The Black Phone 2 Analysis – Hit Horror Sequel Heads Towards The Freddy Krueger Franchise

Coming as the re-activated Stephen King machine was still churning out adaptations, regardless of quality, the original film felt like a uninspired homage. Featuring a retro suburban environment, young performers, telepathic children and twisted community predator, it was nearly parody and, comparable to the weakest the author's tales, it was also inelegantly overstuffed.

Funnily enough the inspiration originated from within the household, as it was adapted from a brief tale from his descendant, stretched into a film that was a surprise $161m hit. It was the story of the Grabber, a sadistic killer of young boys who would enjoy extending the ritual of their deaths. While molestation was avoided in discussion, there was something inescapably queer-coded about the character and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was clearly supposed to refer to, reinforced by the actor playing him with a certain swishy, effeminate flare. But the film was too ambiguous to ever properly acknowledge this and even without that uneasiness, it was too busily plotted and overly enamored with its tiring griminess to work as only an unthinking horror entertainment.

Follow-up Film's Debut During Production Company Challenges

The follow-up debuts as former horror hit-makers Blumhouse are in critical demand for a hit. Lately they've encountered difficulties to make any project successful, from their werewolf film to the suspense story to their action film to the total box office disaster of the robotic follow-up, and so a great deal rides on whether the sequel can prove whether a brief narrative can become a motion picture that can create a series. However, there's an issue …

Paranormal Shift

The initial movie finished with our Final Boy Finn (Mason Thames) killing the Grabber, supported and coached by the ghosts of those he had killed before. This situation has required director Scott Derrickson and his co-writer C Robert Cargill to advance the story and its killer to a new place, turning a flesh and blood villain into a ghostly presence, a direction that guides them through Nightmare on Elm Street with a capability to return into the real world enabled through nightmares. But in contrast to the dream killer, the Grabber is clearly unimaginative and completely lacking comedy. The disguise stays appropriately unsettling but the film struggles to make him as scary as he briefly was in the original, trapped by complicated and frequently unclear regulations.

Snowy Religious Environment

Finn and his irritatingly profane sibling Gwen (the performer) face him once more while trapped by snow at a high-altitude faith-based facility for kids, the second film also acknowledging regarding the hockey mask killer Jason Voorhees. The sister is directed there by a vision of her late mother and what might be their late tormenter’s first victims while the brother, still attempting to deal with his rage and fresh capacity for resistance, is following so he can protect her. The screenplay is too ungainly in its artificial setup, inelegantly demanding to leave the brother and sister trapped at a setting that will further contribute to background information for hero and villain, supplying particulars we didn't actually require or want to know about. Additionally seeming like a more calculated move to push the movie towards the comparable faith-based viewers that transformed the Conjuring movies into huge successes, Derrickson adds a spiritual aspect, with morality now more strongly connected with God and heaven while villainy signifies the devil and hell, faith the ultimate weapon against such a creature.

Over-stacked Narrative

What all of this does is further over-stack a franchise that was previously close to toppling over, adding unnecessary complications to what could have been a straightforward horror movie. Frequently I discovered too busy asking questions about the methods and reasons of possible and impossible events to feel all that involved. It's minimal work for the performer, whose face we never really see but he maintains real screen magnetism that’s mostly missing elsewhere in the ensemble. The location is at times atmospherically grand but the bulk of the continuously non-terrifying sequences are marred by a gritty film stock appearance to differentiate asleep and awake, an poor directorial selection that appears overly conscious and constructed to mirror the horrifying unpredictability of living through a genuine night terror.

Weak Continuation Rationale

Running nearly 120 minutes, Black Phone 2, similar to its predecessor, is a needlessly long and hugely unconvincing argument for the birth of a new franchise. When it calls again, I suggest ignoring it.

• Black Phone 2 debuts in Australian theaters on the sixteenth of October and in the US and UK on the seventeenth of October