I enjoyed watching The Conjuring 2. It’s competently made, features a few clever scares, and Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson lend the film a gravity that many horror pictures are missing. But the more I think about it, the more disappointed I am in the result. The first Conjuring film is one of the best horror features in years, a testament to traditional horror filmmaking and craft. In comparison, its sequel just feels routine.

There’s a good reason for that: this film was very much rushed through production. It’s public knowledge that the demon-antagonist was completely redesigned just three months before the movie’s release, leading to a number of reshoots well into post-production. That sort of seat-of-your-pants filmmaking explains a lot about the movie, from the script, to the production, to the general lack of innovation on display.

Let’s start with the script. Story is rarely the selling point for a horror movie. The genre is built on simple, high concepts, with the central characters trying to survive at all costs. The script really only has to keep things consistent and give us a reason to like or care about the characters in danger. The Conjuring 2 fails at the former. While there’s a continual forward momentum that helps paper over this weakness, the eventual “reveal” about the spirit is complete nonsense. It makes no sense given the timing and physical locations of earlier sequences, and feels like a cheap way of tying the two major narrative threads together.

On the production side, The Conjuring 2 suffers most in comparison to its predecessor. That first film was a marvel of set-design and scare-engineering, one where the geography of the house was constantly in the mind of the filmmaker and instrumental in scene construction. There’s a sense here that returning-director James Wan at least WANTED to approach the sequel in the same way. Like the first movie, there’s an extended tracking shot through many of the house’s rooms, giving the audience a good idea of how the various rooms are laid out. But unlike the first film, there’s no attempt here to really do anything with the rooms. The scares are all confined to small areas, and rely more on jump scares and creepy voices than staging and cinematography. It’s all functional enough, but a huge step back from what was previously accomplished.

Finally, The Conjuring 2 just doesn’t have a lot of original ideas going for it. This could have been a problem with the original, too, but the filmcraft made it a moot point. Here though, without such strong filmmaking to back it up, the narrative just feels tired. It’s your standard demonic possession story, with a young girl doing creepy things and traditionally holy imagery being turned on its head. Wan’s earlier film Insidious already did a lot of this in a more interesting, original manner.

This familiarity is exacerbated by the film’s weird half-hearted commitment to revisiting The Amityville Horror. The pre-credits sequence has the paranormal investigators at the center of the film, the Warrens, investigating the massacre at the Amityville home. This sequence utilizes a lot of famous imagery from the original film, prominently featuring the ghost boy in the striped shirt, but is almost completely excised from the rest of the movie. It’s as if the creators felt pressured to do SOMETHING about Amityville, given the real-life Warrens’ famed involvement there, but knew that it was well-trodden ground. Inserting such a short nod to it doesn’t really satisfy, though, and only serves to make the movie feel more tossed together.

The original Conjuring overcame a lot of potential pitfalls (a tired premise, the glorification of real-life con artists)by just being really well made. While the sequel is certainly functional, and probably better than a lot of mainstream horror films, it just can’t get over those issues in the same way. The Conjuring franchise is a money-machine now, and the pressure to get more and more of these out on a regular schedule is going to continue to lessen their effectiveness.