‘The Black Phone 2’ Review: A Horror Sequel Mostly Done Right

From the outside looking in, horror sequels like “The Black Phone 2” probably look easy. You just take the monster from the first movie and make them kill someone else, right? Wrong. Or at least, there’s a lot more to it.

Some horror franchises follow the villain, which means you need to introduce new heroes and settings and storylines with every film. You also have to raise the stakes with that villain, gradually adding to their backstory and modus operandi, making sure they never kill anyone the same way twice. Eventually the rules of the series are codified, and the audience feels safe. We understand the villain well enough that we think we, too, could defeat them. Except they keep coming back, which means every sequel’s ending is a lie and the stories lack closure. After a while the villain becomes so familiar they become the de facto protagonist, which has its problems too. Eventually you’re tempted to change them as well, just for novelty’s sake. Most villain-based horror series, despite their best intentions, lose track of what made them scary in the first place.

It’s less common, but some horror franchises follow the heroes instead, and that’s also hard to pull off. Your main characters can only fight so many serial killers or vampires (or whatever) before it becomes a daily routine. It stops being scary, to them or the audience. You reach the point where the only way to up the stakes is to kill the main characters, and then you’re stuck with the villain, and all the villain-based horror franchise problems.

The fundamental issue, of course, is that familiarity isn’t scary, so telling the same scary story over and over again doesn’t usually work out. Eventually almost every horror franchise tinkers with the premise so much it breaks, and the audience loses interest. So they have to either give up entirely or reboot the series and start from scratch.

Which brings us back to “The Black Phone 2,” a horror sequel that has it both ways. Scott Derrickson’s film brings back the villain, The Grabber, who died in the first movie. He also brings back the heroes, who already killed the bad guy. As a horror filmmaker, Derrickson is playing with a stacked deck, and he’s the one who stacked it. Against himself.

So it’s a miracle that “The Black Phone 2” works, and is scary as hell, for about an hour. Derrickson — with his frequent collaborator and co-writer C. Robert Cargill — transforms the heroes of “The Black Phone” into newly-troubled characters, and transforms the The Grabber into a terrifying, newly-supernatural villain. It is a textbook example of a horror sequel done right. For about an hour. Then it’s not.

“The Black Phone,” for those who need a primer, starred Mason Thames as Finney, a child kidnapped by a serial killer called The Grabber, played by Ethan Hawke, in the late 1970s. Finney was imprisoned in a basement with a broken telephone, which kept ringing anyway. On the other end of the line Finney could hear the ghosts of The Grabber’s previous victims, who needed his help to put their souls to rest, and who helped Finney develop the skills he needed to save his own life. Meanwhile, his also-psychic sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) tried to track him down by following the clues in her dreams.

Now it’s been several years since Finney and Gwen defeated The Grabber. They’re both in high school, and they’re both kinda messed up. Finney is withdrawn and smokes pot to escape his troubles. Gwen is an outcast who worries that her dreams — the same dreams which drove her mother to take her own life — are driving her insane. Finney still gets phone calls from ghosts, but he ignores them.

Finney, Gwen and Gwen’s kinda-sorta boyfriend Ernesto (Miguel Mora) become counselors at Camp Alpine Lake, a Christian winter retreat where their mother worked as a teenager, and where three boys mysteriously went missing. Those boys, it turns out, were early victims of The Grabber. He’s haunting the camp, and also Gwen’s nightmares. They’ll have to solve the mystery of the missing children to stop The Grabber from killing again, from beyond the grave.

So for those keeping track, “The Black Phone 2” is a horror sequel set at a camp where the villain kills you in your dreams. If you’re going to engineer a new horror franchise, you might as well take your inspiration from the enduring ones. Derrickson and Cargill aren’t content to just lift ideas from “Friday the 13th” and “A Nightmare on Elm Street” either. There’s also a ton of new backstory about Finney and Gwen’s mother, which ties directly into The Grabber’s mythology, and that also gives the movie a big “Scream” vibe — not the meta part, just the soap opera part.

Even though we can recognize all the ingredients of “The Black Phone 2,” the film mixes and boils them down into a thick, hearty stew. Derrickson and Cargill took Joe Hill’s original short story and now they’re running away with it. Finney and Gwen wrestle with the tragedies of “The Black Phone” in realistic ways, and they’re also warm together. They’re funny kids. They’re just well-written, interesting people. They’ve been through a horror movie already and they still come across as realistic characters. That’s a difficult feat.

It even makes sense to bring back The Grabber, since “The Black Phone” already confirmed the supernatural is real, and the dead still communicate with the living. Scott Derrickson films Gwen’s dreams in soft, quiet 8mm film stock, evoking then-contemporary home movies and while still evoking something cinematically ancient. Those dream sequences are staged and edited with a spot-on understanding of the ethereal. It’s a horror sequel which, for an hour, feels extremely unknown.

But after the halfway point “The Black Phone 2” gives up on itself, devolving into a series of tedious exposition dumps and elaborate, sometimes head-scratching rules about where The Grabber gets his new powers and how to defeat him. We also learn so much about Finney and Gwen’s mother that “The Black Phone 2” falls into another sequel trap, where everything that ever happened becomes, in retrospect, preordained. And if it’s preordained, it’s not unknowable, and it’s a lot less scary.

Also, The Grabber spends quite a bit of the second half on magic ice skates made of actual ice which, you know, is just silly.

“The Black Phone 2” starts so strong that even the clunky, misguided second half can’t sink it. It’s a terrifying sequel, in many ways scarier than the first, until it acts like what the audience really cared about is elaborate rules and reveals, as opposed to being scared. It’s one of the great horror sequels, for about an hour. Then it’s a cautionary tale about how not to make a horror sequel, for about an hour. Which shows you, again, just how hard it is to build a horror franchise. You can prove you know how to do everything right and still get stuck in the pitfalls.