It was no coincidence that The Black Phone had a whiff of Stephen King about it. The 2021 surprise horror smash was based on a short story written by the master of the macabre’s son, who uses the unassuming alias Joe Hill. With its fraternity of wise-ass kids, a slightly cartoonish evil presence and down-home characters who represent an idealised version of small-town America, the movie proved that the King family business remains in rude health.
For further proof, look no further than this super-sized sequel which ups the ante considerably. It’s again produced by horror haven Blumhouse with Scott Derrickson once more directing a script he wrote with frequent collaborator C. Robert Cargill. The sets are lusher, the kills gorier and the baddie (played with venomous glee by Ethan Hawke) is nastier still. This is a horror that’s in love with scary movies; a post-modern remix of genre classics filmed through an arthouse gauze that never obscures its goofy sense of humour.
The ’70s-set original introduced us to wimpy teen Finney (Mason Thames) as he became the latest victim of Hawke’s masked villain the Grabber, a bad bastard who’d already snatched five kids from the streets of their quaint Colorado suburb. Finney awoke in the Grabber’s grimy basement, which, yes, featured a broken black phone. For reasons that were never fully explained, the device turned out to be a supernatural conduit for the killer’s previous victims to contact Finney and advise him on how to wriggle out of the mess he’d found himself in.
Although Derrickson and Cargill’s efforts to stretch Hill’s short story to feature length resulted in plot holes no King could abide, The Black Phone was still a deliciously nasty little tale. It seemed like there was no narrative left to run after the credits rolled, but – in yet another surprise – this wildly imaginative sequel is actually better than the original (which you’ll need to have seen). Several years later, Finney’s paranormally gifted sister Gwen (played again by Madeleine McGraw) begins to dream of kids trapped under the ice at Alpine Lake, a Christian winter camp in the mountains. Upon arrival, the siblings stumble across – gulp – a phone booth set ominously amid the snow. And guess who’s calling?
Tonally, the movie is often more like The Simpsons’ spoof of The Shining than Stanley Kubrick’s vicious masterpiece – the kids even have their own Groundskeeper Willie in hammy camp supervisor Armando (Demián Bichir), who knows more than he’s letting on. Scenes in a dorm room are pure Friday The 13th pastiche, bordering on parody, and Freddy Krueger would delight in the plot’s pivot to a surreal dreamscape where anything is possible.
While the original unfolded in the Grabber’s claustrophobic basement, the mountain resort, with its pitiless frozen lake, offers a widescreen vista for a grand psychological horror. As ice splits and snow is streaked with blood, you can almost see the filmmakers cackling at their own untrammelled creativity. The Grabber shows up a little late and the final act becomes too convoluted but this is one call you should definitely answer.
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