A Call That Never Ended
The Black Phone (2022) brought back a certain style of horror to theaters. It was psychological, intimate, and oddly nostalgic. It was not about jump scares, but the silences that speak of a trauma. So, The Black Phone 2 (2025) was announced, and the internet was wild with theories. Would we see Ethan Hawke’s “Grabber” back? Would the spirits of the cursed phone remain souls in the tormented phone holders?
Scott Derrickson gave only the most cryptic clues in his early interviews when he said “the story isn’t over, not for the victims, and not for the phone.” That single sentence was enough for the fans to exhaust every frame of the first film trying to find the clues that contain the mystery of the upcoming sequel.
A Darker, Louder Echo of the Original
The sequel opens in an equally claustrophobic, familiar, and abandoned house, a house that seems to breathe despair. Finney, the boy who escaped the Grabber in the first movie, now struggles with nightmares of the Grabber. But the calls that come for him this time, come through him.
The narrative follows Finney many years later, still tortured by memories of the basement. The phone, long silent, once more beckons, drawing him into a new series of supernatural occurrences that imply the Grabber’s malevolence may indeed transcend death. There is talk of an evil, sustained, and an unfinished revenge, of spirits striving to make themselves heard, and a malevolence greater than any evil ever conceived.
Fans were eager to see Manson Thames reprising the role, and the extent of his growth, both as an actor and a character, is remarkable. His character pride, as well as his multiple leading passions, were painfully human. “‘Playing Finney again,’ Thames told Collider, ‘was like revisiting a part of myself I thought I’d left behind. But trauma doesn’t fade; it mutates,’ he explains.”
Theories That Fueled the Fire.
In the lead-up, Reddit threads and fan pages were filled with speculation and wild theories. Some thought that Finney would become a medium, the living crossing signal with the dead. Other theories suggested that the Grabber wasn’t completely gone, and instead had become one of the phone’s “callers,” controlling new victims.
Most surprisingly, rather than quelling any theories, Derrickson seems to encourage them. He remarked, “Fans often guess things right, but they never guess how it happens,” at a Comic-Con panel. That openness was incorporated into the marketing strategy. Fans were not just passive viewers of The Black Phone 2, they were active participants in the experience.
Even after the film was released, the discussions refused to die down. Some in the audience were certain they heard faint, and possibly unscripted, audio track whispers during certain phone sequences just recorded on set. Whether these were designed as Easter eggs or not, was, and remains, unknown. This ambiguity served to deepen the unsettling, uncanny realism The Black Phone is now known for.
Behind the Shadows — Life Imitating Art.
What is compelling about The Black Phone 2 is how much the life of the cast actors seems to intertwine with their parts. Hawke, who briefly returns in flashbacks and visions, teaches us that the themes of the film mistakenly touted as The Black Phone are guilt and unfinished business. The film shows these themes as part of Hawke’s life as a father as well as an artist.
“In GQ interview, Hawke said on playing something like the Grabber, ‘You begin to wonder, what kind of darkness do people hide within themselves, and how much of that darkness do you see in yourself?’”
Mason Thames, now a young adult, spoke candidly about growing up with the fame that followed the first movie. He described it as “surreal but isolating,” much like Finney’s experience of surviving trauma in silence. Director Derrickson mirrored this by shooting several of Finney’s scenes in near-complete isolation — minimal crew, real darkness, and an authentic sense of fear.
The Haunted Production
The crew members working on The Black Phone 2 set encountered problems. Malfunctions near the main set like flickering lights, microphones turned off during filming, and phantom phone ringtones were reported. While many attributed these odd occurrences to coincidence, they were puzzling enough to make Derrickson’s cinematographer Brett Jutkiewicz admit, “it did feel like the house had its own energy.”
The sequel was filmed in the same area of Colorado as the first, and employed the same shooting strategy. The production team added the gritty realism to the film by using practical effects and minimal CGI. For the film’s sound design, the production team used a deeply unsettling technique for which they blurring the line between reality and fiction. They used real disconnected phone static to create a breathing sound and layered it with faint recordings of human breathing.
When Audiences Became Detectives
Following the premiere, audiences began to investigate the film’s hidden signs. They zoomed in on the recurring film symbols, and the chalk markings, the number 7, and certain phrases were spoken with a whisper over the phone. They ignited hundreds of online discussions suggesting subplots with the spirits of the other victims. Some fans even suggested the film was connected to Derrickson’s earlier work, Sinister, proposing a shared universe of cursed media.
The studio’s silence only increased the anticipation. Speculation ran rampant: the Grabber’s mask was cursed, Finney’s sister’s psychic abilities stemmed from something dark, and the phone was made by someone who communicated with the dead.
Box Office Noise and Silent Fears
Released in late 2025, The Black Phone 2 had a wildly successful opening weekend, despite competition from major blockbusters, and critics noted the emotional horror was consistent with the first film while the mythos expanded. Most memorable was the film’s ability to make people care not only about surviving, but about listening.
It was no longer a film about monsters; it was a film about memory, about regret, and the silence in the voices.
Perhaps that is why the phone keeps ringing — some stories, and trauma, do not end.
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