The Grabber on ice!
My abiding fear of Black Phone 2 was that, ensnared by Blumhouse’s McHorror philosophy, the dark, beautiful completeness of The Black Phone would be shattered into a thousand franchisable pieces, desecrating something wonderful in pursuit of a quick buck. And while the sequel does do a little genre remodelling (akin to Fast and Furious‘ transition from street racing to action spy caper) it doesn’t just *69 the audience to pick up the phone again, it yanks the whole switchboard off the wall and rewires its own mythology to deliver a genuinely satisfying and, at times, terrifying sequel.
Four years after Finney Blake (Mason Thames) killed the Grabber and escaped his basement lair, the scars of the experience haven’t really healed. His sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw), whose psychic flashes were instrumental in Finney’s escape, is still haunted by dreams; not metaphorically but literally haunted. Drawn by a call from her dead mother to investigate a series of murders at Alpine Lake, a remote mountain Bible camp, where their mother once worked and The Grabber may have preyed on the pious.
Scott Derrickson directs again, reuniting with co-writer C Robert Cargill, and again that partnership and vision seems to be enough of a creative crucifix to ward off Jason Blum’s tendency to make things suck. The central gimmick of a telephone connection to the dead remains, but it’s expanded through knowing homages to Friday the 13th (in the camp setting) and A Nightmare on Elm Street, particularly Dream Warriors, for, well, almost everything else. But Derrickson filters the 80s horror tropes through a lens of spiritual trauma and a surprise use of Randy Meeks’ rules for horror movies, by dipping not into the sequel rules but jumping straight to two of the trilogy rules: a killer who’s superhuman, and the past will come back to bite you in the ass. The result is something queasier, occasionally stranger, and more darkly fantastical than the first film. The horror here doesn’t lurk in a basement, nor quite in dreams, instead forcing open a crack in the icy walls between so The Grabber’s malign influence can make itself felt in both the world of the living and the world of the dead.
The returning leads do a lot of the heavy lifting here, and the film benefits from the fact that neither Mason Thames nor Madeleine McGraw have lost the raw edges that made their performances so affecting the first time around. Thames gives Finney a bruised, closed-off quality, subtly conveying the survivor’s burden without tipping into melodramatic angst. McGraw, meanwhile, continues to walk the tricky line between vulnerable and ferocious, her performance sharpened by the film’s darker spiritual turn. They’re bolstered by the addition of Miguel Mora’s Ernesto, brother of his character Robin who was killed in the first film and tentative love interest to Gwen. Jeremy Davies gets a slightly expanded role as their father, starting to piece his life back together but still broken by the tragedies that plague his family but Cargill and Derrickson save their slyest character work for the denizens of the storm-isolated Alpine Lake camp. There’s a slyness in dividing the camp’s staff between a pair of sanctimonious, scripture-quoting performative Christians, with Maev Beatty especially channelling that white evangelical hypocrisy, while Demián Bichir’s Armando, the supervisor of Alpine Lake, and his niece Mustang (Arianna Rivas) offer a more beneficent example of Christian morality. But of course, it’s Ethan Hawke the audience came to see again, and the film is smart enough to let his presence haunt rather than dominate proceedings.
His lack of initial physical presence doesn’t lessen his threat, but it perverts it into something more insidious and difficult to protect against. The physical manifestations of dream injuries in the real world have always been a favourite trope of Freddy Krueger, but Derrickson’s cover version here is done with a kinetic savagery that Wes Craven could only have dreamed of. The decision to so clearly delineate the waking world from the psychically charged dream world by judicious use of Super-8 footage is a devilish conceit, at once paying homage to the inspirational eighties horrors that course through Black Phone 2‘s veins while giving the film a visual identity all of its own.
What Derrickson, Cargill and the cast understand, and why Black Phone 2 ultimately succeeds in avoiding sequelitis, is that it can’t just be about returning characters or escalating kills. Black Phone 2 is about the aftermath; the survivors, the scars, and the way evil seeps into the groundwater of people’s lives and keeps poisoning new crops; less about being grabbed, and more about never quite letting go. Hawke’s Grabber remains massively unnerving, though his status as an enduring horror icon still hangs in the balance. One more film ought to do it, but one more film may also ruin it and, although it’s likely to fall on deaf Blumhouse ears, again I’m pleading for this to be it. The first film was magnificent. This slightly crowbarred sequel is miraculous in its success. A third outing may just see the ice give way and the whole franchise sink into the dark and icy depths of horror franchises that bled themselves dry.
