Death by rat: Where did the rat scene in Sinister 2 come from?
By: Kelly Tompkins
Tags: Movies, TV Shows, Horror, History, Animals

How a torture method used by a Dutch governor spawned years of rat torture in movies.

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This contains spoilers for the movie, Sinister 2. If you haven’t seen this movie and the original, I would come back to this article after so you don’t get a death spoiled! Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

If you remember the story from the original Sinister, the main idea is that this bro Bughuul can travel and sustain himself through images that include him in them. Talk about narcissistic. Anyway, he manipulates children into recording snuff films that involve murdering their entire families on an 8mm tape. What’s more interesting is the way that these children kill their families; it’s always ritualistic torture. Some of the ways were a little bland(i.e. One of the kids just stabbed his family) but some were insanely creative like this one.

The sequel, Sinister II, arguably was not as good as the first film. Instead of finding footage of these murders, all of the kids who were previously manipulated by Bughuul would try to convince a new child to murder their entire family. It didn’t make any sense that anyone would keep hanging out with these ghost kids and watch their homemade movies.

But then a scene happened that involved rats. One of the dead kids, Milo, shows his film where he places his family into a circle on their backs, feet facing towards each other. They have blindfolds on and their hands and feet are bound to the ground with nails. The scene then cuts to rats running around the family then later, Milo putting rats under metal buckets that he places on the stomach of each member of his family. Like you’ve probably guessed already, he puts hot coals on the top to force the rats to start burrowing into them and kill them.

That scene stuck with me for two reasons: It was the most creative and sadistic death so far and also, how did he even think of it? Was Milo really into medieval torture history?

Instances of rats

Using rats for torture comes up a lot throughout history. From the use of rats in Edgar Allen Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum(1842) to using rats as torture in Game of Thrones in the episode, Garden of Bones(2012). Rats weren’t always used to burrow into the victims. Sometimes, rats would be starved and released into a cage or pot that acted as an enclosed space around vulnerable areas like the person’s face or genitals. Old dungeons in England would let the rising tides of the River Thames bring rats into where the prisoners were kept. The rats would cause them to fear for their lives and in some instances, have the flesh from their arms and legs ripped away.

There are also many other instances of rat torture being used in modern works of fiction. In American Psycho(1991), Patrick Bateman uses rat torture by attaching a tube into a prostitute’s vagina and forcing the rat to burrow. 1984(1949) has a scene where the main character, Winston, gets tortured for information by placing a cage of rats over his head. And those are just the books that I’ve read. Looking into it, it’s also used in The Torture Garden by Octave Mirabeau(1899), The Bone Collector by Jeffrey Deaver(1997), even Fast and Furious 2(2003).

My best guess for what inspired the writers to include the rat scene from the movie would be that episode of Game of Thrones since it was the most recent. In that episode, Arya, Gendry, and Hot Pie find themselves imprisoned at Harrenhal.

One of the soldiers under Ser Gregor known as the “Tickler” tortures one of his victims by placing a vessel over their stomach with a rat inside, and uses hot coals to make the rat burrow into their body. Sinister II came out in 2015 so it would be safe to say this movie followed in that episode’s footsteps but that is not confirmed. But where did it start?

The torture methods of Diedrich Sonoy

While some reports like this one say its origins were from China, it was a brief mention without any citation anywhere so I kept digging. The earliest and documented report was in a nonfiction book, The Rise of the Dutch Republic by John Lothrop Motley set in the 1500s. In the northern quarter of Holland in 1575, Diedrich Sonoy, who had become the governor of that quarter, had just found out that some of the inhabitants in this area had been in aid of the approaching spanish invasion. These individuals had been burning down villages and leaving markers designed to further organize movements for the spanish army.

Sonoy, who had been known to be ferocious, rounded up 8 of the men verified to be interlopers. From Motley’s book, Sonoy was “determined to show that the Duke of Alva could not be more prompt, nor more terrible than himself “ so he enacted his own tribunal in imitation of the infamous Council of Troubles that the Duke of Alva had implemented in 1567. This very council had originally been implemented to deal with the spanish opposition that was present in the Netherlands and would later be known as the Council of Blood because of the amount of executions.

Sonoy, under his own authority, used everything at his disposal to force information out of those eight men he had rounded up. In one instance, he incorporated other torture methods first on a prisoner, one of which was having their skin flayed and forced to crawl around in a dungeon for almost 6 weeks. They were then brought in, stretched upon a rack, and had a large earthen vessel placed upon their body. It was made for this purpose and would be placed, inverted on the naked prisoner’s body. Hot coals would be placed on the vessel until the heat would force the rat to burrow into the person’s body to escape. This prisoner then admitted to all the crimes he had been charged with but later exonerated all accomplices, saying that anything said during his torture had been a weakness of the body. This tactic would later be known to us as a forced confession but he was still executed for his alleged crimes against his nation. Sonoy himself was not a Hollander and because of the brutality of his ways, its people chose not to include him in the character of their nation.