[COLUMN] Black Phone 2 Is a Conversation Across History | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece involves an in-depth discussion of the plot of Black Phone 2, including some significant revelations about where the plot goes. If you’re looking for a quick take on the film, it’s… interesting. Black Phone 2 doesn’t really work as a conventional slasher movie - it’s paced slowly, it is surprisingly lore heavy, and it struggles to build tension due to its central dramatic engine - but it is trying something significantly more ambitious than most slasher sequels. It has very clear goals and a very strong perspective, even if it doesn’t entirely cohere into a satisfying horror film on its own terms. It’s never phoning it in, at least. 

The Black Phone wouldn’t seem to lend itself to a larger horror franchise. The first film ended fairly definitively, with kidnapped child Finney Blake (Mason Thames) suffocating the serial child murderer known as “the Grabber” (Ethan Hawke) with his own belt. It seemed like a nice one-and-done high-concept horror film – a child abduction story with a supernatural twist that found Finney communicating with the ghosts of the Grabber’s previous victims via the eponymous black phone.

However, The Black Phone was a fairly sizable success, grossing $161m on a $16m budget and garnering strong reviews. With his distinctive demonic mask, the Grabber became something of a breakout character, added to Universal’s stable of horror icons appearing in this year’s Fanta commercial. The Grabber is apparently the brand ambassador for the “Fruit Twist” flavor. As such, it seemed inevitable that The Black Phone would get a sequel.

To the credit of Blumhouse and Universal, Black Phone 2 brings back most of the creative team behind The Black Phone: Scott Derrickson returns as director, reteaming with writer C. Robert Cargill for the script, and folding in the core cast from the original film including Thames and Hawke. As much as Black Phone 2 could feel like a cynical cash grab of a sequel handed off to a new creative team following the path of least resistance, the film is something much more interesting.

On the surface, Black Phone 2 is a love letter to 1980s slasher films. Jumping forward four years from the end of The Black Phone, from 1978 to 1982, the sequel riffs on many of the tropes and clichés of the genre. Dead pedophile the Grabber returns to stalk Finney and Gwen in their dreams, evoking A Nightmare on Elm Street. Finney and his sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) apply to work as counselors at a remote camp for children, recalling the premise of the early Friday the 13th films.

The camp is set in the remote Colorado mountains, recalling the setting of The Shining. Once they get to the camp, Finney and Gwen discover that it is snowed in. They are effectively trapped there with the support staff, recalling both The Shining from 1981 and The Thing from 1982. Indeed, the casting of Demián Bichir as the head of the camp, Armando, greeting the new arrivals and guiding them through the snow to shelter, evokes The Hateful Eight, an extended homage to The Thing.

There is a conscious effort in Black Phone 2 to situate the audience in the context of the time. Then again, Black Phone 2 is a movie about time. The eponymous supernatural telecommunication device is, after all, a mechanism that allows the past to speak to the present. Finney converses with the souls of dead children, who remain as young as they were when they were murdered. The Grabber’s legacy lives on, years after he stopped breathing.

Black Phone 2 opens with a telephone conversation spanning literal decades. Hope (Anna Lore), Finney and Gwen’s mother, picks up the camp’s payphone in 1959 and finds herself speaking to her future daughter in 1982. The pair converse with each other, although Derrickson and Cargill make the smart choice to separate the two halves of the conversation. At the start of the film, the audience only hears Hope’s side. Later on, they only hear Gwen’s side. It emphasizes the separation.

Structurally, Black Phone 2 is a very strange horror film. The bulk of the movie revolves around Finney and Gwen investigating events that took place decades before. Gwen is drawn to the camp to recover the bodies of the Grabber’s first three victims, the children that he murdered while working as a handman. These are unusual stakes for a horror film. By the time the film begins, the children are already dead. There’s nothing Finney or Gwen can do to change that.

At the camp, history seems to collapse into itself. There is a sense that this remote mountain outpost is still the wild west. Even outside of the use of Bichir in a way that evokes his work on The Hateful Eight, Armando remembers the man who would become the Grabber by his nickname, “Wild Bill Hickok”, because his toolbelt looked like a gun belt. Armando’s niece, Mustang (Arianna Rivas), dresses like a cowboy. The pair clears snow using a horse-drawn plough.

There are points where this fixation on the past unbalances the film, and it tips over into empty lore. Black Phone 2 features a lot of dense mythology that over-complicates the franchise’s back story, including the decision to reveal that Finney and Gwen’s mother, Hope, did not take her own life but was in fact an early victim of the Grabber, tying the characters together in a way that is both unnecessary and makes the larger universe seem much smaller.

