‘Black Phone 2’ Review: The Grabber May Be Gone, but His Ghost Is Still Calling in Hypnotic Extension of Retro Franchise
Director Scott Derrickson brings an evocative analog texture to keep the scares coming from Ethan Hawke’s (now-dead) devil-masked killer.
(from left) Finn (Mason Thames) and The Grabber (Ethan Hawke) in Black Phone 2, written and directed by Scott Derrickson.
Photo Credit: Universal Pictures
Not that long ago, while talking horror movies with an Asian film critic, I mentioned that ghost stories (especially the Japanese kind, where spirits haunt the living until some unresolved injustice from their past can be rectified) don’t really scare me, because ghosts aren’t real. Oh, but they are, she insisted, suggesting that she may have encountered them herself. What my Chinese colleague can’t understand is Americans’ obsession with slasher movies. Now that’s a genre that does nothing for her, since serial killers seem as far removed from her culture as ghosts do from mine.
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I was reminded of this conversation as I watched “Black Phone 2,” director Scott Derrickson’s artful sequel to his atmospheric Blumhouse horror show about the Grabber, a sicko (played by Ethan Hawke in an elaborate devil mask) who lures kids into the back of his van and terrorizes them. The original — released in 2021, but set 43 years earlier — was what we might call an “elevated” slasher movie, while the follow-up (which leans even more heavily into the film’s creepy retro style) effectively switches genres. It plays as a cross between a ghost movie and “A Nightmare on Elm Street.”