Black Phone 2, or, Collect Call From Bill Ikilledacamperitsaboy

I didn’t see The Black Phone; I was never in the mood to watch a movie all about a kid locked in a torture murder basement. But while all of you low-brow types were frittering away your time watching movies, I enriched myself by reading the original short story, in a book.

From what I know of the movie adaptation, by expanding it to feature length, it leaned more into the supernatural, with more ghosts, visions, and psychic abilities. The original story was more prosaic by comparison, a dismal horror story with hints of the supernatural bringing about its resolution.

I’m mentioning that because I heard some grumblings about Black Phone 2 when it was being promoted, with people complaining that it was an unnecessary, even gratuitous attempt to turn what had been a tight, self-contained horror movie into a franchise. The Grabber dies at the end of the first one!

But I say that the core idea of the first one was a phone that let you talk to ghosts, so they’d already left the door wide open to have calls with dead people. And more significantly: the first one was already taking a horror story and cranking up the fantastic elements, making it more, well, Blumhouse. I think the sequel takes that even farther: it’s an exercise in style, an homage to a very specific era of early-1980s supernatural fantasy horror. And by that measure, I liked it a lot.

The premise of the sequel has Finn trying to deal with the aftermath of his abduction by getting into fights and getting stoned a lot. He’s still haunted by the events of the first movie, frequently getting calls from out-of-order pay phones and having to answer them simply with “I’m sorry I can’t help you.” Meanwhile, his sister Gwen — who was established in the first movie as having a bit of The Shine in the form of prophetic dreams — has started dreaming of a camp in the woods and the three young boys who were murdered there.

Gwen’s dreams are by far the best part of the movie, which is a good thing, because there are a lot of them. They’re filmed in a grainy, handheld camera style that looks like a Super 8 camera. They also involve her waking up within the dream and exploring to try and find the source of her visions, corresponding to her sleep-walking in the real world. There’s a really neat effect whenever she’s awakened from her dream, as the image cross-dissolves from the grainy Super 8 style to the heavily-color-graded, this-is-set-in-1982 look of the rest of the movie.

I liked this because it really made it clear that the filmmakers were going for style. The homages to early 1980s movies are all over the place — not just the suggestions of Stephen King adaptations like The Shining and Carrie and even Firestarter, but also a little bit more subtly to slashers like Friday the 13th and then later, A Nightmare on Elm Street. It didn’t strike me as derivative, but genuinely like a celebration of a particular era of movies that the filmmakers love.

Which meant that I was on board and was watching it in that spirit throughout. Early on, Gwen has a nightmare vision of a little boy at the camp being chased through the woods and then murdered by an unseen assailant. Afterwards, the boy’s body rises up from the bottom of a frozen lake, he reaches out a finger, and he scratches the letter W into the ice. My immediate thought was, I don’t mean to be cruel, kid, but I think you should mark that one as an L instead of a W.

The camp turns out to be a Christian camp that the kids’ mother had worked at as a counselor when she was younger. There are only four adults at the camp, two who’ve been there forever and seem to do all the actual work, and then two who seem to be administrators or new owners, who are sanctimonious fundamentalists there primarily for comic relief.

I’d initially thought that this was a weird and unnecessary detail, if all the movie needed was a “trapped in the snow at a creepy camp in the woods” setting. But it quickly became clear how much heavy lifting it does to establish this as a period piece. Mainstream pop culture of the early 1980s was a lot less secular than it is today, and seeing Christianity used for social persecution instead of genuine faith immediately took me back to the time I was growing up and felt surrounded by it. It was also interesting to show people who claim to believe in a higher power being confronted with proof of the supernatural, and immediately shunning it as evil.

Incidentally: I’m still not 100% sure of all the details and the relationships of the characters, since so much of the dialogue was tough to make out. For everyone, but especially for The Grabber. Respect to Ethan Hawke for taking a weird role where he never shows his face, but also there were several scenes where it was comical how difficult it was to understand what he was saying behind that mask. It was like watching a young man being taunted by one of the teachers from the Charlie Brown specials.

I thought the cast was all good, with Madeleine McGraw as Gwen being the clear stand-out. Even the characters who are there solely to be characters in an early 80s horror movie manage to feel like your memory of those characters, instead of what was likely the inferior reality. Demián Bichir is always under-appreciated. Miguel Mora — who plays a kid with a crush on Gwen — had the best scene of comic relief in a movie that I hadn’t expected to have any, playing everything exactly like a real teenager would talk. And I also felt weirdly tapped into the southern California horror movie scene when I recognized Anna Lore from Final Destination: Bloodlines.

(And a very minor note: I thought I’d caught the movie in a jarring, nitpicky anachronism at the end, when a character tells someone over the phone “it’s been a minute” to suggest that they haven’t talked in a long time. But apparently, that expression has been around since the 1970s, and it’s only me who had never heard it used in the context before the 20th century).

Ultimately, I thought Black Phone 2 was about 30 minutes too long, and it was more an accomplishment of style than substance. But I really enjoyed it, much more than I expected to, and honestly more than I enjoyed most of the movies it’s paying homage to. It was going for nostalgia, and it totally worked for me, taking me right back to the feeling of watching movies in the early 1980s and believing that they could show me anything.

And remember: Don’t cheat the phone company.