October’s big horror movie, Black Phone 2, has opened strong for Blumhouse, and took home #1 at the box office.
Per Deadline, the sequel to Universal’s 2022 horror hit made $42 million worldwide, with $26.5 million of it coming from North America. Both takes are slightly above the respective $23.3 million (domestic) and $35.8 million (global) of its predecessor’s start, and give Blumhouse a much-needed win after its earlier horror flicks in 2025 like M3GAN 2.0 and Wolf Man underperformed.
Directed again by Scott Derrickson and starring much of the first film’s cast—Ethan Hawke, Mason Thames, Madeleine McGraw, and Miguel Cazarez Mora—Black Phone 2 sees Hawke’s child-abducting Grabber dead, but terrorizing the kids who defeated him via another black phone stationed at a kids camp. The first movie was based off a short story by Joe Hill, but the story for this one is wholly original, and reception to this sequel has been generally positive.
Meanwhile, Tron: Ares fell 65% in North America, adding another $11.1 million for a new domestic total of $54.6 million. Disney’s legacy threequel didn’t fare much better internationally; it earned another $14.1 million, but did not land at all with Chinese audiences in its debut weekend. With its new $103 million global total, it’s looking likely that the series won’t have much of a future going forward. As for Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, Netflix hasn’t shared any box office numbers yet, but that tune may change as its limited (and slightly confusing) release expands to other theaters next weekend.
Speaking of “next weekend,” we’ve got Yorgos Lanthimos’ comedy flick Bugonia, Tina Romero’s Queens of the Dead, and Chris Stuckmann’s horror debut Shelby Oaksall hitting theaters on October 24. Halloween weekend doesn’t have any genre films, but November 7 has Predator: Badlands.
Any hit movie will naturally spark talk of a sequel—especially a hit horror movie, thanks to the genre’s fondness for franchises that rack up multiple entries. But in the case of 2021’s The Black Phone, the story hit a pretty definitive endpoint when kidnapped Finney (Mason Thames) tapped into everything he’d learned from his ghostly allies and defeated the Grabber (Ethan Hawke) once and for all. Except, he didn’t, because Black Phone 2 is open in theaters today. How did that happen?
Director Scott Derrickson, who wasn’t originally planning on a sequel, revealed the tempting pitch he got from Joe Hill—author of the original short story the first film was based on—to the Hollywood Reporter: “The Grabber calls Finn from hell.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, the Grabber is on the other line. Sure, that’s great, and it opens up a lot of possibilities.’” Supernatural possibilities.
The Grabber’s connection to Finney (called Finn in the sequel, now that he’s a bit older) and his sister, Gwen (Madeleine McGraw)—beyond the events of the first film, that is—is a new reveal in the sequel that we won’t spoil here. But the twist is something that helped Derrickson further get his head around extending the story.
“It got me thinking about story possibilities in a way that I couldn’t really stop. Having finished it now, it’s a big enough reveal in a movie that doesn’t have a lot of twists and turns … and knowing that we were going to build toward that in some form, it gave us an emotional spinal cord for the movie,” he said. “The most difficult thing in the process of constructing the rest of the skeleton on that spinal cord was how to involve the Grabber and bring him back from the dead in a frightening way and in the lives of these kids. So it took a lot of time and effort and discussion to figure out how we were going to do that.”
THR asked if a third film could be on the way to make a Black Phone trilogy, and Derrickson didn’t rule it out, though he said, “I haven’t spent any time thinking about a third movie. I think it’s important not to do that.”
He continued, “Once you’re trying to plot out sequels and expand into a cinematic universe, you’re inevitably, by definition, limiting story possibilities. So I just haven’t thought about it. I really wanted to make this movie, and my goal was to make a better movie than the first one. So I haven’t considered what the franchise could be, and it’s just not something that’s really entered my mind yet.”
Title:Black Phone 2 Describe This Movie Using One Meatballs Quote: CAMP MOHAWK COUNSELORS: “We are the C.I.T.s, so pity us.“ Brief Plot Synopsis: Rating Using Random Objects Relevant To The Film: 1.5 Henry Rollins out of 5.
Credit: Wikipedia
Tagline: “Dead is just a word.” Better Tagline: “So is ‘cash grab.’ Wait, that’s two.” Not So Brief Plot Synopsis: Did you miss the Grabber (Ethan Hawke)? Well, he’s back, which is good news for you, but bad for Finney Blake (Mason Thames), who’s still dealing with the trauma of being held captive by the Grabber before killing him. Meanwhile, nightmares about three murdered little boys plague his sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw). The murders appear linked to a mountain camp where their mother was a counselor, so of course Finney, Gwen, and Ernesto (Miguel Mora), the little brother of Finney’s murdered friend Robin, apply for counselor-in-training jobs to get to the bottom of everything.
