"The Black Phone 2" Forgets What Made the Original So Special

Back in 2021, I was working in an AMC theater in the suburbs of Boston when a new horror movie came out from Blumhouse. This film was Scott Derrickson's The Black Phone, and while nothing about it was particularly original, it stuck with me. At 17, I would spend my work shifts catching the last 20 minutes of movies before cleaning up spilt popcorn in the aisles, and to this day I think the third act of The Black Phone is one of the best in recent years. With a stellar unexpected performance by Ethan Hawke and some genuinely great scares, The Black Phone ended up one of Blumhouse's most successful projects in recent years. Needless to say, when the sequel was released this weekend, I was one of the first people in line, but did Derrickson deliver a second time?

In The Black Phone 2, Mason Thames reprises his role as Finney, the last survivor of child kidnapper, The Grabber who was killed at the end of the first film. Finney now finds himself haunted by the Grabber as he investigates some mysterious child deaths at a winter camp in the Colorado mountains. Aside from a stronger emphasis on the paranormal, it's clear that something is majorly different this time around. The first film gained a cult following but I can't help but feel like a sequel was not originally planned. The Black Phone ends in a very definitive way, Finney kills The Grabber, his sister's clairvoyance is used to save him, and the evil that once infested their town is defeated. Now, The Grabber is essentially a ghost haunting Finney's every thought and action, a much less palpable threat than before.

You could argue for hours about the existence of ghosts and spirits, but one thing's for sure, serial killers and kidnappers are real. This is what makes horror villains like Leatherface and Buffalo Bill so terrifying, the realistic threat of danger. This is precisely what made The Grabber such a formidable force in The Black Phone, but his return as a vengeful spirit feels like a cheap way of milking the character for all he's worth. The Black Phone 2 relies a lot more on jumpscares than the original, with a story that unravels much more gradually. I won't lie though, there are some bits of dialogue in this film between Finney's sister, Gwen and her boyfriend that made me turn to the person next to me and whisper "wow, what a terribly written scene." I've never felt the need to vocalize something like that before.

Without a doubt, the strongest aspect of The Black Phone 2 are Gwen's premonitions. They are filmed like old home movie footage, with eerie muffled music, no audio, and an incredibly fuzzy camera. They capture a profound yet almost indescribable horror, similar to the family death scenes in Sinister 2. It was in these moments that flickers of brilliance began to show, but they were unfortunately short lived.

On a budget of $16-18 million dollars, the first Black Phone film grossed a whopping $161 million throughout its theatrical run. From then on, Blumhouse and Universal went all in on the property. It is virtually impossible right now to maneuver through Los Angeles without seeing an advertisement, and the film's villain, The Grabber, has become one of the main fixtures of Universal's Halloween Horror Nights. This studio is trying to incredibly hard to make The Grabber one of horror's iconic slashes, alongside the likes Michael Myers, Freddy Krueger, and Jason Vorhees. I cannot emphasize enough how incredibly forced this feels. Some have already likened The Grabber to a "horror industry plant." There is nothing organic about The Grabber's popularity, and audiences can sense it.

It's incredibly cool to see an A-list, auteur actor like Ethan Hawke try his hand at being a horror antagonist. For the most part, he nails it and Scott Derrickson remains a noteworthy director in the genre. Judging by how well The Black Phone 2 did at the box office in its opening weekend, it's predictable that a third film is on its way. Before that inevitably gets written I would just advise Derrickson and his team to take a step back and remember what made the original 2021 film so special; because for now, they've lost the plot.