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Arriving as the resurrected master of horror machine was continuing to produce adaptations, quality be damned, The Black Phone felt like a lazy fanboy tribute. With its 1970s small town setting, young performers, psychic kids and twisted community predator, it was almost imitation and, comparable to the weakest King’s stories, it was also awkwardly crowded.

Interestingly the source was found from the author's own lineage, as it was based on a short story from the author's offspring, expanded into a film that was a surprise $161m hit. It was the tale of the antagonist, a sadistic killer of children who would take pleasure in prolonging the ritual of their deaths. While sexual abuse was not referenced, there was something unmistakably LGBTQ-suggestive about the villain and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was obviously meant to represent, emphasized by the performer acting with a certain swishy, effeminate flare. But the film was too vague to ever fully embrace this aspect and even aside from that tension, it was overly complicated and too high on its wearisome vileness to work as only an unthinking horror entertainment.

The Sequel's Arrival In the Middle of Studio Struggles

The follow-up debuts as former horror hit-makers the studio are in critical demand for a hit. Recently they've faced challenges to make anything work, from their werewolf film to their thriller to their action film to the utter financial disappointment of the AI sequel, and so a great deal rides on whether Black Phone 2 can prove whether a brief narrative can become a film that can spawn a franchise. But there's a complication …

Supernatural Transformation

The first film ended with our Final Boy Finn (Mason Thames) defeating the antagonist, supported and coached by the ghosts of those he had killed before. It’s forced director Scott Derrickson and his co-writer C Robert Cargill to move the franchise and its villain in a different direction, converting a physical threat into a supernatural one, a route that takes them through Nightmare on Elm Street with a power to travel into the real world made possible by sleep. But in contrast to the dream killer, the antagonist is noticeably uncreative and totally without wit. The disguise stays successfully disturbing but the film struggles to make him as scary as he briefly was in the first, limited by complicated and frequently unclear regulations.

Mountain Retreat Location

The protagonist and his frustratingly crude sister Gwen (the actress) confront him anew while stranded due to weather at a high-altitude faith-based facility for kids, the follow-up also referencing regarding the hockey mask killer Jason Voorhees. The sister is directed there by an apparition of her deceased parent and potentially their late tormenter’s first victims while the brother, still attempting to process his anger and newfound ability to fight back, is pursuing to safeguard her. The writing is excessively awkward in its artificial setup, inelegantly demanding to maroon the main characters at a place that will also add to backstories for both protagonist and antagonist, filling in details we weren't particularly interested in or desire to understand. In what also feels like a more calculated move to edge the film toward the similar religious audiences that turned the Conjuring franchise into huge successes, Derrickson adds a religious element, with morality now more strongly connected with the divine and paradise while villainy signifies Satan and damnation, religion the final defense against such a creature.

Overcomplicated Story

The consequence of these choices is continued over-burden a series that was already nearly collapsing, incorporating needless complexities to what ought to be a basic scary film. I often found myself excessively engaged in questioning about the processes and motivations of what could or couldn’t happen to experience genuine engagement. It's minimal work for the performer, whose features stay concealed but he maintains real screen magnetism that’s generally absent in other areas in the ensemble. The setting is at times atmospherically grand but most of the continuously non-terrifying sequences are damaged by a rough cinematic quality to separate sleep states from consciousness, an ineffective stylistic choice that appears overly conscious and constructed to mirror the horrifying unpredictability of experiencing a real bad dream.

Weak Continuation Rationale

Running nearly 120 minutes, the follow-up, comparable to earlier failures, is a excessively extended and extremely unpersuasive justification for the establishment of a new franchise. The next time it rings, I recommend not answering.

• The sequel releases in Australia's movie houses on the sixteenth of October and in America and Britain on the seventeenth of October