I will say that the ending itself, and how it fed into what happened in the first movie, was actually really well-done. But, again, I don't think I can come to the conclusion that this was a good movie. I'm still a horror fan and if I see a good horror movie, regardless of its intentions, I'm gonna point it out. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but I don't really connect to that. Particularly teens and young adults, who go with their friends to have a good time.
Not saying that this movie employed this tactic, because I really don't know, but, again, it's the type of movie that's an easy sell for audiences. I enjoyed the first two Paranormal Activities, which employed this marketing tactic. This type of movie exists so they can put together an audience reaction trailer that shows them reacting to the jump scares. Even though horror is still very much a niche driven genre, there's also movies that you can tell will be good for a scare to a wider audience. For one reason or another, I came to the conclusion while watching this, but this is very much a casual horror movie. But, much like Ouija: Origin of Evil, I felt that despite being a massive improvement over the first one, it's not what I would call a good movie anyway. Not even fucking close, so it's not that. Let's get this out of the way first, this is not in the same territory as Evil Dead 2. That's a misleading statement, of course, because it takes more into consideration how bad the first movie was as opposed to the sequel actually being great. In terms of the varying quality from movie to movie, you could say that this is one of the best horror sequels of all time. The reason I bring this up is because, much like Ouija's sequel (Origin of Evil) this is a vastly superior movie to the original. Only thing I remember is that Annabelle Wallis, yes, gave a really bad performance in her role. Perhaps not as awful as the original Ouija was, but still really bad. I say that because, I thought the first Annabelle was a very bad movie. Regardless, let's get going on the movie, shall we? This sequel presents an interesting conundrum. So, unless Universal and Warner Bros decided to work together, this won't be a shared universe. There's been no confirmation that all of these films exist in the same universe since, for some reason, this movie (and its prequel) were Distributed by Universal instead of Warner Bros, who distributed the film that this is a spin-off from (The Conjuring). I don't want to say that all of these movies are interchangeable, but I can see how someone might confuse this with another of the movies I just mentioned. The reason that these movies share a universe is, because, realistically speaking, they share a lot of similarities in style, form of presenting their horror and tone. And, even then, those movies still don't have as identifiable villains as the Universal monsters. I suppose you could include the Ouija movies in there as well, though, in the case of Ouija, there's not a clear definable villain as, say, there may be in the aforementioned movies. Having seen this movie, however, I could say that there's already a shared universe with films like Annabelle (duh), The Conjuring (major duh) and Insidious (triplicate duh). So I was talking, a couple of days ago, about Universal doing their own cinematic universe using their famous horror monsters from the 20s-50s starting with The Mummy, which was a major misfire.