Why Ethan Hawke's Grabber Targets Older Victims In Black Phone 2
by Joe Roberts · /FilmScott Derrickson's 2022 horror film "The Black Phone" was a box office success, which was refreshing news for not just the horror genre but modern moviegoing in general. Rather than setting up a sequel, the movie — an adaptation of Joe Hill's 2004 short story of the same name — was content to tell a self-contained tale. Of course, in Hollywood, anything that sells tickets will almost certainly get a follow-up regardless, and now we've got just that. "Black Phone 2," which /Film's Rafael Motamayor has dubbed "Dream Warriors good," isn't just a rehash of the first film, either. Derrickson really tried to up the stakes with his sequel, and a big part of that was making the victims of Ethan Hawke's The Grabber significantly older than in the first movie.
In "The Black Phone," Mason Thames' Finney Blake was 13-years-old when he was abducted by The Grabber. The sequel, however, is set four years later, and that was very intentional on Derrickson and co-writer C. Robert Cargill's part. The director spoke to SFX Magazine for its November 2025 issue and shared that he was interested in making a high school movie for the sequel due to the more "interesting emotional stakes." He continued:
"It requires a different tone than a middle school coming-of-age supernatural movie. You just invariably are going to need to be more violent, and more aggressive and maybe more shocking, to escalate aspects of the movie beyond what the first movie did, because a good portion of the audience, the teenagers who grew up really loving 'The Black Phone,' they're older now."
Essentially, then, as Derrickson sees it, making "Black Phone 2" a high school movie comes with a built-in stake-raising mechanism. But there was more propelling his decision.
Black Phone 2 takes some cues from the Terrifier films
"The Black Phone" told the story of middle school kids menaced by the mysterious child abductor and serial killer The Grabber. In "Black Phone 2," Ethan Hawke's villain has returned to once again terrorize Finney Blake and his sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw). This time, though, Finney is a 17-year-old high-schooler, and that four-year time jump was crucial for Scott Derrickson.
During his SFX interview, Derrickson went on to explain how he very much had the audience's real-world experiences in-mind when choosing to make Finney and his friends significantly older in "Black Phone 2." Specifically, the director knew that viewers of his new movie are the same "kids who paid to see 'Terrifier.'" Damien Leone's uber-violent slasher (or "megaslasher," as Mike Flanagan has dubbed it) and its two sequels certainly raised some stakes of their own, especially in terms of the amount of gore a mainstream theatrical release can showcase. They also seem to have had a direct impact on "Black Phone 2."
For Derrickson, the influence of Leone's movies was significant enough to mean that "Black Phone 2" needed to be more gory to appease its audience, which is coming to the film as a more hardened, desensitized group. Discussing his own sequel, the director remarked, "There's certainly more intensity and more gore. We were rated R, and one of the things we were rated R for was gore. There's no gore in the first movie at all." That, alongside the general need to raise the stakes, was so important to Derrickson that he claims to have delayed making "Black Phone 2" in order to ensure his actors were old enough. (In the interim, he made the Anya Taylor-Joy and Miles Teller-starring sci-fi/romance/thriller "The Gorge" for AppleTV.)
Scott Derrickson had a personal interest in telling a more mature story in Black Phone 2
In "Black Phone 2," Finney Blake is understandably traumatized by his previous experience, and despite his attempts to handle his pain through marijuana, he can't help but lash out as he struggles to suppress his anger. That makes "Black Phone 2" a much more mature story from the off, regardless of its gore levels, and it seems Scott Derrickson knew he needed to make such a tale, if only for his own interest. "I really loved both the characters from the first," he told SFX, adding:
"I loved the actors, these kids really put their hearts into it. It was really interesting reconnecting with them, just seeing who they had become as people. The change that you go through between middle school and high school may be one of the biggest, most dramatic changes you go through in your lifetime, and I was really interested in who these characters have become, having gone through something so extraordinary."
With that in mind, the director intensified the violence and horror in his follow-up movie in order to tell a more grown-up story (as opposed to simply trying to be "edgier"). "I was interested in being more mature," he continued. "Going deeper into the emotions of these characters and trying to make a movie that worked as a pair." If Stephen King's "Black Phone 2" review is anything to go by, that was the right call. At the time of writing, the sequel has been by and large well received by critics, all of which suggests Derrickson knew exactly what he was doing with the project.
"Black Phone 2" is now playing in theaters.