It’s helpful to remember 2021’s “The Black Phone” when pondering all the things that are different about the sequel, “Black Phone 2.” Because many of those differences point to why the second film spun off a Joe Hill (Stephen King’s son) short story doesn’t work.

Director Scott Derrickson did both films, and his early ’80s visual aesthetic (with flashbacks to the late ’50s) is an arresting revisit not just to the Golden Age of Duran Duran, Dorothy Hamill bob haircuts and add-a-gold-bead necklaces. The images are grainy, home movie/early home video quality. It’s a winter tale this time, so there’s snow and cold and forests rendered in simple, stark blacks

And the sound — silences were so important to the first film’s horror — is crackly, the static of a “Poltergeist” TV set or a land line on its last legs.

But the terror was almost mythic in that first film, like a story passed through generations of tweens and teens. Somebody was snatching Denver elementary school kids off the street in the ’70s, somebody with a black van with black balloons spilling out of the back, someone entirely happy to wear monstrous mask.

“The Grabber” would lock children in his basement for his torturing pleasure. The story’s lone supernatural element is the phone in that basement. Children are communicating through time about this monster and their fate, and ways to forestall it.

In “Black Phone 2” the supernatural pre-Android is a pay phone booth at a Alpine Christian Camp for kids in the mountains of Colorado. A voice from the past reaches out from the horrors of the late ’50s to Gwen (Madeline McGraw) in the 1982 present.

It’s not like her family needs more trauma. Her dad (Jeremy Davies) is blitzed and disconnected from life. Brother Finney (Mason Thames) has soured into a bully who only needs a “new kid” to ask him about being the boy who killed The Grabber (Ethan Hawke) as an excuse to beat the hell out of that child.

Gwen and Finney are still having nightmares, with Gwen’s connected to her dead mother’s 1950s camp youth. In “Nightmare on Elm Street” fashion, “Black Phone 2” is about interrupting those dreams and surviving them. Because The Grabber, whom we all saw finished off, has become The Thing/Jason Voorhees/Michael Myers/Pennywise and Freddy Krueger with a van. He won’t die.

The cliche of summer camp horror since “Friday the 13th” has been slaughter visited upon such places just before opening for the season, or just after. Derrickson and co-writer C. Robert Cargill (“The Gorge,” ugh) send Gwen and Finney and their pal Ernesto (Miguel Mora) to Camp Alpine for a dead-of-winter Christian retreat. A blizzard keeps other counselors from making it through.

Only camp counselor Mustang (Arianna Rivas) and lone adult Mando (Demián Bichir) are there to take them in from the cold and get tangled up in this family’s history with a monster who got the camp closed in the late ’50s thanks to his abductions.

The bodies of three little boys were never found.

A call from Gwen and Finney’s mother (Anna Lore) sets a new “test” for the siblings in motion.

“She reached out to me for a reason,” Gwen figures.

The wintry settings — often filmed in a dark, snowy void — look like green screen effects, with nobody really reacting to the icy cold — even when plunged into the lake that no summer/winter camp would be complete without.

The performances register little of the terror that the first film’s younger children in peril got across.

Hawke, in scary mask and gruesome makeup underneath it, milks the inexplicable villainy of monsters who prey on children — murderers or pedophiles.

“I am a bottomless pit of sin!”

Bichir adds a little gravitas to the proceedings. Not much. Giving him a line nobody in 1982 uttered into a phone (an anachronism) doesn’t help.

“It’s been a minute.”

Both “Black Phones” are derivative, as you might expect from material from Stephen King’s apprentice/son. But the derivations Derrickson went for in the sequel are simply not as arresting or interesting.

The setting — snowy or not — is a cliche. The jolts aren’t here. The pathos of the first film is mostly missing, thanks to the absence of innocent and helpless younger children. The “escape” element of that basement dungeon and suspense of whether anybody will get out is left out.

But “Doctor Strange” director Derricson took the assignment, brought in his “Gorge” writer, cashed the check and delivered an inferior photocopy. That’s no way to bolster one’s reputation as the New Sam Raimi or Wes Craven.

Rating: R, graphic violence, much of it directed at children, pot use, profanity

Cast: Madeline McGraw, Mason Thames, Jeremy Davies, Ariana Rivas, Miguel Mora, Demián Bichir and Ethan Hawke

Credits: Directed by Scott Derrickson, scripted by C. Robert Cargill and Scott Derrickson, based on characters created by Joe Hill. A Blumhouse/Universal release.

Running time: 1:54