{"id":979704,"date":"2025-10-01T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-10-01T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.denofgeek.com\/?p=979704"},"modified":"2025-09-30T17:57:38","modified_gmt":"2025-09-30T21:57:38","slug":"black-phone-2-real-life-experience-the-grabber","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.denofgeek.com\/movies\/black-phone-2-real-life-experience-the-grabber\/","title":{"rendered":"Black Phone 2: The Creepy Real-Life Experience That Brought the Grabber Back"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Longtime collaborators and horror connoisseurs <a href=\"https:\/\/www.denofgeek.com\/scott-derrickson\/\">Scott Derrickson<\/a> and C. Robert Cargill are not big on doing sequels. Granted, a lot of folks in Hollywood say that before making one, but few have such a rich history of walking away from the alleged sure-thing. Whether it was turning down the chance to helm <em>Sinister 2<\/em> or having much at all to do with Marvel\u2019s eventual <em>Doctor Strange <\/em>continuation, Derrickson and Cargill always found themselves searching for greener, fresher pastures\u2014including eschewing MCU money in favor of making a mean, gritty little chiller that starred Ethan Hawke as a child predator in a mask: 2021\u2019s <em>The Black Phone<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Even so, when the specter of a <em>Black Phone 2<\/em> came around, neither Derrickson or Cargill could let this ghost go\u2014particularly after author Joe Hill called Cargill up with his own lucid dream of an idea that would expand the narrative of the first film, which itself is based on a short story by Hill.<\/p>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-cnx-video-embed\"><script id=\"bbd468c5f1134ca6988d13270613c704\">\n(new Image()).src = 'https:\/\/capi.connatix.com\/tr\/si?token=6cc529b5-0e26-45aa-a63b-0ffed4b3437f&cid=1ffe12eb-eb53-11e9-b4d2-06948452ae1a';\n  cnx.cmd.push(function() {\n    cnx({\n      playerId: \"6cc529b5-0e26-45aa-a63b-0ffed4b3437f\"\n,      mediaId: \"9d6d63cc-cdf6-43bc-8e8d-ceeefd0b8869\"\n    }).render(\"bbd468c5f1134ca6988d13270613c704\");\n  });\n<\/script><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cThe core pitch was one line,\u201d screenwriter Cargill recalls with a slowly spreading grin when we catch up with them at <a href=\"https:\/\/www.denofgeek.com\/fantastic-fest\/\">Fantastic Fest<\/a>. \u201cA phone rings, Finney answers, and it\u2019s the Grabber calling him from Hell. And I was like, \u2018Oh fuck yeah.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It\u2019s a stark image, one which has become the central conceit of <em>Black Phone 2<\/em>\u2019s marketing strategy. Our core survivor and hero of the first film, Mason Thomas\u2019 young Finney, is now a teenager who\u2019s lived to see the 1980s. He\u2019s defeated the Grabber and witnessed Hawke\u2019s repellent manifestation of real-world evil consigned to the gates of perdition. Yet in a lonely telephone booth on a deeply frigid night, a phone rings, and outside the booth, the Grabber\u2019s sinister mask hovers against the frozen glass like he was the devil himself. Finney picks up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u00a0\u201cJoe went in and had all of these smaller ideas,\u201d Cargill continues. \u201cSome of them are in the movie, some of them didn\u2019t quite work, because he was just spitballing, it hit him like a truck, but he called me up, and I was like, &#8216;You have to call Scott.\u2019\u201d They had a movie to make.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Sitting in our Austin studio the morning after <em>Black Phone 2<\/em>&#8216;s world premiere, Derrickson and Cargill seem appropriately pleased with the turn of events for their sequel, which by design leap-frogs past the first film\u2019s 1970s setting and aesthetics for a 1982 follow-up. In the new movie, Finney is now  in high school, as is little sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw), the latter of whom takes on a more pronounced role since she too becomes bedeviled by bleak dreams involving their mother, the Grabber, and a winter camp nestled in the Rockies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The setup obviously provides a different context for the sequel, and yet it was one that Derrickson and Cargill knew intimately from their own childhoods in the same era. The wintertime Christian camp proved especially vital to painting with an authenticity and nostalgia that would be alien to most.