At the end of 2022’s The Black Phone, the child serial killer The Grabber (Ethan Hawke) was successfully killed by his intended victim, Finney (Mason Thames). But you can’t keep a good villain down — especially when the original movie made lots of money at the box office — so The Grabber is back to terrorize Finney and kid sister, Gwen (Madeleine McGraw), once again.
In this sequel, The Grabber is essentially Freddy Krueger and attacks Gwen in her dreams to get back at Finney. Since The Grabber’s newfound dream power is somehow tied to past unsolved murders at a summer camp, the siblings and their friends travel to the camp to defeat The Grabber once and for all.
Black Phone 2 shamelessly rips off A Nightmare on Elm Street’s core concept of a child killer stalking teens while they sleep, but it works due to Hawke’s unsettling performance. The Grabber is creepier as an ethereal entity instead of a flesh-and-blood killer, and the movie effectively generates enough scares to make it a worthy horror sequel.
