Examining Black Phone 2 – Successful Horror Follow-up Heads Towards Nightmare on Elm Street

Arriving as the resurrected Stephen King machine was still churning out screen translations, regardless of quality, the first installment felt like a uninspired homage. With its retro suburban environment, young performers, psychic kids and disturbing local antagonist, it was almost imitation and, like the very worst of his literary works, it was also awkwardly crowded.

Funnily enough the call came from inside the family home, as it was based on a short story from the author's offspring, expanded into a film that was a shocking commercial success. It was the narrative about the kidnapper, a brutal murderer of children who would revel in elongating the process of killing. While assault was never mentioned, there was something clearly non-heteronormative about the character and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was obviously meant to represent, emphasized by the performer portraying him with a distinctly flamboyant manner. But the film was too vague to ever really admit that and even excluding that discomfort, it was excessively convoluted and too high on its exhaustingly grubby nastiness to work as anything more than an unthinking horror entertainment.

The Sequel's Arrival During Production Company Challenges

The next chapter comes as previous scary movie successes the production company are in urgent requirement for success. Recently they've faced challenges to make any project successful, from their werewolf film to The Woman in the Yard to their action film to the total box office disaster of the AI sequel, and so significant pressure rests on whether the sequel can prove whether a compact tale can become a movie that can create a series. But there's a complication …

Paranormal Shift

The original concluded with our Final Boy Finn (Mason Thames) defeating the antagonist, supported and coached by the ghosts of those he had killed before. This situation has required director Scott Derrickson and his writing partner Cargill to advance the story and its villain in a different direction, turning a flesh and blood villain into a paranormal entity, a direction that guides them through Nightmare on Elm Street with a power to travel into the real world made possible by sleep. But unlike Freddy Krueger, the villain is markedly uninventive and completely lacking comedy. The facial covering continues to be successfully disturbing but the film struggles to make him as frightening as he briefly was in the original, limited by convoluted and often confusing rules.

Mountain Retreat Location

The main character and his irritatingly profane sibling Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) face him once more 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. The female lead is led there by a vision of her late mother and what might be their deceased villain's initial casualties while the brother, still attempting to handle his fury and recently discovered defensive skills, is following so he can protect her. The screenplay is overly clumsy in its contrived scene-setting, clumsily needing to maroon the main characters at a place that will also add to background information for hero and villain, providing information we didn't actually require or care to learn about. What also appears to be a more calculated move to push the movie towards the comparable faith-based viewers that transformed the Conjuring movies into huge successes, the filmmaker incorporates a faith-based component, with virtue now more directly linked with the creator and the afterlife while villainy signifies Satan and damnation, religion the final defense against a monster like this.

Overloaded Plot

The consequence of these choices is additional over-complicate a series that was already close to toppling over, adding unnecessary complications to what ought to be a straightforward horror movie. Regularly I noticed too busy asking questions about the processes and motivations of possible and impossible events to experience genuine engagement. It’s a low-lift effort for the actor, whose features stay concealed but he possesses real screen magnetism that’s typically lacking in other aspects in the acting team. The location is at times remarkably immersive but the bulk of the persistently unfrightening scenes are marred by a gritty film stock appearance to differentiate asleep and awake, an unsuccessful artistic decision that appears overly conscious and created to imitate the terrifying uncertainty of experiencing a real bad dream.

Unconvincing Franchise Argument

At just under 2 hours, Black Phone 2, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a unnecessarily lengthy and hugely unconvincing argument for the birth of another series. The next time it rings, I advise letting it go to voicemail.

• The sequel releases in Australia's movie houses on 16 October and in the United States and United Kingdom on the seventeenth of October