Black Phone 2 Does Something Almost No Other Slasher Horror Film Has Done Before

This article contains Major spoilers About “Black Phone 2.”
After several years away, seemingly forever, given that he died in the first film, The Grabber is back for more. In fact, after his death at the hands of plucky teenager Vinny in The Black Phone, director Scott Derrickson and writer C.K. Robert Cargill joined forces with Blumhouse and Universal Pictures on the critically acclaimed film Black Phone 2. Although the old line of thinking, especially in horror films, is that “bigger is better,” there is one thing that is shockingly small about this sequel. It is the number of deaths. At least in the current timeline, the death toll is zero.
In the sequel, The Grabber seeks revenge on Finn (Mason Thames) as he preys on his younger sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) from beyond the grave. A 17-year-old Finn struggles in the aftermath of his capture while 15-year-old Gwen begins receiving calls in her dreams from the ever-mysterious black phone. She begins having visions of three young boys being chased into a winter camp known as Alpine Lake.
Gwen convinces Finn to visit the camp during a winter storm to try to solve the mystery. a surprise! The Grabber, filled with Freddy Krueger, is there waiting for them – in Gwen’s dreams. What unfolds at Alpine Lake is a terrifying mix of dream nightmares and real-life horror as the group searches for the bodies of these missing children in hopes of not only solving cold cases years old, but also stopping The Grabber once and for all.
What’s amazing is that, as scary and occasionally violent as “Black Phone 2” is, Ethan Hawke’s masked killer doesn’t actually manage to kill Finn, Gwen, or even any of the new, seemingly disposable side characters we’ve been introduced to. Everyone who dies, died in the past. To say this is rare for a slasher film would be an understatement.
The Grabber has a surprisingly low kill count in Black Phone 2
We learn that The Grabber was actually a former employee of the Alpine Lake winter camp, where he killed the three boys Gwen had in her vision. Through a bit of a retcon, we also learned that Finn and Gwen’s mother was actually killed by The Grabber, although it looked like she committed suicide. So, it’s not like there’s no body count, but the body count comes entirely through flashbacks.
It’s not as if there aren’t slasher movies that contain few or no deaths. April Fool’s Day is known to not have any deaths, even though it seems as if people die all the time. In general, cutting tools are attractive because of their body count. “Halloween Kills” shows Michael Myers killing 30 people and wounding quite a few others. This is an extreme example, but not having killings nowadays is, to put it mildly, a bold choice.
However, Derrickson has walked a similar line before. “Sinister”, one of the scariest films of all time, mostly shows the killings through so-called “murder tapes” found in the attic, with the current timeline of the killings appearing at the end of the film. Derrickson and Cargill set out to do something different with this sequel, rather than following the obvious route. In an age when it seems that many franchisees can just sit and spin their wheels until those wheels fall off, it’s hard not to notice and admire this big swing.
The “go bigger to be better” mantra with slashes has its limits. Jason Voorhees has killed more than 180 people on screen in the “Friday the 13th” movies, but at a certain point, it becomes difficult to simply expand. This is how deadly villains end up in space, for better or worse. That’s not to say that no one wants to see The Grabber in space, but it does leave room for growth, assuming we get a “Black Phone 3” and beyond at some point.
“Black Phone 2” is now in theaters.
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2025-10-17 00:00:00