In Scott Derrickson’s 1978-set The Black Phone, ‘the Grabber’ (Ethan Hawke) was just a run-of-the-mill masked killer. His boy victims, however, were unrestful spirits, contacting latest abductee Finney (Mason Thames) through a disconnected old phone in the Grabber’s basement dungeon with tips on surviving. Ultimately, the ghost-guided Finney killed the Grabber.
Box-office success made a sequel inevitable, but also posed a problem: how do you follow up a story whose iconic villain ends up very dead, and whose narrative threads have all been tied up? The answer is to go back before moving forward. For Derrickson’s Black Phone 2, again co-written with C. Robert Cargill, opens in 1957 at a remote Christian youth camp, where one snowy night young counsellor Hope (Anna Lore) makes a call in an outdoor phone booth to a number that she has seen in her dreams.
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Cut to 1982, and Finney’s sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw), who has inherited the clairvoyance of her late mother Hope, receives that call in her dreams. Trying to close the circle of their family’s loss, Finney and Gwen travel to the wintry camp. There they discover that the Grabber still maintains a ghostly presence, drawing power from his very first three victims whose bodies remain unfound. In other words, this becomes a classic slasher sequel, with the Grabber resurrected from Hell to rehaunt a lakeside camp like Jason the Slaughter King in any of the later Friday the 13th films, while our gang of ghost hunters play out their interdimensional battles with him as though this were A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors – on ice.
Finney and Gwen team up with victim’s brother Ernesto (Miguel Mora), ex-con camp owner Armando (Demián Bichir), Armando’s niece Mustang (Arianna Rivas) and even their own recovering alcoholic father (Jeremy Davies) to fill in the parts of a backstory that they did not know were missing, to face their trauma and fears, and to take on the revenant Grabber once again in both the spirit realm where he is luring Gwen and the real world where he is manifesting.
For all her ‘woo-woo’ powers, Gwen remains a refreshingly foul-mouthed teenager, and this time around, her and Finney’s storylines dovetail more neatly and compellingly. The way in which the real world and Gwen’s grainy, staticky dream world are shown to intersect is always visually coded, making it relatively easy to follow otherwise disorienting narrative layers across different timelines.
Here, as in Derrickson’s earlier The Exorcism of Emily Rose and Deliver Us From Evil, a supernatural story is heavy-handedly framed in Christian terms. Eschatological questions are answered with reference to heaven and hell, salvation and damnation, while ghosts are unredeemed souls or demons. This feels like sermonising — even if the film’s two most performatively devout characters are repeatedly lampooned for their bad faith and hypocrisy. Ultimately, for all the focus on horrific ‘cold cases’ from the past, this plays too nice with its characters in the present. Great horror is meaner-spirited and less happy-clappy.