Nightmare on Sequel Street

Why must horror sequels so often descend into cliché and be derivative of other franchises? Black Phone 2 may make oodles of money, but it largely omits what made the first instalment gripping.

Based on an interesting short story by Joe Hill, Stephen King’s elder son and the author of the new doorstopper King Sorrow, the original Black Phone was powerful almost from beginning to end. Its atmospheric first half hour pulled us into a dusky Denver suburb in 1978 where people lived in fear of a kid-snatching sicko aptly called the Grabber. Mason Thames was convincing as a boy, Finn, who suffered bullying at school and the abuses of an alcoholic dad, yet found solace in his relationship with his preternaturally alert sister Gwen, played by Madeleine McGraw, until the monster forced Finn into a van and spirited him off to a dirty, soundproofed basement. In this hellish situation, Finn had to keep his wits about him and figure out how to escape before the Grabber did to him what he had done to untold numbers of other boys. A supernatural element made for a less conventional kind of thriller: the eponymous phone on the grimy wall, otherwise useless, enabled Finn to talk to the Grabber’s other victims, never mind that they were dead — including a friend with tricks to impart about fighting. At the climax, Finn put those methods to deadly use.

Black Phone 2 ★★ (2/5 stars)
Directed by: Scott Derrickson
Written by: Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill
Starring: Mason Thames, Madeleine McGraw, Jeremy Davies, Ethan Hawke
Running time: 114 mins

We catch up with Finn and Gwen in Black Phone 2 a few years after Finn’s ordeal. Duran Duran have just released a new album, Gwen has a romantic interest in the form of a boy named Ernesto — the brother of the kid who taught Finn how to fight — and the two siblings’ dad has mostly mended his ways and become the sober father they pined for. Gwen’s faith is as strong as in the original outing, so strong that she decides to head off to a Christian youth camp in the snowy wilds of Colorado, in the company of Finn and Ernesto. But, even though Finn made short work of him last time and there was no question whatsoever of his having survived, the Grabber is not done menacing kids. Here the villain is a direct descendant of Freddy Krueger, invading their dreams, turning their waking lives into a nightmare unless they can get the better of him.

The first Black Phone dealt in gritty social reality. Its 1978 setting placed its events directly before a notorious real case: the May 25, 1979, disappearance of Etan Patz, the six-year-old whose mom watched from a SoHo window as he walked to a corner by himself on his way to a bus stop, turned the corner, and was never seen alive again. Patz turned up on milk cartons; cops stopped little blond boys walking with their moms on the street to ask a few questions. It was hard to watch the 2021 Black Phone without thinking of real-life abductions. Indeed, the original movie’s Finn, though older, bore a resemblance to Patz. The film was powerful because it tapped into fears as raw in the late 1970s as now.

In Black Phone 2, though, the theme of abduction is gone, and there is little here that we have not seen done to death in one Nightmare on Elm Street sequel after another. The Grabber’s coming for you, and watch out for phones in the middle of nowhere that ring as you walk past. He may materialize right outside the booth, as abruptly as Freddy. The supernatural element — the villain’s ability to invade minds, altering and destroying the tissue of reality — almost wholly replaces the social verisimilitude of the original.

Black Phone 2 is loud, overwrought, and empty at its core. As a love interest for Gwen, Ernesto is woefully underdeveloped, given just a few lines, while the father — a characteristically distinguished Jeremy Davies — gets little time. The film is not even especially interested in the subtext of a religious camp that bilks its young charges, or rather their parents, without providing much in the way of moral and spiritual guidance. Indeed, the scenes set at the snowbound youth camp are baffling in their austerity. There don’t appear to be any kids besides Finn, Gwen, and Ernesto, raising the question how the place stays open with so few enrollees. Maybe it is a dream. Cheap production. Or lazy screenwriting.

It is especially sad that this sequel turned out the way it did, because Joe Hill is a talented writer with a lot of promise. Scott Derrickson’s film has turned his interesting material into derivative genre fodder. In the inevitable Black Phone 3, is it too much to ask that we might get some real psychological insight as Finn enters young adulthood wracked with PTSD and survivor’s guilt? The question of how to live in the world after having endured what, for most people, constitutes unimaginable trauma is an issue as real, immediate, and relevant as anything that contemporary cinema can compel us to face. A real grabber.