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?
Full analysis below
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Not a woke trap. The Black Phone 2 is a straightforward genre sequel that leans further into its sibling-bond and faith-adjacent themes rather than pivoting to progressive messaging. Critics who flagged that 'some Christians are depicted as selfish' in the film are technically correct, but the film's treatment of Gwen's self-described Christian identity is overwhelmingly positive. She is the moral and spiritual center of the film. The isolated-camp setting, 1980s period authenticity, and focus on supernatural threat are exactly what the marketing promised.
Our Verdict on 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.
Woke Tropes & Content Analysis
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
Director: Scott Derrickson
TRADITIONAL CONSERVATIVE (Christian). Scott Derrickson is one of Hollywood's most openly Christian directors. He has written publicly and extensively about his faith, his doubts, and how both shape his filmmaking. His filmography consistently engages with supernatural evil, the existence of demons, the reality of spiritual warfare, and the moral cost of encounters with genuine darkness. The Black Phone series, based on Joe Hill's story, is Derrickson's most commercially successful work and his most fully developed expression of these themes. He has described the film as being partly about grace operating through children who have not yet been fully broken by the world.Scott Derrickson is a Denver-born writer-director who studied at Biola University, a Christian liberal arts institution. His feature debut was The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005), a film explicitly framed as a defense of the reality of possession over purely psychiatric explanations. His subsequent work includes Sinister (2012), Doctor Strange (2016), and The Black Phone (2021). He and C. Robert Cargill have collaborated on scripts since their Starz podcast partnership. Derrickson is one of the few openly Christian filmmakers operating at a commercial Hollywood level, and his faith is not incidental to his work. It is its operating system.
Writer: Scott Derrickson & C. Robert Cargill
Derrickson and Cargill adapted the sequel from Joe Hill's connected Black Phone story universe. The screenplay expands the supernatural mythology established in the first film, introducing the concept that the Grabber was one in a line of killers whose victims linger at the site of their deaths. The script's central insight is that Gwen's psychic gift operates through faith rather than in spite of it; she literally identifies herself as a good Christian girl and her visions are prayer-adjacent revelations rather than secular psychic phenomena. Cargill has discussed the intentionality of this framing in interviews.
Content Breakdown
Adult Viewer Insight
Derrickson's public Christian faith is not incidental to understanding this film. He has written about horror as a genre uniquely suited to honest engagement with evil because it refuses to domesticate darkness into something manageable. The Black Phone universe is built on the premise that evil is real, that children can encounter it and survive it, and that something beyond them, something that answers prayers and sends visions, is also real. This is not covert Christianity. Gwen explicitly names her faith. Her visions arrive in ways she frames as religious. Her 'good Christian girl' self-identification is played straight by the film, not ironically. Conservative Christian audiences who often feel like Hollywood treats faith as either a punchline or a delusion will find The Black Phone 2 a genuinely unusual piece of commercial entertainment: one that takes their worldview seriously enough to build a mythology around it. The sequel also handles trauma with more honesty than most horror films. Finney's anger and isolation four years after his ordeal are not presented as personality failures but as genuine consequences of what happened to him. The film's implicit argument is that healing is possible but slow and that community, specifically the sibling bond and the shared mission, is what makes it possible. This is not a therapeutic framework. It is a traditional one.
Parental Guidance
Rated R. Not for children. Mature audiences only. Violence: Significant. The film depicts child murders (in period flashback), supernatural threat, and physical violence. The original Black Phone's violence was severe; this film is comparable. Language: Strong. Period-appropriate profanity used throughout. Sexual Content: None. Faith Content: The film depicts Christian faith as genuine and functional. Parents who want a horror film that takes their faith seriously will find it here. Parents who are concerned about their children encountering dark supernatural content should note that the film takes demons and ghostly evil as real and present, not as metaphors. Age Recommendation: 17+ in keeping with the R rating. Mature teenagers who have seen the first film can handle this sequel. The psychological content, specifically the depiction of survivor trauma and the supernatural imprisonment of child murder victims, warrants discussion. Discussion Points: Does Gwen's faith help or hinder her in the film? What does it say that her prayers work? How does the film portray the aftermath of trauma for Finney differently from what we might expect?
Is The Black Phone 2 Safe for Kids?
Expected R for strong horror violence, disturbing images, and language. Psychological horror with supernatural elements. Child abduction premise. Language expected strong. Recommended for ages 16+. Pre-release assessment.
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