“Critical” Analysis: If you were puzzled by the news that 2021’s The Black Phone was getting a sequel, you’re not alone. Ethan Hawke’s “Grabber” appeared well and truly dead at the end of that movie (spoiler!), but some forces are greater than death. Specifically, $161 million global box office on an $18 million dollar budget. It’s a miracle.
Set four years after the events of the first movie, Black Phone 2 uses a concept from original story author Joe Hill as inspiration. Naturally, it has to pivot to accommodate pesky things like the death of its antagonist. Director Scott Derrickson and co-writer C. Scott Cargill evidently felt the best way to accomplish this was a mashup of the summer (well, winter) camp slasher vibes of Friday the 13th with the somnambulant escapades of A Nightmare on Elm Street. The results are less than the sum of those parts.
One thing that does work is the shifting of the focus to Gwen. It’s her dreams that move the plot, giving McGraw the lion’s share of the dramatic work, and she’s mostly up to the task. It’s just too bad her range of emotion isn’t in service of a better movie. Same goes for Demián Bichir, playing Armando, the owner/manager of the camp. Bichir brings some much-needed gravitas, something of a tall order when trying to have serious conversations about a dream killer.
A good deal of what made The Black Phone work was its grounding in the real world. The paranormal elements were integral to the plot, but didn’t overwhelm it (and Derrickson really captured those late ’70s earth tones). Here, the Grabber is presented as Freddy Krueger without any antecedent or explanation until well into the movie, and only thanks to the flimsiest of horror tropes.
Why the long face, buddy? Credit: Universal Pictures
The pacing is also a problem. The original was somewhat ponderous as well, but at least it moved with purpose. Black Phone 2 too often bogs down in expository dialogue or rubbing our noses in scenes of kids getting hacked up. There’s an almost temporal distortion about the first hour, where Gwen’s sleepwalking is at the fore and not a lot happens until events contrive to get our trio to the camp.
Black Phone 2 is not without humor, though. Once the kids get there, this mostly comes from the interaction between the often foul-mouthed Gwen and Barb (Maev Beaty ), one of the Christian camp’s staff. Armando’s niece Mustang (Arianna Rivas) also earns extra credit for pointing out to Barb that cowering in fear from threats isn’t “true Christian behavior.”
As for Hawke, he’s top-billed, but it’s hard to shake the impression there’s some “Pedro Pascal in The Mandalorian” deception going on. That’s his voice as the Grabber, but aside from a few close-ups, anyone could be behind that mask.
None of the probably matters. The original Black Phone was a huge hit, and its sequel lands in theaters two weeks before Halloween. That’ll probably be enough to overcome that Black Phone 2 magnifies many of the originals movie’s negatives without offering much more beyond that than pastiche.
At one point in Black Phone 2, the Grabber, the villain played so memorably by Ethan Hawke, reunites with his potential victim from the first film. “Did you think our story was over, Finny?” the demonic masked figure asks tauntingly.
It seems a reasonable question, since the Grabber died at the end of the previous film, dispatched by Finn (Mason Thames). But we’re talking about the movie business, after all, and the death of the principal villain proves no impediment to making a sequel if the original film was profitable enough — which, with a worldwide gross of $160 million, it certainly was. Fortunately, this follow-up arriving four years later is no mere cash grab, but rather an even more stylistically and thematically ambitious effort that mostly succeeds in its aspirations.
Black Phone 2
The Bottom Line
It’s a grabber.
Release date: Friday, Oct. 17 Cast: Ethan Hawke, Mason Thames, Madeleine McGraw, Demian Bichir, Miguel Mora, Jeremy Davies, Arianna Rivas Director: Scott Derrickson Screenwriters: Scott Derrickson, C. Robert Cargill
Rated R,
1 hour 54 minutes
When we’re reintroduced to Finn, it’s clear that he’s still suffering from trauma over his past ordeal. He violently lashes out at a fellow student and spends many of his waking hours in a marijuana-induced haze. It’s no wonder, considering what he went through, and it seems perfectly understandable that he answers randomly ringing payphones by telling the callers, “Sorry, but I can’t help you.” (If you don’t get the reference, you obviously haven’t seen the first film.)
