For a Blumhouse horror movie sequel, perhaps the best thing that can be said about Black Phone 2 is that it is interesting -where so few movies like it are. Not every aspect of that is a success, and there are some real stretches where it does to try and justify itself, but its focus and presentation are distinct from that first movie -something that is important in any attempt to build a horror franchise. The first movie was based on a story by Joe Hill, very much in that mode of supernatural mixed with tangible horror that his father Stephen King is so known for. There is no source for director Scott Derrickson and his co-writer C. Robert Cargill on this film, and yet they still lean into that kind of a tone, but in their own way -such as bringing a much greater influence of slasher films into what was formerly a largely grounded piece.
Case in point, Ethan Hawke’s serial killer villain The Grabber was killed at the end of the prior movie -but leaping off of the presence of ghosts in the titular phone, Derrickson and Cargill found an excuse to bring him back in a supernatural way -one that transforms him from a vaguely Buffalo Bill kind of figure into Freddy Krueger. And it’s about as jarring as that sounds.
Yet there is some pretty firm grounding in this movie acknowledging the effects of the first. It has been a few years but Finney (Mason Thames) is still traumatized by his captivity at the hands of the Grabber before killing him and escaping. He has now become emotionally isolated and something of a school bully to the dismay of his clairvoyant little sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw). For her part, Gwen starts experiencing vivid dreams of terrible murders at the Christian Alpine Lake Camp in the Colorado Rockies, accompanied by a phone call from her deceased mother. Compelled by this and in spite of the dead winter, Gwen, Finney, and Ernesto (Miguel Mora) -a boy with a crush on Gwen- travel to the camp to seek answers about their mother and the murders, which are revealed to intersect with the Grabber -whose spirit is still haunting Finney.
This premise is so far removed from that of the first film, it almost feels like Derrickson came up with a snowbound Friday the 13th conceit and wrapped a sequel to The Black Phone around it as a matter of convenience. The presence of spirits was a significant part of the prior film but not to near the extent it is here, with a genuine apparition terrorizing people from an otherworldly realm. And it goes full Stranger Things in that regard, with characters being flailed around in apparent mid-air, wounds appearing on them. Like Freddy Krueger, the Grabber attacks in dreams and his effects manifest in the world of the living. Specifically on Gwen, who is his chief target this time around.
In concert with this film leaning harder into the supernatural, its lens of focus shifts that way as well, with Gwen becoming the protagonist of this story after a solid supporting turn in the last one. Though her storyline there wasn't particularly compelling, McGraw left a fairly strong impression and, a little older now, she takes to the added responsibilities and screen-time here rather well. Of note is the intensity of her emotional performance, and the terror of her manipulation by the Grabber that is eventually turned on its head as something more confident -the kind of thing that could set her up as a Scream Queen. The script isn't always there for her though in terms of fleshing out her personality, which largely just consists of being profanely confrontational with authority figures -in this case judgemental Christian camp employee Barbara (Maev Beaty), a thin stereotype of a character facilitating an equally thin sense of righteousness for Gwen.
Finney's portion of the plot is mostly concerned with his lingering trauma from the first film and being overprotective of his sister. But though the Grabber's machinations are ostensibly linked to him and taking revenge through one he cares about, Thames manages to fade into the background for portions of this film. His violence at school is never fully reckoned with, and though Derrickson stages a very good scene between the kids and their father (Jeremy Davies) that hinges on Thames's devastating expression of what he's been through, he still feels strangely like an afterthought -to the point that the Grabber in the climax while terrorizing everybody equally barely acknowledges the significance of his relationship to Finney.
In the role of a supernatural villain, the Grabber himself -though still menacing- feels diminished. He was never a terribly original character, but as this potentially unkillable monster with a twist connection to Finney and Gwen's family -as though to justify his terrorizing them- he's not particularly interesting. Blumhouse has been trying to cram him into a brand slasher-shaped hole through some of their other studio marketing and it has been wholly unconvincing. Hawke appears to think so too, his enthusiasm for this creep has evidently waned and he never appears without some variation of his mask on.
Derrickson's energy has not deteriorated though and he seems especially compelled by his aesthetics. An abandoned campground is creepy and isolating enough, setting it within a snowbound blizzard is even more claustrophobic and intense. The film takes its action out onto a frozen lake and a poorly placed phone booth rattled by heavy winds, and it builds up the very chilling atmosphere when there is a dampness and a coldness to every space these characters are being haunted in. Where so many choices in this movie are running intentionally in the opposite direction from the first to mixed results, this one is perhaps the most successful. The movie actually stands out a touch from other Blumhouse horrors because of it.
There are some pretty good scares in there too, at least on par with some of the better examples from Stranger Things. And Derrickson provides the film a very interesting visual character, where every dream sequence from Gwen's point of view is seen in more analogue terms, with a hazy grain over the film stock like in an old video tape -while everything outside of her perspective is in standard high definition. It's a great way of separating the worlds and evoking a kind of plane of memory. But this kind of creativity isn't matched in the narrative construction, and the means of its supernatural leaps by the script and shifting focus aren't very convincing. There are bits of exposition working overtime to sell these starkly different contexts from where the first movie was. At the same time, Black Phone 2 is quite interesting in several respects and a mark above typical horror sequels in being such a radical departure from the first. Just because the approach isn't quite successful here doesn't mean it is the wrong approach for other films to take.
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