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cWinter camps in the Rockies are something I went to as a teenager,\u201d director Derrickson reveals to us.\u00a0 \u201cI [brought in] specifically the dangerousness of the weather, and the idea that there are these old structures that were old in 1982. They would rattle in the storms; they didn\u2019t feel safe when you were in them, and you probably weren\u2019t as safe as you thought you were. Being 16 or 17 years old, there\u2019s a heightened sense of existence when you\u2019re in an environment like that, especially at night when it can be 20 or 30 degrees below zero in a storm. I think all of that, and the spiritual texture with it [in] Gwen\u2019s dreams, and the religious conversations, all of that was very real to my high school experience.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It also came out of a central conceit he and Cargill settled on as writers: they would have the Grabber tell Finney \u201cHell isn\u2019t flames, it\u2019s ice,\u201d a visual motif informed almost entirely by Dante\u2019s Ninth Circle of Hell in <em>The Divine Comedy<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Says Derrickson, \u201cThe Dante reference is really the thing. I love Dante\u2019s book. I\u2019ve read the whole&nbsp;<em>Divine Comedy<\/em>, but the&nbsp;<em>Inferno&nbsp;<\/em>is really the part people gawk over, and I think the idea that of the Ninth Circle of Hell being ice where the worst of the worst are\u2014they are the betrayers, and there is something about the Grabber being a betrayer to the kids, to his brother, and being the worst kind of person that there is\u2014and the inversion of the flame mythology with the ice mythology, that just made sense to me.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yet if Derrickson was drawing on his own youth, Cargill also brought in his own eerie real-life experience as a counselor at a summer camp.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cI worked at a Christian youth camp, so a lot of the rules and texture of how the camp works came from my experiences of working at these camps,\u201d Cargill says. Some of this was from the lighter side of nostalgia, such as counselors in the 1980s often creating fake names just for their campers (Cargill muses there are adults out there right now who don&#8217;t know their beloved Counselor Bogie co-wrote that <em>Doctor Strange <\/em>movie they saw decades later). But it was far from all fun and games.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cI had a horror movie experience at one of those camps,&#8221; he confides. &#8220;It was literally on a weekend where most of the kids were gone, and I was one of the only counselors on, taking care of the stay-over kids staying for more than a week, and we had a guy in a mask break into the girls\u2019 cabin,\u201d Cargill says. \u201cAnd when a girl walked in, she saw a guy in a mask with a weapon, and she took off. We had to grab the kids and get the rifles from the rifle range and hole up at the main house while we called the police and had them scour the grounds.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>They never did find the masked intruder. And for the rest of the summer, children and counselors alike dreaded \u201cthere was some masked guy out in the woods.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>An experience like that can help explain why despite intentionally returning to the well-worn genre staple of a camp setting\u2014albeit at winter instead of summer\u2014there is a tactile chilliness to <em>Black Phone 2<\/em> that is more than just the temperature on set.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Much of this, again, comes down to Hawke\u2019s performance as the Grabber, which is less frequently on screen in <em>Black Phone 2<\/em> but constantly felt. According to Derrickson, it was something Hawke approached with at least mild trepidation since. In his mind, the actor had never committed to a sequel before either\u2014an interesting perspective since Hawke of course co-wrote and starred in Richard Linklater\u2019s <em>Before Sunset <\/em>and <em>Before Midnight. <\/em>\u201cThat doesn\u2019t count, I wrote it!\u201d Hawke told his horror director.