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Debuting as the re-activated master of horror machine was still churning out film versions, regardless of quality, the first installment felt like a sloppy admiration piece. Set against a small town 70s backdrop, teenage actors, gifted youths and gnarly neighbourhood villain, it was close to pastiche and, comparable to the weakest his literary works, it was also awkwardly crowded.

Curiously the call came from within the household, as it was adapted from a brief tale from King’s son Joe Hill, expanded into a film that was a unexpected blockbuster. It was the story of the Grabber, a cruel slayer of children who would enjoy extending the ritual of their deaths. While assault was never mentioned, there was something inescapably queer-coded about the villain and the era-specific anxieties he was clearly supposed to refer to, emphasized by the actor acting with a noticeably camp style. But the film was too ambiguous to ever fully embrace this aspect and even without that uneasiness, it was excessively convoluted and too high on its exhaustingly grubby nastiness to work as anything beyond an undiscerning sleepover nightmare fuel.

The Sequel's Arrival During Filmmaking Difficulties

Its sequel arrives as once-dominant genre specialists the studio are in desperate need of a win. This year they’ve struggled to make anything work, from Wolf Man to The Woman in the Yard to their action film to the utter financial disappointment of the AI sequel, and so a great deal rides on whether the continuation can prove whether a short story can become a motion picture that can spawn a franchise. However, there's an issue …

Paranormal Shift

The initial movie finished with our Final Boy Finn (the performer) defeating the antagonist, helped and guided by the ghosts of those he had killed before. This situation has required writer-director Scott Derrickson and his writing partner Cargill to take the series and its villain in a different direction, transforming a human antagonist into a ghostly presence, a route that takes them through Nightmare on Elm Street with a power to travel into reality enabled through nightmares. But unlike Freddy Krueger, the villain is clearly unimaginative and completely lacking comedy. The mask remains effectively jarring but the film struggles to make him as frightening as he temporarily seemed in the initial film, limited by convoluted and often confusing rules.

Snowy Religious Environment

The protagonist and his annoyingly foul-mouthed sister Gwen (the actress) encounter him again while snowed in at an alpine Christian camp for kids, the follow-up also referencing in the direction of Jason Voorhees the Friday the 13th antagonist. Gwen is guided there by a vision of her late mother and what could be their late tormenter’s first victims while Finn, still trying to process his anger and newfound ability to fight back, is pursuing to safeguard her. The writing is too ungainly in its contrived scene-setting, clumsily needing to leave the brother and sister trapped at a location that will additionally provide to backstories for both protagonist and antagonist, providing information we didn't actually require or care to learn about. What also appears to be a more calculated move to guide the production in the direction of the similar religious audiences that turned the Conjuring franchise into massive hits, Derrickson adds a spiritual aspect, with good now more closely associated with the divine and paradise while evil symbolizes the devil and hell, belief the supreme tool against this type of antagonist.

Overcomplicated Story

What all of this does is additional over-complicate a story that was formerly almost failing, incorporating needless complexities to what should be a simple Friday night engine. Frequently I discovered overly occupied with inquiries about the processes and motivations of feasible and unfeasible occurrences to become truly immersed. It's minimal work for Hawke, 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 impressively atmospheric but most of the continuously non-terrifying sequences are marred by a gritty film stock appearance to differentiate asleep and awake, an unsuccessful artistic decision that feels too self-aware and constructed to mirror the frightening randomness of being in an actual nightmare.

Unpersuasive Series Justification

Lasting approximately two hours, the follow-up, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a unnecessarily lengthy and hugely unconvincing justification for the establishment of a new franchise. If another installment comes, I advise letting it go to voicemail.

• The follow-up film is out in Australia's movie houses on 16 October and in the US and UK on October 17