Examining Black Phone 2 – Successful Horror Follow-up Moves Clumsily Toward The Freddy Krueger Franchise

Arriving as the re-activated bestselling author machine was still churning out screen translations, quality be damned, the first installment felt like a sloppy admiration piece. With its small town 70s backdrop, high school cast, psychic kids and twisted community predator, it was nearly parody and, similar to the poorest his literary works, it was also clumsily packed.

Interestingly the inspiration originated from within the household, as it was inspired by a compact narrative from King’s son Joe Hill, over-extended into a film that was a surprise $161m hit. It was the narrative about the kidnapper, a sadistic killer of children who would enjoy extending their fatal ceremony. While molestation was never mentioned, there was something unmistakably LGBTQ-suggestive about the character and the era-specific anxieties he was intended to symbolize, emphasized by the performer playing him with a distinctly flamboyant manner. But the film was too ambiguous to ever fully embrace this aspect and even without that uneasiness, it was excessively convoluted and too focused on its wearisome vileness to work as only an undiscerning sleepover nightmare fuel.

Second Installment's Release In the Middle of Studio Struggles

The follow-up debuts as former horror hit-makers Blumhouse are in desperate need of a win. Lately they've encountered difficulties to make any project successful, from Wolf Man to their thriller to Drop to the utter financial disappointment of the AI sequel, and so much depends on whether the sequel can prove whether a brief narrative can become a movie that can spawn a franchise. However, there's an issue …

Ghostly Evolution

The first film ended with our Final Boy Finn (the performer) defeating the antagonist, helped and guided by the spirits of previous victims. This has compelled director Scott Derrickson and his co-writer C Robert Cargill to advance the story and its villain in a different direction, turning a flesh and blood villain into a ghostly presence, a direction that guides them by way of Freddy's domain with an ability to cross back into the real world made possible by sleep. But different from the striped sweater villain, the villain is markedly uninventive and completely lacking comedy. The facial covering continues to be appropriately unsettling but the production fails to make him as terrifying as he temporarily seemed in the initial film, trapped by complicated and frequently unclear regulations.

Alpine Christian Camp Setting

The main character and his irritatingly profane sibling Gwen (the actress) encounter him again while stranded due to weather at an alpine Christian camp for kids, the second film also acknowledging in the direction of Jason Voorhees the camp slasher. Gwen is guided there by a vision of her late mother and what could be their dead antagonist's original prey while the protagonist, continuing to deal with his rage and newfound ability to fight back, is following so he can protect her. The writing is excessively awkward in its artificial setup, clumsily needing to leave the brother and sister trapped at a setting that will further contribute to background information for hero and villain, supplying particulars we didn’t really need or care to learn about. What also appears to be a more strategic decision to push the movie towards the comparable faith-based viewers that turned the Conjuring franchise into major blockbusters, Derrickson adds a religious element, with virtue now more directly linked with God and heaven while evil symbolizes the demonic and punishment, faith the ultimate weapon against this type of antagonist.

Overloaded Plot

The result of these decisions is further over-stack a story that was formerly almost failing, adding unnecessary complications to what ought to be a basic scary film. I often found myself too busy asking questions about the processes and motivations of what could or couldn’t happen to feel all that involved. It's minimal work for Hawke, whose face we never really see but he maintains real screen magnetism that’s mostly missing elsewhere in the acting team. The location is at times remarkably immersive but the majority of the consistently un-scary set-pieces are damaged by a rough cinematic quality to differentiate asleep and awake, an poor directorial selection that feels too self-aware and constructed to mirror the horrifying unpredictability of experiencing a real bad dream.

Weak Continuation Rationale

At just under 2 hours, the follow-up, comparable to earlier failures, is a needlessly long and extremely unpersuasive justification for the establishment of a new franchise. The next time it rings, I recommend not answering.

• Black Phone 2 debuts in Australian cinemas on October 16 and in the United States and United Kingdom on 17 October