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Debuting as the resurrected master of horror machine was continuing to produce screen translations, regardless of quality, the original film felt like a sloppy admiration piece. Featuring a retro suburban environment, high school cast, psychic kids and gnarly neighbourhood villain, it was nearly parody and, comparable to the weakest the author's tales, it was also clumsily packed.

Funnily enough the source was found within the household, as it was adapted from a brief tale from the author's offspring, over-extended into a film that was a shocking commercial success. It was the story of the Grabber, a brutal murderer of adolescents who would revel in elongating the ritual of their deaths. While sexual abuse was never mentioned, there was something inescapably queer-coded about the antagonist and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was intended to symbolize, reinforced by the performer acting with a distinctly flamboyant manner. But the film was too opaque to ever properly acknowledge this and even without that uneasiness, it was too busily plotted and too high on its wearisome vileness to work as anything more than an unthinking horror entertainment.

The Sequel's Arrival During Studio Struggles

The next chapter comes as former horror hit-makers the production company are in urgent requirement for success. This year they’ve struggled to make any project successful, from their werewolf film to their thriller to the adventure movie to the total box office disaster of the AI sequel, and so much depends on whether Black Phone 2 can prove whether a short story can become a film that can spawn a franchise. But there's a complication …

Paranormal Shift

The original concluded with our surviving character Finn (the young actor) defeating the antagonist, assisted and trained by the apparitions of earlier casualties. This has compelled director Scott Derrickson and his writing partner Cargill to move the franchise and its villain in a different direction, transforming a human antagonist into a ghostly presence, a route that takes them through Nightmare on Elm Street with a capability to return into the physical realm enabled through nightmares. But different from the striped sweater villain, the antagonist is clearly unimaginative and totally without wit. The mask remains appropriately unsettling but the production fails to make him as terrifying as he temporarily seemed in the first, limited by complex and typically puzzling guidelines.

Snowy Religious Environment

Finn and his frustratingly crude sister Gwen (the actress) face him once more while snowed in at an alpine Christian camp for kids, the follow-up also referencing in the direction of Jason Voorhees Jason Voorhees. The female lead is led there by a vision of her late mother and potentially their deceased villain's initial casualties while Finn, still trying to handle his fury and newfound ability to fight back, is following so he can protect her. The writing is too ungainly in its contrived scene-setting, awkwardly requiring to get the siblings stranded at a setting that will further contribute to backstories for both hero and villain, providing information we didn’t really need or care to learn about. Additionally seeming like a more calculated move to guide the production in the direction of the similar religious audiences that transformed the Conjuring movies into huge successes, the filmmaker incorporates a faith-based component, with good now more closely associated with the divine and paradise while villainy signifies the demonic and punishment, faith the ultimate weapon against such a creature.

Overcomplicated Story

The result of these decisions is continued over-burden a series that was already close to toppling over, adding unnecessary complications to what could have been a simple Friday night engine. Frequently I discovered excessively engaged in questioning about the processes and motivations of feasible and unfeasible occurrences to feel all that involved. It's an undemanding role for the actor, whose features stay concealed but he maintains real screen magnetism that’s mostly missing elsewhere in the ensemble. The setting is at times atmospherically grand but most of the persistently unfrightening scenes are marred by a gritty film stock appearance to distinguish dreaming from waking, an ineffective stylistic choice that feels too self-aware and constructed to mirror the frightening randomness of being in an actual nightmare.

Unpersuasive Series Justification

Running nearly 120 minutes, the follow-up, similar to its predecessor, is a needlessly long and hugely unconvincing argument for the birth of another series. When it calls again, I suggest ignoring it.

• Black Phone 2 releases in Australian theaters on October 16 and in the US and UK on 17 October