Black Phone 2’s Trailer Reveals The Shocking Way Ethan Hawke’s Villain Returns
The phone’s still ringing.
There’s a common conundrum when you end a horror movie. When the credits roll, you have two choices, each with its pros and cons. You can make sure the villain is totally defeated and meets their mortal fate, which provides a satisfying ending for the characters who spent the last 100 minutes or so trying to survive, but cuts off any possibility of future movies.
Or, you can have a last-second tease that the villain somehow survived, which means you can revisit everything in a future movie and expand into a franchise, but it can be frustrating, especially if no future films ever manifest.
But one 2021 film has found a third option that manages to keep the best of both worlds: a dead villain, but a sequel that still manages to bring them back.
In Scott Derrickson’s 2021 movie The Black Phone, its villain, the Grabber (Ethan Hawke), dies at the hand of Finney (Mason Thames), who breaks his neck with a phone cord. It’s a gruesome sequence that doesn’t leave much room for a sequel, but nevertheless, The Black Phone 2 is happening, with Ethan Hawke reprising his role. Check out the teaser for this movie above.
To get around the narrative obstacle, the Grabber is now a demon operating from beyond the grave, haunting his old victims and trying to wreak revenge. “You, of all people,” he tells Finney, “know that dead is just a word.”
Ethan Hawke brings the Grabber back to life in the trailer for The Black Phone 2.
The first Black Phone did have some supernatural elements, but they were mainly restricted to one character’s psychic dreams. Now, though, it looks like the Grabber is going full-on Freddy Krueger, infecting peoples dreams, morphing their realities, and incorporating some truly chilling new powers.
Now that the Grabber is no longer flesh and blood, the door is open for a new horror franchise that can only get scarier from this point on. When The Grabber is in everyone’s dreams, everything is fair game.
