Scott Derrickson has made millions on the unnerving emptiness between fragments of film grain. The horror films the director has made with screenwriter C. Robert Cargill — “Sinister” and “The Black Phone” in particular — have used the aesthetics of Super 8 film to create a suggestive aura of supernatural menace. “The Black Phone 2” is no exception, with grain so dense in certain sequences that the actors are reduced to ghostly silhouettes. It’s an effective technique, which is probably why Derrickson keeps using it.
The Super 8 (and modified Super 16) sequences in “The Black Phone 2” provide the film with its most horrific imagery: fragmented shots of red feathers littering the snow around a child’s abandoned parka and thick, viscous blood oozing from a tree stump in the frozen woods. These are all echoes — some prophetic, others from the past — that recur in the dreams experienced by Gwen (Madeleine McGraw), younger sister of Finney (Mason Thames), the siblings that were also at the center of the original “The Black Phone.”
Finney triumphed at the end of that film, dispatching child-snatching serial killer the Grabber (Ethan Hawke) with help from the ghosts of his previous victims and one of Gwen’s psychic visions. But that doesn’t matter in a horror movie, particularly a supernatural one. And so the Grabber is back, calling from beyond the grave to threaten Finney with not only his own demise, but that of his little sister as well. Hawke returns too, grumbling and growling behind a rubber mask (and, eventually, some grisly prosthetics). And thank goodness, because there are some thick blocks of dialogue to get through here, and only an actor of Hawke’s caliber could make them work.
Part of the charm of the “Black Phone” movies is that their threat is anachronistic. The number of pay phones in the United States has fallen sharply since the mobile revolution, making it next to impossible for a disembodied malevolent spirit to terrorize any misfit kids through phone booths today. “The Black Phone 2” takes place in 1981, a fact that’s nearly impossible to forget with the repeated, winking era-specific references and lines about a character being “deader than disco.”
The plot of both films also depends on their teenage characters being relatively unsupervised, an equally anachronistic touch that “The Black Phone 2” shares with its most obvious inspiration: the “A Nightmare on Elm Street” movies. Specifically, Gwen takes on a leading role in this film that’s very similar to Patricia Arquette’s character in “A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors,” but with the staff of a snowed-in Christian summer camp at her back rather than the patients at a youth psychiatric hospital.
These include Ernesto (Miguel Mora), the younger brother of a character from the previous film (also played by Mora) and Gwen’s innocent puppy-love suitor; camp supervisor Armando (Demián Bichir), who provides a living link to macabre events that occurred there decades earlier; and Mercedes (Arianna Rivas), Armando’s equestrian niece. Attempts to add a bit of Latinx flair to the dialogue largely fizzle. But, like Hawke, Bichir does a heroic job carrying the burden of explaining the film’s lore — an essential function in a backstory-heavy effort like this one.
Most of the flaws in “The Black Phone 2” can be traced back to its screenplay, from some of the more cringeworthy dialogue to the unwieldy chunks of exposition and a thematic thread that affirms the existence of Heaven and Hell, and, therefore, the validity of Christian belief. This is not an unusual message for a horror film — the entire possession subgenre is built on Catholic dogma, as is the “Conjuring” series. What makes it worthy of critique here is the inconsistent way in which it’s applied, setting up a more thoughtful take on the hypocrisy of organized religion only to abandon it when it’s time to send the Grabber back to Hell.
Derrickson acquits himself more admirably, adding blood-soaked flair not only to the film’s analog sequences but also the digital ones. A scene where Gwen is terrified by the appearance of three boys who were murdered on the campgrounds back in 1957 is a masterclass in creative gore effects, slicing one boy’s head in half diagonally on a windowpane, watching it slither to the ground, and leaving it to sputter and twitch as blood pools around what’s left of his face. The film also builds on a famous effect from “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” spinning bodies and flinging them around like marionettes whose puppeteer is having a seizure as the characters battle the invisible foe in Gwen’s dreams.
Still, a complaint that’s also common to contemporary horror films nags at “The Black Phone 2,” in that all of the best things about this movie come from other movies, whether they be the creative team’s previous efforts or iconic titles from decades past. (It’s not just “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” either; the majority of the action takes place as the characters are snowed in at an isolated location, making comparisons to “The Shining” equally inescapable.) These elements are enjoyable, which is precisely why they’re recycled here. And maybe that’s good enough for a horror sequel. But good enough will never be more than just that.
Grade: B-
“The Black Phone 2” premiered at Fantastic Fest 2025. Universal Pictures will release it in theaters on Friday, October 17.
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