The ambience of a church youth camp is both cozy and eerie. While the collective prayers, emotional singing, shared meals and camp-specific games provide a sense of camaraderie, those same elements can be disquieting: Remote campgrounds seem a twee bit scarier if you’ve come out of a Bible study where you’ve heard that Jesus cast out demons into a drove of pigs, for example.
It’s striking that more horror films haven’t capitalized on the innate dread of these spaces. But director Scott Derrickson has used the setup to craft a theologically graceful and, above all else, grisly horror film with Black Phone 2, a film whose supernatural scope gives it not only some indelible imagery (everyone thinks they’re tough until the serial killer starts ice skating with his axe) but also affecting pathos.
- Release Date
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October 17, 2025
- Runtime
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114 Minutes
- Director
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Scott Derrickson
The first Black Phone, adapted from Joe Hill’s short story of the same name, ended fairly definitively as Finney (Mason Thames) murdered child-abducting serial killer The Grabber (Ethan Hawke) with the aid of the ghosts of the Grabber’s past victims. When we catch up with Finney and his sister, Gwen (Madeleine McGraw), they’re in high school, and wrestling with the trauma that made their names national news. Gwen, whose premonitions were crucial in stopping The Grabber in the first film, is afflicted with terrifying new visions, all captured in grainy, vermillion Super 8 film. She sees her mother (Anna Lore) — who died by suicide when Finney and Gwen were young — answer a phone in an unnamed camp, as well as a frozen lake that holds the bodies of maimed and dismembered children who use their last breaths to carve initials into the ice.
Convinced that she needs to go to the camp to understand the nature of these visions, Gwen recruits Finney and a classmate, Ernesto (Miguel Mora), to take the journey to wintry, snowed-in Lake Alpine. There, the trio meet camp supervisor Armando (Demián Bichir) and his niece Mustang (Arianna Rivas), as well as two camp employees played by Graham Abbey and Maev Beaty. Soon, Gwen and Finney learn that their mother was a camp counselor at Lake Alpine, and from beyond the grave, the camp staff and the kids try to figure out how the visions of dead children connect to the past and present threat of the Grabber.
What’s compelling about Black Phone 2 is that Derrickson and screenwriter C. Robert Cargill have written characters who take the spiritual dimension of life as a given. It’s tedious to witness people bicker about the veracity of a threat as they debate whether the supernatural forces afflicting someone are “real” or not. In this film, the Grabber has returned as a vengeful spirit, one who’s able to cause most harm when people are asleep or in a lucid state, which gives him an anchor to be in the physical world and wreak havoc there. To paraphrase one of Hawke’s lines in the film, he’s conjured from “his hate” and “whatever memories Hell let me keep.” He’s divine judgment with a literal axe to grind, free from the inhibitions of a physical form.
By setting the film at a church youth camp, Black Phone 2 establishes that its characters are people who take the demonic, heavenly and everything in between at face value. It’s far more compelling to see how characters respond to the presence of the supernatural based on their differing theologies rather than needing to be convinced of its truth. This thread culminates in a truly thrilling sequence where the Grabber attacks Gwen while she’s sleepwalking in the camp kitchen and begins throwing her around. We take the eyes of the viewers and look on in horror, as it seems as though Gwen is being bruised and battered by an unseen force. Rather than stay dumbstruck, however, Finney, Ernesto and the church staff try their best to fight back, making for a much more exciting set piece.
Their battles are not just physical, however. Thames gives an achingly compelling performance as a young man who can’t shake the brutality he’s witnessed and enacted. When you’re young, it’s tempting to feel like your trials and tribulations can’t be overcome and that your traumas are a curse you can never exorcise. But those who have lived life and understand that the arc of living is long enough to encompass our best and worst, and that our present anguish is only as permanent as the power we let it have over us, can offer essential insight. It’s not that time erases wounds, but it gives us the perspective to put them in their place. Bichir’s Armando gives that gift of power to Finney, telling him, “You are strong enough to let what happened [to you] go.” And McGraw commits herself in body, mind, and spirit to playing Gwen; there’s a lot demanded of her here, but whether she has to be flung about or wear terror nakedly on her face, she’s up to any challenge.
The film’s Super 8 sequences — pristinely captured by cinematographer Pär M. Ekberg — are terrifying even when nothing horrific is happening. The graininess makes it feel as though we’re watching a cursed home video, and the image compositions are so warped in their color and design that it’s as if they’re from a different, haunted dimension. In one particularly striking moment, Gwen walks through her abandoned cabin, where the red coils of the numerous radiators give the space a hellish glow. It constantly feels like we’re watching something we shouldn’t be privy to, which only makes the ensuing violence that much more visceral.
And my, the violence. The first film featured no paucity of dead kids, eviscerated in all sorts of gnarly ways. But Derrickson and Cargill have somehow managed to get away with even more gore here — once again, much of it happening to kids. Youths die in all sorts of messed-up ways in Black Phone 2, and Derrickson, rarely, if at all, cuts away from the action. We’re meant to feel sickened, but there’s also an abundance of style that creates iconic imagery, such as a moment where a window closes on a kid’s face and the slice of flesh containing one eye and half of his lips writhes about as it flops on the ground.
But it’s the way the film balances its unvarnished brutality with an emotional throughline that makes Black Phone 2 work as well as it does. Gwen wears her faith on her sleeve, but it’s not a disembodied or wishful-thinking type of faith: She laces her prayers with profanity and petitions to God earnestly, to ask for deliverance from evil for not just herself but those around her as well. She finds ways to make room for spirituality in the midst of what’s around her, and Black Phone 2 reminds us that the sacred and secular need not be pitted against each other. By taking belief seriously, it reframes the ways that grace and love can be tactile, potent weapons that cut against the heart of darkness and evil.
Black Phone 2 world premiered at Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas, and was reviewed at that festival. It opens in theaters October 17.