Of course, escaping from the past isn’t so easy when his younger sister, Gwen (Madeleine McGraw), begins suffering from horrible dreams in which she channels not only their late mother (Anna Lore), who died by suicide, but also three young boys who we eventually learn were murdered by the Grabber in his early killing days and whose bodies have gone undiscovered. The visions ultimately lead her and Finn to Alpine Lake, a Christian camp located in the Rocky Mountains, where they naturally get stranded during a fierce blizzard.
It turns out that death hasn’t really slowed down the Grabber, who seems intent on getting revenge against Finn even from the depths of Hell. Much like Freddy Krueger, he’s able to wreak psychic and physical violence on people from within their dreams, making Gwen particularly vulnerable to him.
Director Scott Derrickson and his co-screenwriter Robert Cargill seem to know that their convoluted storyline is a lot of hooey, but they lean into it so emphatically that we just go with it. They do manage to invest the horrific proceedings with genuine emotion in their depiction of the tortured family dynamics between the two siblings and their father (Jeremy Davies, repeating his role). And they inject interesting religious themes in their treatment of Christianity, the more repressive aspects of which are demonstrated by a pair of officious husband-and-wife camp employees (Graham Abbey, Maev Beaty).
Every horror film needs a great villain, and this burgeoning franchise definitely has one with the Grabber. Largely hidden behind a series of genuinely scary, demonic-looking masks, Hawke delivers one for the ages, using his cigarette-ravaged, raspy voice to chilling effect in a virtuosic, mostly voice portrayal that seems destined for future installments.
Thames and McGraw, repeating their roles, are absolutely terrific as the traumatized teens willing to do battle with evil, and there are sterling supporting turns from Demián Bichir as the camp’s sympathetic owner and Arianna Rivas (A Working Man) as his spunky niece. In an example of stunt casting that actually works, Miguel Mora, who played one of the Grabber’s victims in the first film, now plays the victim’s brother, who forms a romantic connection with Gwen.
Derrickson is no stranger to the horror genre, having helmed not only the first Black Phone but also such films as Sinister and The Exorcism of Emily Rose. He exerts stylistic mastery over the material, using both Super 8 and Super 16 film for the nightmarish sequences to truly eerie effect. Not to mention the unsettling score by Atticus Derrickson, his son, that will do nothing to lower your blood pressure.
There are times when Black Phone 2 wears its stylistic influences — including not only the Nightmare on Elm Street films but many other horror movies from the ‘80s — too heavily on its sleeve. But the extensive borrowings are easily forgiven when the set pieces are delivered with the sort of panache that they are here.
Black Phone 2 reviews are beginning to arrive, with the film looking to promise a worthy sequel to the 2021 horror movie of the same name.
What are the Black Phone 2 reviews saying?
Over on Rotten Tomatoes, Black Phone 2 is currently sitting at an 80-81% rating, which matches the 2021’s original score. Black Phone 2 has 25 reviews as of now, most of which are positive and praising of the film’s style and general step up from the original.
Rogert Ebert’s Brian Tallerico said the film is a “tick too long,” but is “at its best when it leans into surreal nightmare logic, but this weird movie works its fear factor in unexpected, creative ways.” Slant Magazine’s Rocco T. Thompson praised director Scott Derrickson, saying he “collapses dreams, reality, past, and present sidelong into a singular cinematic haunted space.”
Based on characters created by Joe Hill, the script for Black Phone 2 comes from Derrickson & C. Robert Cargill. The cast further includes Demián Bichir, Arianna Rivas, Miguel Mora, Jeremy Davies, Maev Beaty, and Graham Abbey. Derrickson, Cargill, and Jason Blum produce the movie, while Ryan Turek, Adam Hendricks, Daniel Bekerman, and Jason Blumenfeld serve as executive producers.
Blumhouse is celebrating its 15th anniversary this year, and today brings a new book that goes behind the scenes of the horror studio‘s meteoric and entertainingly gory rise.
Its full title is Horror’s New Wave: 15 Years of Blumhouse, and it’s full of details about its biggest hits (Five Nights at Freddy’s, Get Out, M3GAN) and hitmakers (James Wan, M. Night Shyamalan, Mike Flanagan), styled in part as an oral history with photos, storyboards, and other insider-y mementos.
io9 has an exclusive excerpt to share from the book’s section on found footage—specificially its importance in 2012’s Sinister, directed by Scott Derrickson and co-written by Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill. It stars Ethan Hawke as a struggling author who decides he’ll find inspiration by moving his family into a house with a tragic past. In the attic, he discovers a stash of old movies that reveal the crime is actually part of a recurring terror that he’s now nightmarishly entangled with.
