The Black Phone was already an expansion of a short story, written by Stephen King’s son Joe Hill, so expanding it further to create a sequel was always going to be a tough job. Black Phone 2 doesn’t always succeed, and can’t possibly hope to recapture the power of the first film, but it is a noble effort. It helps that Derrickson is behind the camera again this time around; this is a good-faith sequel, not a mere effort at franchise-building, which distinguishes it from, say, Sinister 2, which Derrickson didn’t direct. Apparently, it took Derrickson a while to figure out exactly how to adapt Hill’s original story, and the originality and strangeness of the first film stemmed from his decision: to pair a procedural serial killer narrative, revolving around a suburban child snatcher known as the Grabber (Ethan Hawke), with a dark magical realist narrative, in which the Grabber’s latest abductee Finney (Mason James) was able to commune with previous victims via a magical telephone, and receive advice from them about to how escape his predicament. In the sequel, we return to Finney, along with his psychic sister, Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) as they explore the Grabber’s legacy further, and his relationship to their deceased mother, who also had psychic powers.

Of course, that begs the question – what role can the Grabber possibly play in this film, given that he was killed in the original? Derrickson gets around this by having the Grabber commune with Gwen in her dreams and by shifting the action to a winter camp where the Grabber collected his first victims. What ensues often recalls the sleep/waking thresholds of A Nightmare on Elm Street but also the return to magical ultra-horror that we see emerge in the Terrifier franchise from the second film onwards. Most of Black Phone 2 unfolds at the threshold of Gwen’s surreal nightmares, imbuing the “real” world with a muted, dream-like quality too, and slowing the action down to the strange pace of sleepwalking. This is only enhanced by the deserted winter camp where most of the action takes place, especially once a blizzard hits to emphasise its emptiness, quietness and desuetude. Most of the film takes place at night, with daytime sequences severely truncated, meaning that, beyond a certain point, it’s difficult to know if we’re watching dreaming or reality. For me, this threshold between waking and sleeping was a little too porous at times, not unlike some of the later films in the original Elm Street run, and offsets what was one of the creepiest features of the first film: the blunt materiality of a certain strand of brutalist suburban architecture in the 70s and 80s. At times this sleepwalking slowness runs the risk of turning into a dirge, or a generalised “otherworld” in the vein of Stranger Things; I wanted a few more day scenes when the Grabber’s history at the camp was tracked more procedurally.

Still, there is no doubt that many of these dreams are terrifying in themselves, with the film often playing more as a loose sequel to Sinister than The Black Phone given the staticky, Super 8 quality of the images they contain (one of the dreams actually seems to feature the same house from the iconic opening sequence in Sinister). More generally, Black Phone 2 remains true to the most enduring period detail of the original film: spaces where adults are notionally present in an ambient way but adolescents remain essentially unsupervised. Taken collectively, the true crime boom of the last ten years is in part a way of historicising this unique generation of latchkey kids, whose plight the first film condensed to one specific and precarious space: the commute to and from school. We do glimpse this space in Black Phone 2, which opens with a brutal playground fight without a teacher in sight, but Derrickson quickly shifts it to the winter camp, which expands it into something more surreal and existential. For the holiday camp is the quintessence of this unsupervised adolescent space at this moment in American history, and that void of adult oversight is enhanced by the fact that Finney and Gwen, who have volunteered as camp counselors, arrive in the midst of a snowstorm that has delayed all the other employees, meaning that they are isolated with the smallest possible skeleton crew of superintendents. Their father is barely concerned with their safety, cursorily telling Finney to “Go look after your sister,” while Gwen is forced to sleep alone, in an enormous vacant bunk bed hall, since state law prohibits her from joining Finney and friend Ernesto (Miguel Mora) in the boys’ cabin.  

Whereas the original film presented a naturalistic vision of latchkey life in the late 70s, Black Phone 2 thus opts for expressionism, using the camp to evoke an entire underworld of adolescent life that remained invisible to parental control – and so hypervisible to the most dangerous kind of adults. That pushes the sequel into more overtly horrific territory than the first film, and creates an even more pessimistic gloom, which makes it all the more surprising when it effectively resolves and restores parental presence in the closing scenes. Not only do Finney and Gwen reconnect with their father at the end but they discover that their mother didn’t abandon them by taking her own life; she was murdered by the Grabber in one of the dream sequences that Gwen has experienced here. Finally, Gwen communes with her mother on the camp phone, congealing all the phones of the two films into a general benignity, while the last note is her and Finney’s father bantering with Finney about his new girlfriend. This feels like a different universe from the parentless world of the original, as if Derrickson has jumped forward in time to a more contemporary form of family. And this is another way that Black Phone 2 bears traces of Stranger Things; sure, the Duffer Brothers feature a lot of kids by themselves, or kids who meet brutal ends, but the series itself is ultimately a way of bridging the gap between 80s parents and 10s kids – a way for 80s parents to differentiate themselves from their own forebears. While Black Phone 2 is an honest effort, then, it ultimately resolves so much of what was alien about the first film, and eventually departs from its signature and suffocating vision of late 70s adolescence. It neither adds nor detracts from the original, which was one of the strangest and most singular horror films in recent memory, testament to Derrickson’s brilliance with this genre.