Black Phone 2 Review

“Did you think our story was over?” – The Grabber

Well, frankly, I sure thought the story was over. I couldn’t really see how a sequel was feasible. The Black Phone was a movie about a child abductor/murderer whose last victim killed him with the aid of the spirits of the previous victims. The spirits called the current victim on a disconnected phone in the basement he was being held prisoner. It was coloured black.

All in all, it was a great movie – set in 1978, by the same creative team of Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill who wrote Sinister and Sinister 2, which are featured in this year’s Shocktober line-up. Sinister, as you’ll see is a true horror heavy hitter, its sequel less so. But with Black Phone 2, Derrickson and Cargill have taken their sequel game to a whole new level.

(By the way, I wish I could take credit for the meticulous planning in covering both Sinister films for Shocktober and reviewing this, their latest horror offering within the same fortnight – but I can’t. It was a complete coincidence. Serendipity at its finest.)

The trailer for Black Phone 2 has been nagging at my curiosity since the beginning of summer when it was first shown at the multiplex. As I previously said, I didn’t see how this was going to be pulled off. Then, in the foyer of Cineworld, a full-sized telephone box appeared as part of the movie promotion. When you went inside, and picked up the phone, you heard a creepy message from The Grabber. (Wow – that right there is showmanship – right?)

The film is set four years after The Black Phone, we pick up on the would-be victim of The Grabber, the one who killed the killer, Finn (Mason Thames) who’s still at high school. His younger sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) has begun having bad dreams. It was established previously that she had premonitions in her dreams, but now she’s having dreams of murders that happened in a winter camp (I thought summer camps were bad enough, but who the hell would send their kids to stay in the tundra???) called Camp Alpine Lake in 1957. In one of these dreams, she receives a phone call from her late mother, who also has similar dreams and passed the gift on to Gwen.

Camp Alpine Lake is set up in the Rockies, and is snowbound as soon as Finn and Gwen, along with their friend Ernesto (Miguel Mora) arrive under the guise of wanting to become trainee camp counsellors but really to investigate what the dreams might mean.

There are only the three of them and four camp staff on hand. They are isolated, but Finn starts to hear the public phone ring, with mocking messages from The Grabber (Ethan Hawke), while Gwen sees three of his past victims. But The Grabber… isn’t he dead?

Black Phone 2 doesn’t diminish its legacy in any way, but ingeniously builds upon the legend, while paying a sort of homage to some familiar horrors of the past in ways that aren’t slavishly imitative. And that’s no easy feat.

I guess the most obvious nod is to Freddy Krueger, as Gwen is violently attacked in her dreams, with any ensuing injuries she suffers in her nightmare becoming real. The other main one is the setting of the film in a young people’s camp, which brings us straight to Jason Voorhees and Friday the 13th. But the huge difference is that it’s a winter camp. And that’s more than a cosmetic difference. We saw in the trailer over the past few months, the sight of The Grabber skating along a frozen lake, through a misty snow, axe in hand, toward a victim. Full use is made of the weather as practically, a contributing character in its own right. Not to mention a particularly menacing snowman!

Again, I’ve avoided mentioning anything here that is not seen in the trailer, and that trailer has been around for six months or more. As with the best movies, this is so much more than what we’ve seen in the trailer. So much more is built on the foundation of the original, the characters are richer than they were. This is a rare occurrence in the horror movie field, where the sequel actually surpasses the original film and takes it in a direction where even a trilogy might not seem a bad idea on its current trajectory.

Rather than give us more of the same, which is standard practice in horror sequels, Derrickson and Cargill have taken the original, built up something I wasn’t expecting and driven it in a different direction.

Rob Rating = 10