The movie’s success helped cement Blumhouse as a horror force to be reckoned with, and Sinister added on to its box-office receipts with an even rarer prize: becoming a cult classic.
THE ORIGIN OF BLUMHOUSE IS inexorably tied to the genre of found-footage horror. The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity kicked off a mad dash in Hollywood to replicate the affordable model of unknown actors in home movies or security camera footage. Movies like Cloverfield, District 9, and Chronicle followed Paranormal Activity and brought the found-footage aesthetic to disaster films and science fiction.
But horror is its home, and as Blumhouse grew, the company continued to experiment in the genre. Paranormal Activity was followed by six sequels during the subsequent decade, and legendary director Barry Levinson even tried his hand at found footage with the Blumhouse film The Bay, which was released in 2012. But the found-footage movie that really catapulted Blumhouse to the next level of success was a work that dramatizes what it would be like to be the unlucky soul who finds a record of someone’s gruesome death.
The origin story of Sinister began with a poker game. The movie was a Vegas gamble for both director Scott Derrickson and co-writer C. Robert Cargill. Derrickson had hit the director A-list after the success of The Exorcism of Emily Rose, but his big-money reboot of The Day the Earth Stood Still stumbled at the box office. Cargill was attempting to launch a screenwriting career after years as a film critic for Ain’t It Cool News and had spent years refining a pitch for what would become Sinister.
A chance meeting with Derrickson at a poker tournament in Las Vegas (they’d been friends for a while, but it took a few stiff drinks at the card table to get Cargill to pitch the story) set them off on the road to creating what would be dubbed the “scariest movie of all time” in a scientific study conducted by Broadband Choices in 2020, and again in 2022, when the test was repeated.
In a sense, Sinister is something close to a meta-narrative, a movie “about watching horror films,” as Derrickson says. Ellison is compelled, as we are as viewers, to bear witness to something awful, something unnatural, and something with the potential to psychically wound the audience. Sinister is not a found footage film, but rather a film about the relationship between the audience and graphic horror images. Much like the 1998 Japanese horror film Ringu (and its American remake, The Ring), the image medium itself, Super 8 film in this case, contains a deadly evil. The demon Bughuul literally lives inside the home movies Ellison discovers and it is released only because of his unending, self-interested curiosity.
Not long after Vegas, Derrickson and Cargill took their pitch to various film companies, hoping to get a few meetings. They nabbed one with producer Roy Lee. The other was with Jason Blum. Both producers offered to buy the film, and a bidding war began. What was originally pitched as a $1 million micro-budget horror film became a $3 million movie. Derrickson and Cargill weighed both offers, but they simply liked what Blum had to say about the creative behind the movie better and went with him.
“I thought The Exorcism of Emily Rose was a great movie,” Blum said. “And I thought a studio would just look at The Day the Earth Stood Still and say, ’Well, maybe Scott can’t do this.’ I think we’ve always picked directors differently than studios, because we always look at their whole body of work.”
Part of Sinister’s powerful impact was because of how personal it was for Derrickson. The parallels between Ellison’s career and where Derrickson’s career was at in 2012 are clear. “I really wrote the worst version of myself,” Derrickson says. “Going all the way down that rabbit hole and into the abyss.”
Sinister is, in many ways, about obsession and the all-consuming desire for attention, approval, and fame. Ellison can’t stop watching these grisly home movies, because he believes there’s some reward for the trauma of watching real people be brutally murdered. He will subject himself to any indignity to recapture the glory he once knew. That desperation is familiar to anyone who’s toiled in the mines of the entertainment movie business for long enough.
There’s a poignancy to having been on top and desperately wanting to get back there; it’s the nostalgia for what once was and may never be again. Unlike Ellison, who gets murdered by his daughter at the end of Sinister, Derrickson would go on to reach even greater heights, directing the smash hit Doctor Strange for Marvel Studios in 2016. But none of that would have been possible without Sinister.
SCOTT DERRICKSON, co-writer and director: In horror, you’ve got such heightened stakes and heightened threats. And if you don’t feel tremendous empathy for the victims in a horror film, then the film is not working. Horror taps into the unspoken and sometimes unspeakable fear that we feel as human beings; it’s the unspoken and unspeakable horror that we have to reckon with in the world. And the horror film experience is itself a reckoning with that horror. It’s a reckoning with fear.
