Man, don’t you just hate when your tea party gets interrupted by a woman clutching a cross and the Bible, and then your bones start popping and your head starts jutting in weird directions, and then something really awful happens, but no one can see it because the camera’s turned away? That mortifying situation is exactly what happens to the little girl in the above teaser trailer for Annabelle 2, a film that dares to ask the question, “What if we made another movie about that doll from The Conjuring, even though people didn’t really go wild for the first one featuring it?”
Still, Annabelle was effective at delivering the basics of a horror film, by which we mean it had a few decent scares. And besides, who’s to say this won’t be The Godfather Part II of horror sequels? (It probably won’t be.) Still, given we’re currently hearing good things about director Mike Flanagan’s sequel to the execrable Ouija, all scornful asides about sequels to cheap knock-offs are currently on hold. Annabelle 2 is scheduled to freak out pediaphobes sometime in 2017.