The Black Phone’s power comes from its simplicity. The slow-burn setup takes plenty of time to put all the pieces in place, but at its heart, the low-budget 2021 horror hit comes down to an intense, quiet, extended battle of determination between a masked serial killer called The Grabber (Ethan Hawke) and his latest abductee, 13-year-old Finney (How to Train Your Dragon’s Mason Thames), with some spooky posthumous assistance from The Grabber’s previous victims. Returning writer-director team Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill go much larger and messier with 2025’s Black Phone 2, which they made on a clearly bigger budget, and with a lot more ambition — for better and worse.
The sequel loses the small-scale, intense focus in favor of The Conjuring-level supernatural effects and action. At its best, it’s much scarier than the first movie. But it also comes with a level of full-on action-goofiness that Derrickson and Cargill avoided in Black Phone.
Black Phone 2 catches up with Finney (now going by Finn) and his sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) four years after The Grabber’s death. The frightening retrocognitive dreams about horrific murders that haunted Gwen in the first movie have gotten even worse, and Finn is still getting phone calls from the dead. The two siblings deal with their past traumas and their present psychic abilities in radically different ways: Gwen has fully taken on the responsibility of understanding her dreams and helping the dead find peace however she can. Finn is numbing himself with weed and denial, and answering his periodic supernatural phone calls with a flat “I’m sorry, but I can’t help you” before hanging up.
When evidence suggests a connection between Finn and Gwen’s dead mother, The Grabber, some spooky murdered kids, and a Christian camp in the Colorado mountains, Gwen insists on traveling to the site, and Finn reluctantly tags along to protect her. Also along for the ride: Gwen’s classmate Eduardo (Miguel Mora), who played Finn’s ferocious murdered friend Robin in The Black Phone, and is back as Robin’s younger brother. Derrickson and Cargill layer in more characters who wind up somewhere between suspicious and superfluous, including Demián Bichir as camp head Mondo, Arianna Rivas as a camp wrangler called Mustang, and a bland, judgy couple pointedly named Barbara and Kenneth (which is to say, Ken and Barbie), tossed into the mix as brief but pointed commentary on the difference between faithful Christians and hypocrites.
Derrickson and Cargill both identify as Christian, and their interest in exploring their beliefs here give Black Phone 2 more texture and nuance than the average demons-and-devils horror movie, particularly when it comes to Gwen’s unconventional relationship with religion. But the Christian commentary is just one thread in an overpacked movie exploring half a dozen different things at once, including Finn’s struggles to process his trauma (a common subplot in an era where most mainstream horror movies are either metaphors for trauma, or just openly about its legacy), a tentative romance between Gwen and Eduardo, Gwen and Finn’s still-evolving relationship with their recovering-alcoholic father (Jeremy Davies), and the backstory of what really happened to their dead mother.
That’s a lot to fit into one film. And while the attempts at rich, nuanced, emotional characterization are laudable, they also pile up to a point that make the supernatural battles against The Grabber feel like just another side plot, rather than the movie’s centerpiece — a particular problem given how familiar those battles are from the past horror films Derrickson and Cargill are openly referencing.
The filmmaking duo based the first Black Phone on a 2005 short story by the same name from Locke & Key author Joe Hill. In a Q&A at the sequel’s world-premiere screening at Fantastic Fest, Cargill said the idea for Black Phone 2 came when Hill called him up with what he called “the dumbest idea” about how The Grabber could return. (Cargill’s response: “I love dumb ideas!”) The core idea isn’t dumb at all — it’s certainly fueled any number of past popular horror movies. And the idea of The Grabber still able to reach Finn and Gwen from beyond the grave nestles perfectly into the scenario The Black Phone already established, where dead people are an active, present force in the living world.
All that said, though, The Grabber returning with elaborate, murderous powers over Gwen’s dreams pushes Black Phone 2 straight into Freddy Krueger territory, and the way Gwen fights back turns this movie into a spin on A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors. At Fantastic Fest, Derrickson acknowledged that debt, along with the many other ’80s horror movies they’re referencing or channeling here, from 1983’s Curtains (the source of Black Phone 2’s ice-skating battle) to the Friday the 13th movies that inspired this movie’s woodland camp setting.
All of this makes Black Phone 2 feel more like an indiscriminate buffet than a single well-curated meal. It’s packed with supernatural incident and gore, big emotional moments for the characters and creepy jump-scare sensationalism for the audience, winky references for longtime horror fans and echoes of The Black Phone’s best moments for the younger fans just getting their start in horror with this franchise. It’s maximalist horror that builds up to a showy, CG-heavy climax with a dozen moving parts, and it’s often rousing, unnerving, and even funny.
But at the same time, the movie’s best moment is a single, simple conversation where Hawke and McGraw get to share a quiet, edged moment, where The Grabber explains the true nature of hell, and what he’s become. The first Black Phone was built around the incredible tension of simple character work. Even amid all of Black Phone 2’s giddy, over-the-top thrills, it’s easy to miss the powerful simplicity of that original dynamic: two people in a room together, both holding onto their own secrets, navigating which one of them is about to die at the other’s hands.
Black Phone 2 hits theaters on Oct 17.
