Warning: spoilers for Black phone 2 below!Black phone 2 brought the world of 2021 by Scott Derrickson The black phone back to the cinema, and with him, the iconic horror film villain. Set in 1982, four years after Finney escaped from the Grabber’s clutches with the help of the ghosts of his other victims and his psychic sister Gwen, the child-targeting serial killer played by Ethan Hawke terrorizes them once again.
This despite The black phone ending with Finney overpowering his captor and snapping his neck – as for the boys calling via the titular, disconnected rotary phone, death wasn’t really the end for the Grabber. But unlike his victims, he can do more than just talk to those who have the gift of listening.
So how Black phone 2 explain the return of the Grabber? And what exactly can this killer ghost do?
The Grabber has been to hell and back (sort of)
The first hint of the Grabber’s reappearance (you know, aside from marketing) comes where you’d expect it to be. Gwen, who has taken to sleepwalking, is led by the ringing of a telephone to the basement where her brother was being held captive. The killer comes down the stairs menacingly when Finney arrives and wakes her, thus dispelling the threat.
But ultimately, its scope expanded considerably. Although it initially appears that Gwen’s dream contact with her teenage mother led her, Finney, and Ernesto to pursue a whole new case of unsolved murders at the Alpine Lake children’s camp, it all goes back to the Grabber. He lured the two Blake children into the winter wilderness to punish Finney by killing his sister in her already supernatural dreams.
As time goes on, the film reveals more about how this happened. The Grabber did indeed die and was, unsurprisingly, sent to hell. for being an evil child murderer. But according to him, hell is not exactly as it is described. In addition to being ice rather than flameit’s not a place one is necessarily trapped in forever. His afterlife stripped him of all that remained of humanity, leaving behind only his sins.
This explains some crucial changes in characterization since The black phone has Black phone 2. In the original, Hawke plays a warped psychological profile whose origin we never really learn, but who is most certainly human. He has faults, weaknesses and a disturbing emotionality.
The specter of the Grabber, on the other hand, seems much more like a force of pure malevolence. He seems capable only of cruelty and rage, and he is primarily motivated by revenge against Finney personally, rather than simply using her as a vehicle for some sort of abstract role-playing game. He became a different type of horror movie villain than the one we first met.
His ability to manifest to Gwen can probably be attributed to two things. First of all, In The black phoneone of the ghost boys confirms that the Grabber can hear the phone ringingjust like Finney. If he had a latent supernatural ability in life, it is reasonable that he could wield more power than the average mind.
Second, it is revealed when Black phone 2 that he worked at Alpine Lake, and the three dead boys Gwen dreamed of were his first three victims. The film explains that he is able to draw power from his victims as long as they remain unknownand since The black phone ending with Gwen dreaming about where he buried his victims’ bodies in Denver, these three are his only unsolved murders – as far as we know.
The Grabber’s power appears to increase once the Blakes arrive at Alpine Lake, suggesting that the proximity of the boys’ bodies is a factor. This would explain why he appears so limited in Gwen’s Denver dreams and why it took four years for his plan to gain traction.
The Grabber’s Supernatural Powers, Explained
In The black phonethe Grabber was just a man, albeit a darkly twisted one. In Black phone 2as an entity of pure sin, he gained quite a significant improvement. Like other ghosts in these films, he can appear in Gwen’s dreams and communicate with certain members of the living via disconnected phones. But it goes well beyond these limits.
Outside of Gwen’s special dream space, he cannot manifest physically, but he can sometimes interact with the material world. He is able to temporarily trap Finney in the phone booth, cut off the power to Armando’s office, and throw demonic snowballs at his window. In the film’s finale, when he is closest to the hidden bodies, he does anything from breaking the ice to causing bodily harm to people. But he nevertheless remains invisible.
In dreams, just like Freddy Krueger, he appears as himself and can physically attack Gwen in a way that impacts it in the physical world. If he picks her up and throws her, her real body flies across the room as if by an invisible force. If he cuts it, a gushing wound appears out of nowhere.
And it does more than just appear in these dreams. Rather than functioning as a door that he can pass through, the Grabber is able to send and control Gwen’s dreams, at least for a time. It’s unclear exactly how much influence he exerts when, say, Gwen talks to her mother – but there’s no denying that he’s the one who takes her back to the night her mother died.
His control over the ghosts of his victims in Gwen’s dreams seems variable. For one thing, not only do they surround her and terrify her in her first dream in Alpine Lake, but they lead her straight to the Grabber in the kitchen before she’s attacked for the first time. On the other hand, one of the ghosts saves her from the dream that takes place in Denver’s basement. Perhaps there is a distinction between a projection of the ghost generated by him and the spirit of the real boy, which is only distinguishable by the way they behave.
Eventually, despite its power, the Grabber proves vulnerable. Gwen discovers that she can compete with him in dream space with her own power, and although she likely would have perished if she had attempted to defeat him alone, the recovery of the bodies gradually weakened him until he could no longer resist her. At the end of the film, he is physically damaged and condemned to a barrel at the bottom of the lake, just as he leaves his first victims.
The feeling at the end of Black phone 2 is certainly that the threat is removed and the Blakes move to safety with a loving call from their mother. But it doesn’t seem like ghosts can dieso who’s to say that there aren’t still some hidden bodies that the Grabber can exploit in the future? Black phone 3?
- Release date
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October 17, 2025
- Runtime
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114 minutes
- Director
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Scott Derrickson
- Writers
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C. Robert Cargill, Scott Derrickson, Joe Hill
- Producers
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Jason Blum, C. Robert Cargill
