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Arriving as the resurrected master of horror machine was still churning out film versions, without concern for excellence, The Black Phone felt like a sloppy admiration piece. With its 1970s small town setting, high school cast, gifted youths and twisted community predator, it was nearly parody and, like the very worst of King’s stories, it was also clumsily packed.

Curiously the source was found inside the family home, as it was adapted from a brief tale from King’s son Joe Hill, over-extended into a film that was a surprise $161m hit. It was the story of the Grabber, a cruel slayer of young boys who would take pleasure in prolonging the ritual of their deaths. While molestation was never mentioned, there was something clearly non-heteronormative about the antagonist and the era-specific anxieties he was clearly supposed to refer to, reinforced by Ethan Hawke portraying him with a noticeably camp style. But the film was too opaque to ever properly acknowledge this and even aside from that tension, it was overly complicated and overly enamored with its tiring griminess to work as anything more than an unthinking horror entertainment.

The Sequel's Arrival In the Middle of Studio Struggles

Its sequel arrives as former horror hit-makers the production company are in urgent requirement for success. Lately they've encountered difficulties to make any project successful, from the monster movie to their thriller to their action film to the complete commercial failure of M3gan 2.0, and so much depends on whether Black Phone 2 can prove whether a short story can become a movie that can create a series. There’s just one slight problem …

Supernatural Transformation

The first film ended with our Final Boy Finn (the young actor) eliminating the villain, helped and guided by the apparitions of earlier casualties. It’s forced filmmaker Derrickson and his co-writer C Robert Cargill to advance the story and its antagonist toward fresh territory, transforming a human antagonist into a ghostly presence, a route that takes them via Elm Street with a power to travel into the physical realm facilitated by dreams. But in contrast to the dream killer, the Grabber is noticeably uncreative and totally without wit. The mask remains successfully disturbing but the film struggles to make him as terrifying as he briefly was in the original, constrained by complicated and frequently unclear regulations.

Snowy Religious Environment

The protagonist and his annoyingly foul-mouthed sister Gwen (the performer) confront him anew while stranded due to weather at a high-altitude faith-based facility for kids, the second film also acknowledging regarding the hockey mask killer the camp slasher. The female lead is led there by an apparition of her deceased parent and potentially their dead antagonist's original prey while Finn, still trying to process his anger and fresh capacity for resistance, is pursuing to safeguard her. The writing is excessively awkward in its contrived scene-setting, inelegantly demanding to get the siblings stranded at a setting that will further contribute to backstories for both protagonist and antagonist, filling in details we didn’t really need or desire to understand. What also appears to be a more calculated move to edge the film toward the similar religious audiences that turned the Conjuring franchise into huge successes, the director includes a spiritual aspect, with good now more closely associated with God and heaven while bad represents the devil and hell, faith the ultimate weapon against such a creature.

Overcomplicated Story

What all of this does is continued over-burden a story that was formerly nearly collapsing, including superfluous difficulties to what should be a basic scary film. Regularly I noticed excessively engaged in questioning about the processes and motivations of possible and impossible events to become truly immersed. It's minimal work for the performer, whose features stay concealed but he maintains genuine presence that’s mostly missing elsewhere in the acting team. The setting is at times impressively atmospheric but the bulk of the consistently un-scary set-pieces are flawed by a grainy 8mm texture to differentiate asleep and awake, an ineffective stylistic choice that feels too self-aware and constructed to mirror the frightening randomness of experiencing a real bad dream.

Unpersuasive Series Justification

At just under 2 hours, the follow-up, comparable to earlier failures, is a unnecessarily lengthy and hugely unconvincing case for the creation of another series. When it calls again, I suggest ignoring it.

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