It’s hard enough being a teenager, but to be a teenager with a metaphysical connection to the deceased serial killer who once abducted you and/or your brother? Forget about it! Psychic siblings Finn (Mason Thames) and Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) return in the Black Phone 2 trailer, as does the menacing if unimaginatively named villain The Grabber (Ethan Hawke), who Finn killed at the end of the first film. “You of all people know that dead is just a word,” The Grabber tells Finn in the new trailer, throwing in an equally uninspired “Vengeance is mine!” later in the clip.
Once again directed by Scott Derrickson, Black Phone 2 is set four years after Finn survived his encounter with The Grabber. “As Finn, now 17, struggles with life after his captivity, the headstrong 15-year-old Gwen begins receiving calls in her dreams from the black phone and seeing disturbing visions of three boys being stalked at a winter camp known as Alpine Lake,” the synopsis reads. “Determined to solve the mystery and end the torment for both her and her brother, Gwen persuades Finn to visit the camp during a winter storm. There, she uncovers a shattering intersection between The Grabber and her own family’s history. Together, she and Finn must confront a killer who has grown more powerful in death and more significant to them than either could imagine.”
The Black Phone 2 trailer is quite consciously referential to horror movie history: the remote, woodsy cabin harkens back to Friday The 13th, while the shaky found-footage style recalls The Blair Witch Project. And of course, The Grabber seeking revenge on Finn by terrorizing his sister’s dreams is basically the plot of Nightmare On Elm Street. With Ethan Hawke behind the mask, there’s a bit of gravitas to the latest evil child killer. But does the image of The Grabber gliding over ice with a hatchet live up to the legacy of such villains as Jason, Freddy, or Michael Myers? You can decide for yourself when the movie premieres October 17.