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Like Derrickson and Cargill though, Hawke became enthralled with the idea of a Grabber spat back out from Hell with what little shreds of humanity he had being stripped away. All that\u2019s left is the demonic. The conception of an \u201880s child killer coming back in the dreams of his intended victims\u2014Gwen and Finney\u2014obviously owes a debt to Freddy Krueger. However, the co-writers of <em>Black Phone 2<\/em> note significant differences from their biggest influence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cThe thing is we are adjacent to <em>Nightmare on Elm Street<\/em>,\u201d acknowledges Cargill. \u201cOf course it was a big inspiration. <em>Dream Warriors<\/em> in particular was the big inspiration. We love <em>Dream Warriors<\/em>. <em>A Nightmare on Elm Street <\/em>is the best in the series, but <em>Dream Warriors <\/em>is everyone\u2019s favorite for a reason. It\u2019s just such a great movie. But here [the Grabber\u2019s] rules, his powers, he isn\u2019t able to do something like Freddy Krueger does. Freddy Krueger is a vengeful spirit, who is wreaking havoc on people who had nothing to do with him by the end of the series. He\u2019s just killing to kill, and the Grabber is a singular being of revenge that wants to get revenge on one person in the universe, and he wants to hurt that person so badly.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Derrickson also points out that the reason they cast Hawke is what makes this a different, perhaps even more unseemly beast.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cThe biggest difference between the two characters is how talkative the Grabber is,\u201d the director considers. \u201cWords are his weapons, inciting fear, the first part of his sadistic torture is scaring them with his language. That\u2019s why we got Ethan to do this movie, because he is such an eloquent speaker and interpreter of lines, and he says a lot in this movie. He says a lot in the first movie. He\u2019s not running around doing one-line quips. Instead he\u2019s speaking perfect paragraphs about the nature of Hell itself.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It was core to making a sequel that neither Derrickson or Cargill, nor they hope the audience, can resist. In fact, it is this performance, plus those of young Thames and McGraw, which ultimately drew the filmmakers back into the Grabber\u2019s dark orbit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cThe kids,\u201d Cargill finally answers for the main reason they came back. \u201cWe loved working with the kids and we talked about how much we wanted to work with them again, and when this opportunity came up, it was \u2018oh we love those characters, let\u2019s revisit them. Let\u2019s wait until they\u2019re teenagers, so we can see who they are as teens and evolve it that way.\u2019 We just wanted to work with those kids again.\u201d And maybe put to bed some of their own ghosts of youth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Black Phone 2 opens on Oct. 17,  2025.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Longtime collaborators and horror connoisseurs Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill are not big on doing sequels. Granted, a lot of folks in Hollywood say that before making one, but few have such a rich history of walking away from the alleged sure-thing. Whether it was turning down the chance to helm Sinister 2 or [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":48,"featured_media":979714,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"dog_exclude_from_homepage":false,"dog_do_not_display_featured_image":false,"dog_external_link":"","dog_product_price":0,"dog_product_button_label":"Buy Now","apple_news_api_created_at":"","apple_news_api_id":"","apple_news_api_modified_at":"","apple_news_api_revision":"","apple_news_api_share_url":"","apple_news_cover_media_provider":"image","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_cover_video_id":0,"apple_news_cover_video_url":"","apple_news_cover_embedwebvideo_url":"","apple_news_is_hidden":"","apple_news_is_paid":"","apple_news_is_preview":"","apple_news_is_sponsored":"","apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":[],"apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[756],"article_type":[],"topic":[69561,1621,69560,6547,62002],"sponsored":[],"feeds":[],"coauthors":[292],"class_list":{"0":"post-979704","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"topic-fantastic-fest","9":"topic-horror","10":"topic-msn-article","11":"topic-scott-derrickson","12":"topic-video","13":"entry"},"apple_news_notices":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v26.0 (Yoast SEO v26.0) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Black Phone 2: The Creepy Real-Life Experience That Brought the Grabber Back | Den of Geek<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Exclusive: Director Scott Derrickson and co-writer C. 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