Examining Black Phone 2 – Successful Horror Follow-up Lumbers Toward Nightmare on Elm Street

Debuting as the re-activated Stephen King machine was continuing to produce screen translations, without concern for excellence, the first installment felt like a sloppy admiration piece. Set against a retro suburban environment, young performers, psychic kids and disturbing local antagonist, it was close to pastiche and, similar to the poorest his literary works, it was also awkwardly crowded.

Funnily enough the source was found within the household, as it was based on a short story from the author's offspring, over-extended into a film that was a shocking commercial success. It was the narrative about the kidnapper, a cruel slayer of children who would revel in elongating their fatal ceremony. While molestation was never mentioned, there was something inescapably queer-coded about the character and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was intended to symbolize, emphasized by the performer playing him with a noticeably camp style. But the film was too vague to ever really admit that and even without that uneasiness, it was overly complicated and too high on its wearisome vileness to work as anything beyond an undiscerning sleepover nightmare fuel.

Follow-up Film's Debut In the Middle of Production Company Challenges

The next chapter comes as former horror hit-makers Blumhouse are in critical demand for a hit. Recently they've faced challenges to make any film profitable, from the monster movie to The Woman in the Yard to their action film to the complete commercial failure of M3gan 2.0, and so significant pressure rests on whether the sequel can prove whether a short story can become a film that can generate multiple installments. However, there's an issue …

Paranormal Shift

The initial movie finished with our Final Boy Finn (the young actor) defeating the antagonist, assisted and trained by the ghosts of those he had killed before. This has compelled writer-director Scott Derrickson and his collaborator C Robert Cargill to take the series and its killer to a new place, transforming a human antagonist into a supernatural one, a direction that guides them via Elm Street with a capability to return into the real world enabled through nightmares. But different from the striped sweater villain, the Grabber is markedly uninventive and entirely devoid of humour. The disguise stays appropriately unsettling but the production fails to make him as frightening as he briefly was in the first, constrained by complex and typically puzzling guidelines.

Snowy Religious Environment

The protagonist and his annoyingly foul-mouthed sister Gwen (the performer) encounter him again while snowed in at a high-altitude faith-based facility for kids, the follow-up also referencing toward Freddy’s one-time nemesis Jason Voorhees. The female lead is led there by a vision of her late mother and what might be their late tormenter’s first victims while Finn, still trying to handle his fury and recently discovered defensive skills, is pursuing to safeguard her. The script is excessively awkward in its contrived scene-setting, awkwardly requiring to maroon the main characters at a setting that will further contribute to backstories for both protagonist and antagonist, providing information we didn’t really need or desire to understand. What also appears to be a more deliberate action to edge the film toward the similar religious audiences that made the Conjuring series into huge successes, the filmmaker incorporates a faith-based component, with morality now more strongly connected with the creator and the afterlife while evil symbolizes the devil and hell, religion the final defense against this type of antagonist.

Overcomplicated Story

The result of these decisions is further over-stack a story that was formerly close to toppling over, adding unnecessary complications to what should be a basic scary film. Regularly I noticed too busy asking questions about the processes and motivations of possible and impossible events to experience genuine engagement. It's an undemanding role for Hawke, whose face we never really see but he possesses authentic charisma that’s generally absent in other areas in the cast. The environment is at times impressively atmospheric but most of the consistently un-scary set-pieces are flawed by a gritty film stock appearance to distinguish dreaming from waking, an unsuccessful artistic decision that seems excessively meta and created to imitate the terrifying uncertainty of living through a genuine night terror.

Unconvincing Franchise Argument

Lasting approximately two hours, the follow-up, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a needlessly long and extremely unpersuasive argument for the birth of an additional film universe. When it calls again, I recommend not answering.

• Black Phone 2 debuts in Australia's movie houses on 16 October and in the United States and United Kingdom on the seventeenth of October