I think young people are drawn to horror, in particular, because fear is such a powerful emotion and because they have to feel so much of it being young. Wes Craven talked about how a horror film doesn’t create fear. It releases it. And I believe that. I think any time that you’re getting scared in a movie, what you’re feeling is not something that’s being put into you. What you’re feeling is something that’s already in you that’s coming out. It’s being released.
THE HANGING TREE
One of the most arresting images in the entire film is the death of the most recent occupants of the Oswalts’ home: the Stevenson family. They’re hanged, side by side, from a large tree in the yard. Sinister opens with home movie footage of this horrific murder, which was so indelible and unforgettable that the term almost inspired the title of the movie.
C. ROBERT CARGILL, co-writer: When it was a pitch in my head, it was called “Super 8.” And of course, J. J. [Abrams] made his movie, and I’m, like, Well, I can’t call it that. And then, [Scott Derrickson and I] called it Home Movies while we were writing it. And then another horror movie was coming out before Sinister that was going to be called Home Movies. Well, we [couldn’t] call it that 1759295467. Turns out nobody remembers that movie; you know, barely anyone saw it.
And so, while we were in pre-production, I was, like, “What about Found Footage? Why don’t we just call it Found Footage? It’s great. That’s the title.” And so we shot it as Found Footage.
SCOTT DERRICKSON, co-writer and director: Everybody was making found-footage movies [in 2012]. And this is a movie about the guy who finds the footage. Nobody had done that before, you know—made a movie about a guy who finds this scary material to watch. And the movie is really about watching horror films, in a lot of ways. So, we called it Found Footage. That was the running title for a while.
C. ROBERT CARGILL: And then, while we were in post-[production], Jason says, “Do you think that’s a little on the nose? It’s a little inside baseball.” Like film critics know what found footage is. Filmmakers know about found footage. But does the average person at home know what found footage is? And we were, like, “Probably not.” I mean, now they do, of course. It would go on to become a real phenomenon of the subgenre. But at the time, it wasn’t. So, we just started throwing names back and forth. And I remember sending a list of truly terrible names, like The Hanging Tree, The House with the Hanging Tree. Maybe we would do something with the tree, as in The House with the Sinister Tree. And Scott just emailed back, going, “What about just Sinister? We just call it Sinister.” And I was, like, “We could . . . oh, that sounds good.” Jason said, “I like Sinister.” He didn’t tell us that Insidious was coming out and that we would spend the rest of our life getting confused with Insidious. But that was the title that stuck.
THE MONSTER
C. ROBERT CARGILL, co-writer: In the script, Bughuul was written as literally a messed-up Willy Wonka. They started playing around with a ratty trench coat. Ratty capes. A top hat. We saw that face and then saw it in the top hat and then the trench coat, and it just didn’t work. It wasn’t scary.
So, Scott went on Flickr, one of those sites where people would post their art looking for some inspiration. He searched for the word horror on Flickr, and he got a whole bunch of images: he sent about a dozen, and I narrowed it down to five that I liked, and then Scott selected the final image of [what we know now as] Bughuul and it was perfect. He reached out to the artist, and he said, “We’d like to use this. We’ll pay you five hundred bucks to license this piece of art.” And they said, “Great.” So, they have a credit in the movie for inspiring the design.
And then we handed it over to our art team, and they did a bunch of sketches. And they did a version without the top hat, without the Willy Wonka accoutrements, and it was scary as hell. The first time they put our actor in the mask, Jason went into the trailer and freaked out, and left immediately. He went, “Nope, nope, not going back in there.”
Ironically, the image I had in my head of Bughuul was basically The Babadook [which came out two years after Sinister]. When I saw The Babadook, I’m, like, “Oh, that’s my Mr. Boogie.”
ELLISON OSWALT’S MURDER BOX
The films Ellison finds in his house had to be shot on film stock that was accurate to when they were meant to have been made. All those gruesome snuff films were shot before the main production began, on Super 8 cameras. Super 8 was a Kodak film stock used primarily for home movies during the mid-20th century. The cameras were incredibly loud when rolling, so most Super 8 film stock did not have a magnetic strip for recording audio. Therefore, most Super 8 films are silent, which is why Pool Party ’66, BBQ ’79, Lawn Work ’86, Sleepy Time ’98, and Family Hanging Out ’11 have no sound. The silence adds an otherworldly, spooky quality to the images on screen. It leaves the horrific screams of the families to your imagination.
