Examining Black Phone 2 – Hit Horror Sequel Lumbers Toward Nightmare on Elm Street

Coming as the resurrected Stephen King machine was still churning out screen translations, quality be damned, The Black Phone felt like a lazy fanboy tribute. With its retro suburban environment, young performers, telepathic children and disturbing local antagonist, it was nearly parody and, similar to the poorest his literary works, it was also awkwardly crowded.

Curiously the source was found from the author's own lineage, as it was based on a short story from his descendant, stretched into a film that was a unexpected blockbuster. It was the story of the Grabber, a sadistic killer of adolescents who would revel in elongating their fatal ceremony. While assault was avoided in discussion, there was something clearly non-heteronormative about the antagonist and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was intended to symbolize, emphasized by the actor portraying him with a distinctly flamboyant manner. But the film was too vague to ever properly acknowledge this and even aside from that tension, it was overly complicated and too high on its wearisome vileness to work as anything beyond an unthinking horror entertainment.

Follow-up Film's Debut Amidst Production Company Challenges

Its sequel arrives as former horror hit-makers the production company are in critical demand for a hit. Lately they've encountered difficulties to make anything work, from the monster movie to their thriller to the adventure movie to the total box office disaster of the AI sequel, and so significant pressure rests on whether the sequel can prove whether a short story can become a motion picture that can spawn a franchise. But there's a complication …

Paranormal Shift

The first film ended with our Final Boy Finn (Mason Thames) killing the Grabber, supported and coached by the ghosts of those he had killed before. It’s forced filmmaker Derrickson and his co-writer C Robert Cargill to move the franchise and its villain in a different direction, turning a flesh and blood villain into a supernatural one, a route that takes them by way of Freddy's domain with a capability to return into reality enabled through nightmares. But unlike Freddy Krueger, the Grabber is markedly uninventive and entirely devoid of humour. The mask remains successfully disturbing but the film struggles to make him as scary as he temporarily seemed in the original, limited by complicated and frequently unclear regulations.

Alpine Christian Camp Setting

The main character and his irritatingly profane sibling Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) confront him anew while trapped by snow at an alpine Christian camp for kids, the follow-up also referencing regarding the hockey mask killer the camp slasher. The female lead is led there by a ghostly image of her dead mother and potentially their deceased villain's initial casualties while Finn, still trying to process his anger and newfound ability to fight back, is following so he can protect her. The writing is overly clumsy in its forced establishment, inelegantly demanding to maroon the main characters at a location that will additionally provide to histories of hero and villain, providing information we weren't particularly interested in or desire to understand. Additionally seeming like a more calculated move to edge the film toward the similar religious audiences that transformed the Conjuring movies into major blockbusters, the director includes a spiritual aspect, with virtue now more directly linked with the creator and the afterlife while bad represents the devil and hell, religion the final defense against a monster like this.

Overloaded Plot

What all of this does is further over-stack a franchise that was previously nearly collapsing, including superfluous difficulties to what should be a basic scary film. I often found myself overly occupied with inquiries about the processes and motivations of what could or couldn’t happen to feel all that involved. It's minimal work for the actor, whose face we never really see but he maintains genuine presence that’s generally absent in other areas in the cast. The location is at times atmospherically grand but the majority of the persistently unfrightening scenes are flawed by a rough cinematic quality to differentiate asleep and awake, an unsuccessful artistic decision that seems excessively meta and created to imitate the horrifying unpredictability of being in an actual nightmare.

Unpersuasive Series Justification

Lasting approximately two hours, the follow-up, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a needlessly long and highly implausible argument for the birth of an additional film universe. The next time it rings, I suggest ignoring it.

• The follow-up film releases in Australia's movie houses on 16 October and in the United States and United Kingdom on the seventeenth of October