Will you answer the call? You had better make your decision quickly because Universal Pictures is ringing in with the first official trailer forBlack Phone 2. Four years in the making, the movie is finally coming to cinemas this fall, with an arrival date set for October 17 — just in time for the spooky season! Since it was announced that filmmakerScott Derrickson(Doctor Strange) would return to the helm of the sequel, audiences have been excited to see what the creative team came up with — especially with the news thatEthan Hawke’s incredibly dead serial killer character, known as The Grabber, was killed at the end of the first movie. But, from what viewers will see in today’s trailer, sometimes evil still lurks long after its Earthly departure.
Despite having successfully killed The Grabber in the first movie, Finney (Mason Thames) finds himself plagued by the murderer’s presence from the great beyond, all thanks to a payphone. There are still plenty of blanks that need to be filled in, but it looks like the movie will take on a supernatural twist that will likely play into the genre’s current favorite theme — trauma. Previous victims of The Grabber (apparently from his time working at a youth camp) will help fill out the storyline of the new movie, while Finney’s sister,Madeleine McGraw’s Gwen, is plagued by dreams that return her to the basement where her older sibling was once trapped.
The first filmserved as an adaptation ofJoe Hill’s short story of the same name, but Derrickson and his co-scribe,C. Robert Cargill, were going into this one totally in the dark. When we last left off with the characters, Finney had just snapped the neck of The Grabber, escaping his captor and running back into the arms ofhis sister, Gwen. For a brief refresher, Gwen has some supernatural abilities that allow her to aid the police in finding the home of The Grabber, ending the town’s ongoing nightmare.
What Scott Derrickson Has Teased About ‘Black Phone 2’
The Black Phonebecame one of the studio’s most talked-about and biggest moneymakers of the year, with Derrickson more than eager to get back to the continuation of the story. The original was just about as dark as they come — after all, it centered around a child killer. But theDoctor Strangedirector haspreviously teasedthat the follow-up will somehow be even heavier.
“The main difference is that it’s a high school coming of age movie, in the same way that the original movie was a middle school coming of age movie, but those are two very different sorts of things. You know, a high school coming-of-age movie demands more. It has to be more visceral. It has to be, I think, more graphic, scarier.
I think that the change that occurs in human beings between middle school and high school, that’s some of the biggest change you go through in your life. And so to be able to revisit these characters who’ve really developed as people in the four years between the movies was also very interesting to me.”
Black Phone 2arrives in theaters on October 17.
Black Phone 2
