The Black Phone 2: The Grabber is Back

Finney Shaw survived the Grabber in the original Black Phone movie, which was a good thing. Since then, he has been known as the boy who killed the serial killer, which hasn’t been great. Unfortunately, he is about to learn he and the Grabber have a deeper connection than he ever knew, which is very, very bad. Even though he is dead, the Grabber still wants a piece of Shaw and Gwen, his sister with the “shine.” However, the Shaw siblings are still tenacious survivors in Scott Derrickson’s The Black Phone 2, produced by Blumhouse, which opens Friday in theaters.

Several years have passed, but Finney still gets phantom calls on out-of-service pay phones (this is the early 1980s, so there are plenty of them out there), which he ignores and Gwen still has ominous dreams. Her latest vision is that of her late mother calling from Alpine Lake, a Christian winter-sports camp in the Colorado Rockies. Basically, if you camped at Alpine Lake as a teen, you could graduate to staying at the Overlook Hotel in The Shining as an adult, because similarly bad things happened both places.

In fact, three kids were killed at the camp shortly after their mother quit working there as a counselor. It was closed for years, but ‘Mando, a former employee, bought the camp and reopened it, so he could continue looking for the victims’ missing bodies. Wanting answers about the mother they hardly knew, Gwen convinces Finney and her pseudo-boyfriend, Arnesto Arellano (the brother of Robin, whom the Grabber abducted just prior to taking Finney), to join her as trainee camp counselors. However, a not-so-freak blizzard (again, this is Colorado) traps the three teens in Alpine Lake, with the Grabber, who has become something like Freddy Kruger.

The first film was a very Blumhouse production, mostly confined to the Grabber’s sinister dungeon. Fans might have been skeptical of the sequel’s wider scope, but Derickson and co-screenwriter C. Robert Cargill successful incorporate elements of The Shining and Nightmare on Elm Street, in a manner that feels compatible with the first film’s mythos.

However, sometimes it arguably departs from King/Hill family themes, in good ways, by giving the Shaw siblings’ father redemptive moments and not demonizing the camp for its Christian origins. Plus, regardless of where it was filmed (apparently somewhere in Ontario), Black Phone 2 feels like a very Colorado-kind of film.

The teen principals, Mason Thames and Madeline McGraw returning as the Shaws and Miguel Mora, switching from the role of Robin Arrelano to his younger [living] brother Arnesto, work well together and they all show a youthful maturity you rarely see in horror movies. These are clearly kids who have seen more than their share. Demian also gives grown-up viewers an adult presence worth caring about as Mando, while Jeremy Davies has some shockingly resonant moments playing the guilt-wracked Shaw father.

Frankly, there are times you would hardly know Ethan Hawke is under the Grabber mask. His horned likeness is used somewhat judiciously, but effectively. In fact, the first two acts are genuinely scary, largely due to Derrickson’s command of atmosphere and his taut, slow-building execution. Eventually, the Grabber indulges in some Freddy-like excesses, but fans will already be completely hooked at that point.

It is also interesting to see the original cast back in action in the sequel, having aged a few years. Weirdly, Thames is starting to resemble Hawke, but that arguably adds a strange bonus layer of irony. As a result, this is one of the better recent horror sequels outside the Conjuring and Insidious franchises. Highly recommended for horror fans, The Black Phone 2 opens in theaters tomorrow (10/17), including the Look Dine-In W57 in New York.