If most directors are honest with themselves, especially if they dabble with the horror genre, they pray to the god of celluloid that their film will do well, mainly with their sights on creating a profitable franchise.

For some it's fairly easy, in producing a variation on a theme throughout, churning out enough of them until the franchise hits decline.

For others, like Scott Derrickson, who sort of directed himself into a corner with 2021’s well-received The Black Phone, it means becoming a little more creative when it comes to delivering a sequel.

Four years have passed since Finney (Mason Thames) had his unfortunate encounter with Grabber (Ethan Hawke), and despite getting the better of him, he’s still haunted by the experience.

It’s made worse by the fact his sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) starts having bad dreams that feature her receiving calls on the dreaded black phone. They feature the death of a number of children, who appear to have been murdered at a winter camp, where it just so happened that their late mother worked as a counsellor.

The pair decide to work there as CIT’s (Counsellors in Training), to see what it takes for Gwen’s dreams to stop, and therefore get the evil Grabber out of her head.

American director Derrickson decided to return to The Black Phone after following it up with the disappointing The Gorge. It transpires it wasn’t his best decision.

With the original film ending with a certain someone being killed, its ending didn’t have a natural bridge to crossover to a sequel. Not that it didn’t stop Derrickson, although it really should have.

Again he leans into being more of a psychological thriller than a horror, especially as it has an incredibly low body count to the point that it’s virtually non-existent. In doing so, he also leans in another direction; the first film definitely paid ‘homage’ to a number of shows and films, and benefitted from it, but here he seems to borrow heavily from one franchise in particular, that being A Nightmare on Elm Street; all of the dark elements of the film mainly take place on Gwen’s nightmares, making it eerily similar to the classic Freddy flicks. This sucks all of the originality out of it, which is disappointing.

Pair that with the lack of physical deaths in the film, the result is a limp, bland experience. Even Hawke’s contribution appears to be literally phoned in, as the little his character shows, it could be any random behind the mask, making the character’s role far less menacing than before.

It looks pretty enough, set in a snowy landscape, but the environ is doing a lot of the heavy lifting in an attempt to create a sense of a foreboding atmosphere literally out of thin air.

This then should act as the final nail in this franchise’s coffin, and serve as a reminder that just because your film was a hit, doesn’t automatically mean a franchise and sequel are born, especially without a solid idea to support it, as is the case here.

As tempting as it was for Derrickson answering the black phone ringing for a second time, in retrospect, he should have just simply ignored it, as you should.