More often than not, horror sequels are weak imitations of the original, a cheap, quick, cash grab that hits the same beats in a slightly different way. Black Phone 2 is not that. It’s a sequel that changes and elevates the original in ways you’d never expect. You learn more about the world, the characters, the killer, and by the end, it’s almost as if the original was merely a table setting for the horrors of its follow-up.
Once again directed by Scott Derrickson, based on a script by him and C. Robert Cargill, Black Phone 2 picks up four years after the original. In that film, Finney (Mason Thames) was kidnapped by The Grabber (Ethan Hawke), whom he eventually killed with the help of the ghosts of The Grabber’s other victims, and the paranormal abilities of his little sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw). Gwen’s bravery and plucky personality were highlights of that movie, but she was largely relegated to the sidelines. Here, not only do we get more of her, Black Phone 2 is basically her movie, and it’s better off for it.
The original film also killed The Grabber pretty definitively, so when Gwen starts dreaming about an old set of murders, and Finney starts getting phone calls from him, things instantly change. They’re no longer dealing with a real-life person in their neighborhood—it’s now something scarier, and with a history that goes back decades.
Black Phone 2 has a lot to establish at the start, and, for that reason, it takes a while to get going. We spend time with Finney and Gwen in their high school, which is more violent, but also more romantic. We see what the events of the first movie have done to them and the world around them. There’s also the whole new story, which centers on a winter camp that Gwen keeps dreaming of. The film has to clearly establish why this brother and sister would willingly go to this camp, knowing the horror that might await. Eventually, there’s a very good hook, but that then requires even more exposition to flesh out.
Once Black Phone 2 does get to the camp, though, everything changes. Not just in the story, but in the nature of the film itself. The first Black Phone was largely a supernatural thriller where we chewed at our fingernails hoping Finney and the ghosts could outsmart The Grabber. Now, The Grabber is dead, so his contacting the siblings constitutes a whole new brand of horror. And when you filter that through Gwen’s dreams, there are more than a few shades of Freddy Krueger along the way.
Beyond that, the film borrows quite liberally (but never distractingly) from other classic horror films of the 1970s and 1980s. The snowy setting brings to mind The Shining; that it’s a camp near a lake brings to mind Friday the 13th. (In addition to Nightmare on Elm Street, there are other winks and nods throughout.) This all works in tandem to make Black Phone 2’s transformation from a thriller like the original into a more of a slasher movie feel seamless. It works beautifully, and lets the gore start flowing in ways that go well beyond the original film.
Most importantly, the best thing about Black Phone 2 is Finney and Gwen. Their relationship was the best part of the original, and here they’re together for the entire film. Thames is excellent as the hardened Finney, a boy completely changed by everything he’s gone through. But the true star is McGraw, whose potty-mouthed, religious-leaning dream warrior is funny, heartbreaking, heroic, and delightful all at once. Every time we’re with either of them (or preferably both), the film shines that much brighter. Throw in Demián Bichir as the head of the camp, Jeremy Davies returning as the father, and the original film’s star Miguel Mora—who played the kick-ass Robin in that film and returns here as his brother Ernesto—and you’ve got more than enough to bring Black Phone 2 to entirely new levels.
And it does go to all new levels. Without spoiling too much, Black Phone 2 not only evolves the nature of the franchise, but it also adds more mythology and depth to it. We learn things here that recontextualize everything we saw in the original, which yes, largely has to do with how and why The Grabber became so incredibly evil. In that aim, Ethan Hawke is as terrifying as ever, even as we mostly see him in the mask.
Black Phone 2 may take a while to get going, but its lead performances, primary relationship, and twists make it well worth the trip. It’s filled with great horror moments, a few laughs, and even a nice shot of emotion to tie everything together. The first film was certainly solid, but this one is excellent. The rare sequel that outshines its predecessor.
Black Phone 2 had its world premiere at Fantastic Fest 2025 and opens everywhere on October 17.
At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul | Trailer 1964 #movie
In 1964, Brazilian director, co-writer, and star José Mojica Marins unleashed his singular creation—Coffin Joe—into the world of horror cinema. At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul kicked off a film series built around the character, a murderous undertaker who’s the most monstrously awful guy you’ll ever meet, while also being someone you simply can’t take your eyes off whenever he’s onscreen. Stream on Shudder.
