Why did the inspector tell the book writer he should not have moved from the haunted home?

Question

Spoilers ahead. Please do not read any further if you have not seen the movie and want to watch it.

In the movie Sinister, the deputy inspector so and so calls Ellison after he leaves the county and moves somewhere else.

He says to Ellison that you moved from this house and that was not the right thing to do. And then he lists out all the families and their residential addresses to show that it was all linked. Why does it matter that he moved from this home.

Wouldn't the ghost or whatever that thing was, have killed him and his family anyway regardless of where they are since it was already onto them??

Also why was the ghost making the kids kill their families?
I mean it could do it on its own.

There isn't much explanation about it in the movie or maybe i missed something.

Answer 1

When the inspector tells Ellison that all the murders are connected, he says that each family that was murdered had lived in the house where the previous murder had taken place. Whether the realization of that fact caused each family to then move isn't clear, but nonetheless, the pattern showed that they weren't killed until they moved away from the site of the previous murder.

A thought that occurred to me was that moving could be spreading the evil to new locations, and once it spread, Baghuul no longer needed the carrier family that had spread it, only the new location and a "conveniently" vacant house. Maybe he could have kept it all in one house (killed everyone who moved in and saw the tapes), but that would be a much easier pattern to identify for whatever Inspector So and So lived in that area.

As for why he made the children do it, the university professor explains that Baghuul eats the souls of children. He likely picks out the one he wants, but cannot capture it until pesky dads with baseball bats are out of the equation. Another, more succinct reason for the children committing the murders: it is much more... Sinister.

Answer 2

As raisinghellyer indicates, for whatever reason, Baghuul only goes after people after they move. It's a common thread in superstition, and thereby horror movies, that the monsters follow rules. Whether he does it because it benefits him (as noted, moving the murders to new locations so they're less likely to get caught) or because he has to (supernatural rules of some sort) is undefined. The first film didn't cover it. In the second film, the protagonist is trying to trace the string of murders and plans to destroy the vacant house before another family can move in.

As regards why people wind up moving, Baghuul is progressively driving everyone insane if they stay, so they have motivation to move and then he strikes. Again, it's undefined as to whether he can't kill them where they stand or if it just suits his purpose.

The second film does also imply that destroying the house probably would not actually stop the infection, as one of the first known cases involved a radio broadcasting Baghuul's influence from an abandoned house.