Black Phone 2 (2025 | USA | 114 minutes | Scott Derrickson)

The Black Phone, writer/director Scott Derrickson’s thriller about a young boy attempting to escape from the serial killer who’s kidnapped him, didn’t immediately look like a monster hit to its benefactors at scrappy horror factory Blumhouse Productions. 

Modestly budgeted, unpretentious, and steeped in late seventies faded grindhouse hues, the movie experienced two release delays, and was nearly consigned to the abject oblivion of streaming. 

Then it successfully played Fantastic Fest, and test-screened through the roof with audiences. Blumhouse took a chance on a theatrical run in 2022, a gamble that paid off in epic fashion: The Black Phone tallied an impressive $160 million gross on a budget somewhere between $16 and $18 million dollars (depending on who you talk to).

Based on a Joe Hill short story, The Black Phone distinguished itself by employing a novel high-concept twist—the killer’s deceased victims aid and advise young protagonist Finney (Mason Thames) by chatting with the boy on a long-dead (black) telephone. It also nailed its ‘70s period details in unforced fashion, and boasted two phenomenal performances by Thames and Madeleine McGraw as Finn’s wise-ass younger sister Gwen. Think Stand by Me meeting Silence of the Lambs in bell bottoms, with a ghost story floating incorporeal in the background—shudders, period verisimilitude, and characters worth rooting for, all combined to make an ostensible formula movie something special. 

Three years later, Black Phone 2 has surfaced. And like 28 Years Later and M3GAN 2.0, two other horror sequels that hit theaters in 2025, it takes a hard sub-genre left turn.

Five years have passed, and teenaged Gwen and Finn are both experiencing their own variations of Hell as high schoolers. Finn’s become the kind of troubled bully that once tormented him in middle school, while Gwen deals with being stigmatized by her classmates for the clairvoyant visions that bedeviled her in the original film. 

Before long, Gwen’s experiencing a new set of vivid dreams in which she’s seeing dead children etching cryptic clues into the ice of a frozen lake. Those psychic breadcrumbs lead her, Finn, and her wanna-be boyfriend Ernesto (Miguel Mora) to Alpine Lake, a remote winter camp that just might hold clues to the whereabouts and fates of those kids. 

It all appears to be intertwined with The Grabber (Ethan Hawke), the serial killer who kidnapped Finn, and who may now be literally attacking Gwen in her dreams. The heroic trio then winds up trapped at Alpine Lake by a blizzard. They, and a small handful of the camp’s personnel, try to unravel the mystery behind Gwen’s visions, as The Grabber’s hold on Gwen’s subconscious begins bleeding into the real world.

While the original Black Phone wove a relatively down-to-earth serial killer cat-and-mouse tale with only a trace of the supernatural, its follow-up inverts those elements. Derrickson and co-writer C. Robert Cargill largely avoid the concise realism of the previous film here, leaning hard into the heady, slow-burning, nightmarish realm of dream logic. And for awhile, the about-face clicks in a big way.

Derrickson rocks some major skills in the director’s chair, coaxing a dreamlike atmosphere compounded by the snowbound isolation. Better yet, Black Phone 2 smartly shifts focus to Gwen, and McGraw delivers the kind of natural yet full-throttle performance from which genre stars are made. The synergy between her and her onscreen sibling Thames also registers as strongly here as it did in the original. 

The movie handles its shift into the early ‘80s pretty deftly—Derrickson seems to be setting up a trio of horror movies that stride from decade to decade in the vein of Ti West’s entertaining triptych of X, Pearl, and Maxxxine. And The Grabber remains one truly bone-chilling antagonist thanks to Hawke’s voice and body language (not to mention those iconically unnerving masks). 

Unfortunately, Black Phone 2 slips like a camper walking on a frozen lake in sneakers during its last half. The callbacks to A Nightmare on Elm Street land so flagrantly on-the-nose that they flirt with plagiarism, and Derrickson’s and Cargill’s script undercuts the mood—and the tension—with thuddingly silly exposition dialogue and a sentimental streak mawkish enough to make your average Hallmark Christmas movie look hard-nosed by comparison. 

That said, Derrickson and team manage to whip up sufficient chills amidst the cheesiness, the movie looks great, and the cast’s first-rate work engenders enough goodwill to stick it out til the closing credits. It may not soar like 28 Years Later, but at least it largely sidesteps the box-office poison of M3GAN 2.0’s tongue-in-cheek silliness. Here’s hoping that the (likely inevitable) third visit from The Grabber delivers the kind of resonance and pulp artistry that made the first Black Phone stand out.  

Black Phone 2 opens in theaters everywhere October 17. Lead Image courtesy of Blumhouse Productions.