Why Ethan Hawke’s Grabber Targets Older Victims in Black Phone 2

Scott Derrickson’s 2022 horror film “The Black Phone” was a box office success, which was refreshing news not only for the horror genre, but also for modern cinema in general. Rather than creating a sequel, the film – an adaptation of Joe Hill’s 2004 short story of the same name – settled for telling a standalone story. Of course, in Hollywood, anything that sells tickets will almost certainly be tracked, and that’s exactly what we have now. “Black Phone 2,” which Rafael Motamayor of /Film dubbed “Dream Warriors good,” isn’t a simple rehash of the first film either. Derrickson really tried to up the ante with his sequel, and a big part of that was making the victims of Ethan Hawke’s The Grabber much older than in the first film.

In “The Black Phone”, Mason Thames’ Finney Blake was 13 when he was kidnapped by The Grabber. The sequel, however, takes place four years later, and that was very intentional on the part of Derrickson and co-writer C. Robert Cargill. The director spoke with SFX Magazine for its November 2025 issue and shared that he was interested in making a high school movie for the sequel because of the “more interesting emotional stakes.” He continued:

“It requires a different tone than a middle school supernatural coming-of-age movie. You’ll invariably have to be more violent, more aggressive, and maybe more shocking, to intensify certain aspects of the movie beyond what the first movie did, because a lot of the audience, the teenagers who grew up really loving ‘The Black Phone,’ are older now.”

Essentially, Derrickson says, making “Black Phone 2” a high school movie comes with a built-in mechanism for raising the stakes. But other factors motivated his decision.

“The Black Phone” tells the story of middle school students threatened by the mysterious child kidnapper and serial killer The Grabber. In “Black Phone 2,” Ethan Hawke’s villain returns to once again terrorize Finney Blake and her sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw). This time, however, Finney is a 17-year-old high school student, and this four-year time jump was crucial for Scott Derrickson.

During his SFX interview, Derrickson went on to explain how he really had audiences’ real-world experiences in mind when he chose to de-age Finney and his friends in “Black Phone 2.” More to the point, the director knew that the viewers of his new film are the same “kids who paid to see ‘Terrify.'” Damien Leone’s ultra-violent slasher (or “megaslasher,” as Mike Flanagan dubbed it) and its two sequels have certainly raised issues of their own, particularly in terms of the amount of gore a mainstream theatrical release can feature. They also seem to have had a direct impact on “Black Phone 2”.

For Derrickson, the influence of Leone’s films was significant enough to mean that “Black Phone 2” had to be bloodier to appease his audience, who approached the film as a more hardened and desensitized group. Of his own sequel, the director remarked: “There’s definitely 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 at all in the first movie.” This, alongside the general need to raise the stakes, was so important to Derrickson that he claims to have delayed the making of “Black Phone 2” in order to ensure his actors were old enough. (Meanwhile, he directed the sci-fi/romance/thriller starring Anya Taylor-Joy and Miles Teller “The Gorge” for AppleTV.)

In “Black Phone 2”, Finney Blake is understandably traumatized by his previous experience, and despite his attempts to manage his pain with marijuana, he cannot help but lash out as he struggles to suppress his anger. This makes “Black Phone 2” a much more mature story from the start, regardless of its level of gore, and it seems like Scott Derrickson knew he had to make such a story, if only for his own sake. “I really loved both characters in the first one,” he told SFX, adding:

“I loved the actors, these kids really poured their hearts into it. It was really interesting to reconnect with them, just to see who they had become as people. The change you experience between middle school and high school is perhaps one of the biggest and most dramatic changes you go through in your life, and I was really interested in who these characters became, after experiencing something so extraordinary.”

With this in mind, the director ramped up the violence and horror in his next film in order to tell a more adult story (instead of just trying to be “edgier”). “I wanted to be more mature,” he continued. “Deep the emotions of these characters and try to make a film that works as a duo.” If the review of Stephen King’s “Black Phone 2” is anything to go by, it was the right decision. As of this writing, the sequel has been generally well-received by critics, suggesting that Derrickson knew exactly what he was doing with the project.

“Black Phone 2” is now playing in theaters.