Despite meeting his end in the first movie, the Grabber (Ethan Hawke) is back in The Black Phone 2. With the now supernatural boogeyman after Finney (Mason Thames) and Gwen (Madeleine McGraw), the stakes for the sequel are higher than ever, with the gruesome bloodshed pumped up as a result.
While speaking with SFX magazine, director Scott Derrickson explained that the sequel had to be more intense because the audience who watched the first movie had grown up.
“The reason I wanted to do a high school movie was that it has more interesting emotional stakes,” he said. “It requires a different tone than a middle school coming-of-age supernatural movie. You just invariably are going to need to be more violent and more aggressive and maybe more shocking, to escalate aspects of the movie beyond what the first movie did, because a good portion of the audience, the teenagers who grew up really loving The Black Phone, they’re older now. They’re the kids who paid to see Terrifier. So there’s certainly more intensity and more gore. We were rated R, and one of the things we were rated R for was gore. There’s no gore in the first movie at all.“
Derrickson continued, “The change that you go through between Middle School and High School may be one of the biggest, most dramatic changes you go through in your lifetime, and I was really interested in who these characters have become, having gone through something so extraordinary. I didn’t want to intensify the violence and horror to be more edgy. I was interested in being more mature, going deeper into the emotions of these characters and trying to make a movie that worked as a pair.“
The official synopsis for The Black Phone 2: “The Grabber (Hawke) seeks vengeance on Finn (Thames) from beyond the grave by menacing Finn’s younger sister, Gwen (McGraw). As Finn, now 17, struggles with life after his captivity, the headstrong 15-year-old Gwen begins receiving calls in her dreams from the black phone and seeing disturbing visions of three boys being stalked at a winter camp known as Alpine Lake. Determined to solve the mystery and end the torment for both her and her brother, Gwen persuades Finn to visit the camp during a winter storm. There, she uncovers a shattering intersection between The Grabber and her own family’s history. Together, she and Finn must confront a killer who has grown more powerful in death and more significant to them than either could imagine.“
Following its premiere at Fantastic Fest last month, the sequel has garnered strong praise, with many saying it achieves the rare feat of outshining the first movie. Of course, we know that these types of first reactions usually skew positive, but I’ve got my fingers crossed that the sequel will live up to the hype. The Black Phone 2 will hit theaters on October 17.
