Restaging the plot of the original in the snowblind Rockies, Black Phone 2 again charges Finn (Mason Thames) and Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) Blake with uncovering the mystery of three ice-cold Grabber cases. This time they’re at the frigid Alpine Lake summer camp, which just so happens to be the camp their mother, Hope (Anna Lore), used to work at. The siblings use their connection to the great beyond to investigate the camp, where The Grabber used to work as a groundkeeper. Afflicted with expository dreams that point her to local murders, Hope uses her shining to glean that The Grabber was killing Alpine campers.
Black Phone 2 emphasizes Gwen’s power more than before, using her dreams to fill in Black Phone backstory and stage Wes Craven-inspired action sequences in which the Grabber, now a ghost, attacks Gwen in her dreams. Invisible to everyone else, The Grabber throws Gwen around her bunk as an unseen blade slashes her skin. While these sequences make Black Phone 2 play like a remake of A Nightmare On Elm Street, it’s really the Halloween sequels that the movie is grabbing from. After Gwen uses her dreams to discover that The Grabber and Hope knew each other, The Grabber extends Gwen the courtesy of explaining himself: The Grabber reveals that he killed their mother and staged the murder to look like a suicide.
Much like the retconned supernaturalism and increased family ties of the Halloween franchise, this change undoes much of what The Black Phone did well. In the 2022 film, Finn and Gwen lived in a realistic world with realistic problems. They were latchkey kids of the late ’70s whose family life was torn apart by their mother’s suicide. Meanwhile, the otherworldly powers at play stood on a firmer foundation, doubling as a metaphor for the kids finding inner strength and determination against their attackers. The Grabber, too, was just a guy—one who could be killed by a telephone cord. Black Phone 2 makes him an all-powerful being with ice skates for feet who can only be killed by following a specific set of rules: Find the dead campers’ bodies, and the Grabber will return to Hell.
It’s easy to understand why some horror filmmakers go this route for their accidental franchises. The Saw movies made a complicated mess of their timeline by justifying how Jigsaw kept making a comeback every year. Scream eventually decided to add some of those ghostly elements to help smooth over the decade-long delay between installments. Black Phone 2 joins other supernaturally bent sequels, like Halloween and Friday The 13th, to stretch out the longevity of a series that never thought it’d be a series. But while an undead villain makes resurrection easier, it damages the credibility of the monster. These killers are at their scariest when they exist in familiar worlds, ones the audience can identify—like an everyday summer camp terrorized by a disgruntled employee, or a neighborhood menaced by a senseless killer. The Black Phone got a lot of mileage out of that. Like Halloween, it took a familiar world and added the uncanny. With Black Phone 2, those rules no longer apply. If anything can happen, nothing is scary.
