The Black Phone 2

Scott Derrickson's The Black Phone 2 is a sequel that earns its existence by asking a genuinely good question: what happens to the kids who survive?

Four years after Finney Blake (Mason Thames) killed the Grabber and escaped, he is 17 and not okay. He is angry, isolated, struggling. The trauma did not make him a hero. It left him cracked in ways that don't make good stories. Meanwhile his sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) has inherited their mother's psychic gift and is receiving visions of murders that happened decades ago at a summer camp.

Derrickson makes a choice in the first act that pays dividends throughout the film: The Black Phone 2 is really Gwen's story. She is the one with the gift, the faith, and the drive to follow the visions to their source. Finney matters, but Gwen carries the moral and spiritual weight of the film. McGraw is extraordinary. She was one of the first film's strongest elements and here she is given the full protagonist arc. Gwen is funny, brave, terrified, and completely certain that her gift comes from somewhere real and good, even when what she sees is terrible.

That certainty is the film's most interesting conservative element. Gwen describes herself as a good Christian girl. Her visions arrive like answered prayers, specific and usable. The film does not frame her faith as naive or as something she needs to outgrow. Her belief is presented as accurate. The supernatural is real in the world of The Black Phone, and Gwen's faith-informed intuition about it is consistently correct.

This is not subtle. Derrickson is making a film in which a Christian girl's prayers work.

The Alpine Lake Camp setting allows the film to expand its mythology. The Grabber, we learn, was one of several killers who preyed on children at this camp across decades. The children's ghosts remain there, trapped and restless, waiting for someone to hear them. The film adds Demian Bichir as Armando, the current camp supervisor, and the confined-by-blizzard thriller structure creates real claustrophobic tension.

Ethan Hawke returns as the Grabber speaking from the dead. The film wisely does not try to make him sympathetic. He is still monstrous. His knowledge of the camp's history gives Finney and Gwen usable information, but the film does not rehabilitate him. There is a traditional moral clarity here: evil is evil even when it can be temporarily useful.

The film does contain one element worth flagging for conservative audiences. The character of Kenneth, a camp employee, is implied to be gay through a subplot that Common Sense Media described as 'selfish Christians depicted negatively.' Kenneth's sexuality is not foregrounded, but his characterization reflects the film's occasional willingness to use faith hypocritically practiced as a character flaw. This is worth knowing but does not undermine the film's overwhelming orientation toward faith as genuine and functional.

At $132 million worldwide on a $30 million budget, The Black Phone 2 is one of Blumhouse's stronger commercial performers of the year. It is a better film than most horror sequels manage to be, primarily because Derrickson respects his characters enough to let them be genuinely traumatized rather than conveniently heroic. Conservative horror fans should see this without hesitation. The blend of period authenticity, sibling bond, functional faith, and genuine supernatural evil is rare in contemporary horror.

Formula: Weighted Score = Severity × Authenticity Multiplier × Centrality Multiplier

🔴 Woke Tropes

Trope	Severity	Authenticity	Centrality	Score
Faith Practiced Hypocritically as Character Flaw	2	1	1	2
Implied LGBTQ Supporting Character		1.4	0.5
TOTAL WOKE				2.0

🟢 Traditional Tropes

Trope	Severity	Authenticity	Centrality	Score
Christian Faith as Genuinely Functional (Prayer Answers)	5	0.7	1.8	6.3
Sibling Bond as Moral Anchor	4	0.7	1	2.8
Moral Clarity About Evil (Grabber Remains Monstrous)	3	0.7	0.5	1.05
TOTAL TRADITIONAL				10.2

Score Margin: +8 TRAD