Examining Black Phone 2 – Successful Horror Follow-up Heads Towards The Freddy Krueger Franchise

Arriving as the re-activated bestselling author machine was continuing to produce adaptations, quality be damned, the original film felt like a lazy fanboy tribute. Featuring a retro suburban environment, high school cast, telepathic children and twisted community predator, it was almost imitation and, comparable to the weakest his literary works, it was also awkwardly crowded.

Curiously the source was found within the household, as it was adapted from a brief tale from King’s son Joe Hill, over-extended into a film that was a unexpected blockbuster. It was the narrative about the kidnapper, a brutal murderer of young boys who would take pleasure in prolonging the process of killing. While molestation was not referenced, there was something clearly non-heteronormative about the character and the period references/societal fears he was obviously meant to represent, strengthened by the performer portraying him with a certain swishy, effeminate flare. But the film was too ambiguous to ever fully embrace this aspect and even aside from that tension, it was excessively convoluted and too high on its tiring griminess to work as only an undiscerning sleepover nightmare fuel.

Second Installment's Release In the Middle of Studio Struggles

Its sequel arrives as former horror hit-makers the studio are in critical demand for a hit. This year they’ve struggled to make any project successful, from Wolf Man to The Woman in the Yard to their action film to the total box office disaster of the robotic follow-up, and so much depends on whether the sequel can prove whether a brief narrative can become a motion picture that can generate multiple installments. There’s just one slight problem …

Supernatural Transformation

The first film ended with our protagonist Finn (Mason Thames) defeating the antagonist, supported and coached by the spirits of previous victims. This situation has required writer-director Scott Derrickson and his co-writer C Robert Cargill to take the series and its killer to a new place, converting a physical threat into a ghostly presence, a path that leads them through Nightmare on Elm Street with a power to travel into reality facilitated by dreams. But in contrast to the dream killer, the Grabber is markedly uninventive and totally without wit. The mask remains appropriately unsettling but the production fails to make him as frightening as he momentarily appeared in the original, trapped by convoluted and often confusing rules.

Snowy Religious Environment

Finn and his frustratingly crude sister Gwen (the performer) encounter him again while stranded due to weather at a mountain religious retreat for kids, the sequel also nodding toward Freddy’s one-time nemesis Jason Voorhees. The sister is directed there by a ghostly image of her dead mother and what might be their dead antagonist's original prey while the protagonist, continuing to handle his fury and fresh capacity for resistance, is pursuing to safeguard her. The writing is too ungainly in its artificial setup, awkwardly requiring to maroon the main characters at a place that will also add to background information for main character and enemy, providing information we didn’t really need or care to learn about. Additionally seeming like a more strategic decision to push the movie towards the same church-attending crowds that made the Conjuring series into major blockbusters, Derrickson adds a spiritual aspect, with good now more closely associated with the divine and paradise while villainy signifies the demonic and punishment, belief the supreme tool against a monster like this.

Overloaded Plot

What all of this does is continued over-burden a series that was already nearly collapsing, including superfluous difficulties to what should be a simple Friday night engine. Frequently I discovered overly occupied with inquiries about the processes and motivations of possible and impossible events to feel all that involved. It's an undemanding role for the actor, whose face we never really see but he possesses authentic charisma that’s mostly missing elsewhere in the cast. The setting is at times atmospherically grand but the bulk of the consistently un-scary set-pieces are marred by a grainy 8mm texture to distinguish dreaming from waking, an ineffective stylistic choice that appears overly conscious and constructed to mirror the terrifying uncertainty of living through a genuine night terror.

Unpersuasive Series Justification

Lasting approximately two hours, Black Phone 2, similar to its predecessor, is a excessively extended and extremely unpersuasive case for the creation of a new franchise. The next time it rings, I suggest ignoring it.

• The sequel is out in Australian theaters on October 16 and in America and Britain on October 17