lot of images online, some games, and the concept itself may be the latest in a long line of incarnations of the monster, but the girls probably did a fair bit of extrapolation on their own. They believed Slender Man was going to take them to his castle and keep them safe and happy forever if they hurt their friend, who survived. How does one stop a kid from letting their imagination or whatever other forces get the better of them? And kids aren’t the only ones with imagination.
