Dead is just a word.
That’s the message behind Universal and Blumhouse’s trailer for The Black Phone 2, unveiled Sunday at CCXP Mexico, a pop culture convention being held in Mexico City over the weekend.
The movie is the sequel to the surprise 2022 hit that made $161 million against an $18 million budget. Based on a short story by Joe Hill, the son of Stephen King, the movie introduced audiences to the Grabber, a masked serial killer who abducts children, locking them up in his basement. One such kid, however, finds an unplugged but haunted rotary phone that connects him to the ghosts of the previous snatched boys. And in that, a possible way out.
The movie ends (spoiler alert!) with the Grabber dead, so how the heck is he back? The trailer enticingly shows builds to a chilling phone conversation between our hero, played by a returning Mason Thames, and the Grabber, once again played by Ethan Hawke, with the latter telling the teen, “You of all people should know that dead is just a word.” Then the trailer unleashes a barrage of horror images.
‘Black Phone 2’ poster
Courtesy of Universal Pictures and Blumhouse
Director and co-writer Scott Derrickson, who got on the phone with The Hollywood Reporter prior to the trailer’s reveal, was tight-lipped regarding the return. In fact, he was pretty much tight-lipped about a lot of things.
But he did elaborate on the nature of ghost stories.
“The first movie was a ghost movie but all the ghosts were victims, which is typical, a ghost story,” he said. “But in this one, you’ve got a ghost that is a villain.”
With the first movie, Derrickson tapped into his Denver childhood, where bullies and violence were common. For this one, he drew on his high school experience of going to winter camps in the Rocky Mountains. The severity of the weather, the environment and the surrounding Rockies contributed to the tone of the new movie.
But the difference between middle school and high school ages of the characters is the big change in tone.
“A middle school coming-of-age horror movie is a different animal than a high school coming-of-age horror film,” says Derrickson. “A there’s a ratcheting up of intensity because of that.”
Derrickson wasn’t necessarily planning on a sequel to Black Phone but said Hill wrote to him a month or two after the movie came out with some ideas. And having it set in the high school years proved appealing, especially when he worked out the timing in his head.
“I thought if I go make another movie first and don’t make a sequel now like you’re supposed to, then by the time I finish, these kids are all going to be in high school,” he said. The movie he did was the large-budgeted monster Apple TV+ movie titled The Gorge with Anya Taylor-Joy and Miles Teller. “And I can return to these characters in this different stage of their lives.”
And because of that, Black Phone 2 is more of a horror film than the first movie, which he considers to be a supernatural thriller.
“It is certainly more violent, scarier, more graphic,” he says. “And part of that is because of the age of the kids.”
See the trailer below.
