‘Black Phone 2’ Trailer Breakdown – The Grabber Pays Homage to 1980s Horror
The phone is ringing again. Will you answer the call? The trailer for Black Phone 2 begins by introducing a snow-blanketed landscape that brings to mind John Carpenter’s The Thing from 1982 — the same year that this sequel takes place. While The Black Phone was set in a Denver suburb, the follow-up moves to […]
The phone is ringing again. Will you answer the call?
The trailer for Black Phone 2 begins by introducing a snow-blanketed landscape that brings to mind John Carpenter’s The Thing from 1982 — the same year that this sequel takes place.
While The Black Phone was set in a Denver suburb, the follow-up moves to the more rural Summit County, Colorado. Its wintry Rocky Mountains setting evokes Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, which filmed the exteriors of The Overlook Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado.
The preview features numerous glimpses of grainy, homemade footage, harkening back to director Scott Derrickson‘s haunting Super 8 footage in Sinister — which was determined by a scientific study to be the scariest horror movie of all time.
We catch up with Mason Thames as Finney, who four years ago became the sole survivor of the serial child abductor and murderer known as The Grabber, played by Ethan Hawke.
Now 17, Finney picks up an ominous payphone halfway through the trailer. “Hello Finny,” The Grabber greets him on the other end of the line. “Did you think our story was over?”
The Grabber was definitively killed at the end of The Black Phone, his neck snapped by a telephone cord — but, as he tells Finney, “You of all people know that ‘dead’ is just a word,” alluding to the ghostly victims who aided Finney in his escape.
Madeleine McGraw is also back as Gwen, Finney’s headstrong 15-year-old sister. Taking a page out of A Nightmare on Elm Street‘s book, The Grabber haunts Gwen through her dreams.
There’s also a little bit of Friday the 13th in the film’s Alpine Lake Youth Camp. Fans have longed to see Jason slash his way through Camp Crystal Lake in the winter, but The Grabber beat him to the punch.
The synopsis previews, “While Finn 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. Together, she and Finn must confront a killer who has grown more powerful in death and more significant to them than either could imagine.”
Speaking of ’80s slashers, the slow-motion shot of The Grabber ice skating toward the camera with a weapon in hand is almost certainly a nod to a similar sequence in Curtains.
The camp appears to be a Christian facility, its brochure featuring one of three crosses prominently displayed in the trailer. Derrickson is no stranger to exploring religion in his work, including The Exorcism of Emily Rose and Deliver Us from Evil.
The Grabber gets the last word in the trailer — “Vengeance is mine.” — before tearing off the lower half of his frosty mask. Some of his flesh peels away with it, revealing a ghoulish grin.
The ending title card confirms that the sequel officially drops the “The” from the title, opting for simply Black Phone 2.
Black Phone 2 opens in theaters on October 17 from Blumhouse and Universal.
