Warning: This post contains spoilers for Black Phone 2.
By the end of 2022’s The Black Phone, 13-year-old Finney Shaw (Mason Thames) had managed to kill the serial child abductor and murderer known as the Grabber (Ethan Hawke) with the help of the spirits of some of his previous victims—all of whom were able to contact Finney through a disconnected rotary phone mounted to the wall of the basement where the Grabber was keeping his intended prey.
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Unfortunately, it soon becomes clear in Black Phone 2, now in theaters, that the Grabber is still a threat from beyond the grave. Set in 1982, four years after the events of the original, the sequel follows a now-17-year-old Finney and his psychic 15-year-old sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) as they track the origins of the Grabber’s horrifying exploits to a Christian winter camp deep in the Rocky Mountains and realize their family’s tormenter isn’t exactly gone for good.
Writer-director Scott Derrickson (Sinister, Doctor Strange) and his co-writer, C. Robert Cargill, have said the seeds of the idea for the follow-up film came from Joe Hill, the author of the 2004 short story on which the first movie was based and son of horror legend Stephen King. “He just said, ‘A phone rings, Finney answers, and it’s the Grabber calling from Hell,’” Cargill told Bloody Disgusting.
However, according to Derrickson, the concept of the Grabber’s Hell being a realm of freezing cold and ice rather than burning heat and fire was lifted from the Inferno, the famed first section of Dante Alighieri’s 14th-century narrative poem “The Divine Comedy.” “The whole idea of Hell being a cold place, that all comes from Dante, and the old literature philosophy students, and my love for the Inferno,” he told Bloody Disgusting. “I just think that the idea of the Grabber being the worst of the worst and coming from the ninth circle of Hell, where people are frozen in ice, is a compelling idea.”
The Shaw siblings decide to visit the camp at Alpine Lake after Gwen starts having visions of three young boys whose spirits have been trapped there since they were murdered by the Grabber decades earlier. However, once they arrived and are snowed by a winter storm, they learn the Grabber is able to derive enough power from the lingering fear of the boys’ souls to return as a supernatural entity who has the ability to attack Gwen in her dreams and cause violent chaos. In order to end the Grabber’s reign of terror once and for all, they must retrieve the bodies of his first three victims from the bottom of the frozen lake and lay them to rest.
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How does Black Phone 2 end?
After learning their late mother—who they thought committed suicide—was actually killed by the Grabber when she discovered his murderous secret using her own psychic powers, Gwen and Finney are more determined than ever to ensure he is sent back to Hell. This revelation is the film’s most shocking curveball and, according to Derrickson, is what truly set the sequel in motion.
“That idea [for the Grabber’s role in the life and death of Finn and Gwen’s mother] was surprising to me and surprisingly interesting to me,” he told the Hollywood Reporter. “It got me thinking about story possibilities in a way that I couldn’t really stop. Having finished it now, it’s a big enough reveal in a movie that doesn’t have a lot of twists and turns. That’s the big twist, really, if there is one. And knowing that we were going to build toward that in some form, it gave us an emotional spinal cord for the movie.”
With the help of their friend Ernesto (Miguel Mora), their father Terrence (Jeremy Davies), and some of the camp staff, the siblings set out to fish the boys’ bodies from the lake. But when Gwen falls into a dream state, the Grabber’s assault on the group threatens to derail their plan entirely. Luckily, Gwen has come to realize that she too possesses supernatural power in that liminal space and is able to hold the Grabber off long enough for the bodies to be recovered. The spirits of the three boys then help to defeat the Grabber and he’s sent back to the abyss.
Upon returning to the campgrounds, Gwen receives a call from her mom on a long-dead pay phone letting her know that she’s at peace now in heaven and advising her to think of her psychic powers as a blessing, not a curse.
“The things that Finn has to get past and deal with in the course of the movie are relatively simple, and what Gwen is dealing with is much more complicated in terms of her mother’s death and inheriting her spiritual gift and feeling like an outsider who’s awkward, crazy and freakish,” Derrickson said of the sequel’s focus on Gwen over Finney. “So it needed to be her story in order for that to play out in any kind of meaningful way.”