Villains who leave a mark rarely stay buried, and in Black Phone 2, Ethan Hawke reprises his role as The Grabber, seeking out revenge from beyond the grave. “I wouldn’t have done it if Ethan was not willing to return,” writer-producer-director Scott Derrickson says. “He agreed to it before there was a script, which showed a surprising amount of trust in me. I recognized the appeal of bringing back the Grabber as a ghost.”
Black Phone 2 tells the tale of siblings Finn (Mason Thames) and Gwen (Madeleine McGraw), as they struggle to reclaim their lives four years after the events of the previous film. Gwen starts receiving calls in her dreams from the black phone, and receives visions of three boys being stalked at a winter camp known as Alpine lake. The siblings relive their nightmare when they visit the camp as the Grabber, now more powerful in death, seeks out vengeance.
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Hawke was excited to return to the haunting role as it’s an opportunity to examine how horror draws power from memory. “Ghost stories have always struck me as being less about the dead than about the living,” Hawke says. “They are about what lingers after someone is gone, whether that is regret, anger, love or something else. The Black Phone was about two kids who survived a living nightmare; Black Phone 2 is about how difficult it is to move on from that kind of violence. The Ghost Grabber is the embodiment of the unimaginably horrible memories that—no matter how hard you try to recover—will still find ways to haunt you.”
For Derrickson, the sequel offers a chance to dig deeper into The Grabber’s lore. “Ethan plays a vengeful ghost, which in theory is a basic staple of the genre, but you do not typically get to see or hear dialogue from a vengeful ghost,” Derrickson says. “I was interested in both his character’s motive and backstory. If the Grabber is to return as a ghost, why is he returning and what can we learn about him that we did not know from the first film?”
Derrickson’s longtime collaborator and writer-producer C. Robert Cargill feels like this is the most chilling version of The Grabber yet, as it redefines what The Grabber is. “The Grabber has evolved into something much more terrifying because he is a supernatural creature now,” Cargill says. “In this universe, when someone dies, the less essential parts of who they were begin to fade. What remains is the strongest piece of them. For the boys in the basement, that was fear. For Finn’s friend Robin, it was his moral strength. But for the Grabber, it is pure rage. At the end of the first film, he kills his own brother, and rather than taking responsibility, he blames Finn. In his mind, it is Finn’s fault his brother is dead. That fury is what carries him into the afterlife, and it’s all he is now: rage and sadism. But he does not just want revenge, he wants Finn to suffer. He wants him to watch the one person he truly loves, his sister, die. We amplified everything that made the Grabber monstrous.”
True horror never dies as Black Phone 2 arrives in Philippine cinemas on October 15. Follow Universal Pictures PH (FB), UniversalPicturesPH (IG), and UniversalPicsPH (TikTok) for the latest updates.
