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Coming as the revived master of horror machine was still churning out screen translations, quality be damned, The Black Phone felt like a lazy fanboy tribute. Set against a 1970s small town setting, high school cast, telepathic children and twisted community predator, it was close to pastiche and, like the very worst of his literary works, it was also clumsily packed.

Interestingly the source was found inside the family home, as it was adapted from a brief tale from his descendant, over-extended into a film that was a surprise $161m hit. It was the narrative about the kidnapper, a cruel slayer of children who would take pleasure in prolonging the ritual of their deaths. While sexual abuse was not referenced, there was something unmistakably LGBTQ-suggestive about the antagonist and the era-specific anxieties he was intended to symbolize, reinforced by Ethan Hawke acting with a distinctly flamboyant manner. But the film was too ambiguous to ever fully embrace this aspect and even aside from that tension, it was too busily plotted and overly enamored with its tiring griminess to work as anything more than an unthinking horror entertainment.

Second Installment's Release During Studio Struggles

The next chapter comes as previous scary movie successes the production company are in desperate need of a win. This year they’ve struggled to make anything work, from the monster movie to the suspense story to their action film to the complete commercial failure of M3gan 2.0, and so significant pressure rests on whether Black Phone 2 can prove whether a short story can become a film that can generate multiple installments. However, there's an issue …

Paranormal Shift

The original concluded with our Final Boy Finn (the performer) defeating the antagonist, helped and guided by the spirits of previous victims. It’s forced writer-director Scott Derrickson and his collaborator C Robert Cargill to take the series and its killer to a new place, turning a flesh and blood villain into a supernatural one, a path that leads them via Elm Street with a capability to return into reality enabled through nightmares. But unlike Freddy Krueger, the villain is clearly unimaginative and totally without wit. The mask remains appropriately unsettling but the production fails to make him as frightening as he temporarily seemed in the initial film, constrained by complex and typically puzzling guidelines.

Alpine Christian Camp Setting

The protagonist and his annoyingly foul-mouthed sister Gwen (the performer) confront him anew while trapped by snow at a mountain religious retreat for kids, the second film also acknowledging toward Freddy’s one-time nemesis the Friday the 13th antagonist. Gwen is guided there by a vision of her late mother and potentially their dead antagonist's original prey while Finn, still trying to handle his fury and recently discovered defensive skills, is tracking to defend her. The writing is excessively awkward in its forced establishment, inelegantly demanding to maroon the main characters at a place that will also add to histories of hero and villain, filling in details we weren't particularly interested in or care to learn about. In what also feels like a more strategic decision to push the movie towards the comparable faith-based viewers that transformed the Conjuring movies into huge successes, Derrickson adds a religious element, with good now more closely associated with the creator and the afterlife while evil symbolizes the devil and hell, faith the ultimate weapon against this type of antagonist.

Over-stacked Narrative

The result of these decisions is continued over-burden a series that was already nearly collapsing, incorporating needless complexities to what should be a straightforward horror movie. I often found myself excessively engaged in questioning about the hows and whys of possible and impossible events to experience genuine engagement. It's an undemanding role for the performer, whose face we never really see but he possesses real screen magnetism that’s mostly missing elsewhere in the cast. The environment is at times atmospherically grand 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 constructed to mirror the horrifying unpredictability of being in an actual nightmare.

Unconvincing Franchise Argument

At just under 2 hours, Black Phone 2, comparable to earlier failures, is a needlessly long and highly implausible argument for the birth of a new franchise. When it calls again, I advise letting it go to voicemail.

• The sequel debuts in Australia's movie houses on the sixteenth of October and in the US and UK on October 17