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Debuting as the resurrected master of horror machine was still churning out adaptations, quality be damned, the first installment felt like a sloppy admiration piece. Set against a retro suburban environment, high school cast, telepathic children and twisted community predator, it was nearly parody and, like the very worst of his literary works, it was also clumsily packed.

Curiously the call came 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 unexpected blockbuster. It was the tale of the antagonist, a cruel slayer of young boys who would revel in elongating their fatal ceremony. While assault was not referenced, there was something unmistakably LGBTQ-suggestive about the antagonist and the era-specific anxieties he was obviously meant to represent, strengthened by Ethan Hawke acting with a certain swishy, effeminate flare. But the film was too ambiguous to ever properly acknowledge this and even excluding that discomfort, it was too busily plotted and overly enamored with its exhaustingly grubby nastiness to work as anything beyond an mindless scary movie material.

Follow-up Film's Debut During Filmmaking Difficulties

The next chapter comes as previous scary movie successes the production company are in urgent requirement for success. Lately they've encountered difficulties to make anything work, from Wolf Man to their thriller to their action film to the utter financial disappointment of M3gan 2.0, and so much depends on whether Black Phone 2 can prove whether a short story can become a motion picture that can spawn a franchise. There’s just one slight problem …

Ghostly Evolution

The first film ended with our protagonist Finn (the young actor) defeating the antagonist, helped and guided by the ghosts of those he had killed before. It’s forced writer-director Scott Derrickson and his writing partner Cargill to move the franchise and its villain in a different direction, converting a physical threat into a paranormal entity, a path that leads them through Nightmare on Elm Street with an ability to cross back into reality made possible by sleep. But in contrast to the dream killer, the villain is clearly unimaginative and entirely devoid of humour. The disguise stays appropriately unsettling but the production fails to make him as terrifying as he momentarily appeared in the original, limited by complicated and frequently unclear regulations.

Alpine Christian Camp Setting

Finn and his irritatingly profane sibling Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) encounter him again while snowed in 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 brother, still attempting to process his anger and fresh capacity for resistance, is pursuing to safeguard 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 backstories for both hero and villain, providing information we didn't actually require or care to learn about. In what also feels like a more strategic decision to push the movie towards the same church-attending crowds that made the Conjuring series into huge successes, Derrickson adds a faith-based component, with virtue now more directly linked with God and heaven while villainy signifies the demonic and punishment, religion the final defense against this type of antagonist.

Overcomplicated Story

The consequence of these choices is further over-stack a series that was already nearly collapsing, incorporating needless complexities to what could have been a straightforward horror movie. I often found myself excessively engaged in questioning about the hows and whys of what could or couldn’t happen to feel all that involved. It’s a low-lift effort for the performer, whose face we never really see but he does have genuine presence that’s generally absent in other areas in the cast. The setting is at times atmospherically grand but most of the consistently un-scary set-pieces are flawed by a grainy 8mm texture to distinguish dreaming from waking, an ineffective stylistic choice that appears overly conscious and created to imitate the terrifying uncertainty of living through a genuine night terror.

Unpersuasive Series Justification

Running nearly 120 minutes, the sequel, comparable to earlier failures, is a unnecessarily lengthy and extremely unpersuasive case for the creation of another series. The next time it rings, I recommend not answering.

• Black Phone 2 debuts in Australia's movie houses on 16 October and in the US and UK on the seventeenth of October