In a broader sense, this fixation on the past gives Black Phone 2 a unique texture. In some ways, Derrickson and Cargill seem to be constructing Black Phone 2 as a very old-fashioned ghost story, built around the idea that – to quote The X-Files – the dead get buried alive, that conscience is just the voices of the dead reaching across history, trying to save the living from their own damnation. This is very much the text of Black Phone 2, with the voices of the dead calling out over a phone line.

There is a strange poetic quality to Black Phone 2. Much of the film takes place inside Gwen’s dreams, which are shot to look like old grainy film reels. Gwen reads dream analysis books – including Jung – to help her understand her visions. The film is saturated with icy imagery, with the climax taking place on a frozen lake. The imagery is evocative. There is a sense of a deep darkness lurking just beneath a clear surface. Hell is cold, the Grabber warns Finney. It’s also deep and dark.

Certainly, the film is layered with knowing irony for any viewer with any familiarity with local or regional history. Terrence works for the Rocky Flats Plant, which built parts for nuclear weapons, and he spends most of Black Phone 2 wearing a jacket with the name of the facility printed on it. The film never mentions the complex by name in dialogue – the most that Terrence ever does is to borrow the snow plough used to maintain the facility – but it looms large over the film.

In 1989, seven years after Black Phone 2 takes place, the FBI would raid the Rocky Flats facility, uncovering evidence that the facility had been illegally burning hazardous waste. Over the decades that followed, staff who worked at the plant would allege that they had been exposed to dangerous levels of radiation that led to health complications. Coincidentally or not, the workers claimed in a lawsuit that exposure began in 1959, the same year as the flashbacks in Black Phone 2.

The water imagery in Black Phone 2 becomes more loaded in this context. The Rocky Flats Plant contaminated a large part of the surrounding area. Radioactive material was reportedly pumped into nearby Woman Creek and Standley Lake, and was also flowing with runoff water toward what was at the time a source of drinking water, the Great Western Reservoir. Kids swam and played in those lakes, contaminated by the radiation.

When Finney and Gwen find those three first victims, they discover the Grabber dumped them in a nearby lake, in the sort of steel drums that one associates with nuclear waste. There is, to be fair, no indication that these bodies are literally contaminating anything other than the lake in which they sit, but the imagery is striking. Black Phone 2 never explicitly names the Rocky Flats Plant, even as the words appear in almost every shot featuring Terrence, but the crime haunts the film.

Derrickson grew up in Colorado, and has acknowledged how that informs his work on the Black Phone films. “I saw our dog give birth to mutated puppies when I was a little kid because of the Rocky Flats,” he explained in press for The Gorge. “That happened to all the animals that were in any place that was downwind of Rocky Flats. I saw a lot of weird violence and some grotesque, disturbing things.” Derrickson and Cargill are producing a television show, Full Body Burden, about the scandal.

However, even this subtext feels somewhat metaphorical, the spectral invocation of a real-life tragedy about the way in which events leave indelible marks on places and psyches. Within the world of Black Phone 2, the past of 1959 calls out to the present of 1982. Perhaps the film’s depiction of 1982 is calling out to the audience’s present day. Much contemporary horror is rooted in the 1980s, like the recent Conjuring films. It’s as if the present is haunted by the ghosts of the Reagan era.

There is a recursive nostalgia here. Contemporary culture is currently tied up in a wave of nostalgia for the 1980s, evident in the success of projects like Stranger Things or Top Gun: Maverick. However, the 1980s were themselves caught up in nostalgia for the 1950s, evident in projects like Back to Future or Stand by Me or remakes like The Fly, The Blob and even The Thing. It makes sense in the context of Black Phone 2 that the 1950s linger into the 1980s, as the 1980s linger into the present.

One of the bigger differences between Black Phone 2 and the classic 1980s camp horror movies is the emphasis it places on the religious context of the camp. When Gwen gets there, she immediately butts heads with the sanctimonious religious staff, married couple Barbara (Maev Beaty) and Kenneth (Graham Abbey), who refuse to engage with the horrors that happened there. This strands resonates outside the film’s setting, as a commentary on some of the contradictions of certain vocally religious constituencies.

Certainly, there is a clear connection to be drawn between the cowboy imagery of the camp – “Wild Bill” with his tool belt, Armando wandering in the wilderness, the horse and the cart – with the contemporary reality of Ronald Reagan as a “cowboy in the White House”, alluding to his own 1950s movie career. Within the hazy dream logic of the movie, the past is – to paraphrase Faulkner – never past, but always present.

Black Phone 2 doesn’t entirely cohere. Its structure is awkward and not conducive to the sorts of thrills that it feels obligated to deliver as a slasher sequel. It occasionally gets lost in pockets of its own lore and mythos. However, there remains something compelling about the film, in the way that Derrickson and Cargill have built a slasher sequel that has its own rhythms and tempos, and which is in conversation across decades both inside and outside the narrative.

It's a classic ghost story, a call echoing through history.