The Black Phone 2 Full Movie
Amit Bolds
In 1978, a local serial child abductor and murderer only known as "The Grabber" prowls the streets of a suburb in North Denver, Colorado. Finney Blake and his younger sister Gwen live in the area with their abusive, alcoholic father Terrence, whose wife died by suicide after having a series of disturbing psychic dreams. Finney is frequently bullied and harassed at school, but his friend and classmate Robin fends off the bullies.
Having inherited her mother's ability, Gwen dreams about the Grabber's abduction of Bruce, a boy Finney knew from Little League. Two police detectives, Wright and Miller, interview Gwen at school, believing she may know the Grabber. When Terrence learns about the questioning, he gives Gwen a beating. Soon afterward, the Grabber abducts first Robin and then Finney.
Finney awakens in a soundproofed basement with a disconnected black rotary dial telephone on one wall. It begins to ring on its own at times; Finney hears only static when he first answers it, but then hears Bruce's voice telling him about a floor tile he can remove to dig an escape tunnel. Finney starts to dig, but the house's foundations are sunk too deeply for him to go beneath them.
The Grabber brings Finney a meal and leaves the basement door unlocked. As Finney is about to sneak out, he gets a call from Billy, another past victim. Billy warns Finney that the Grabber is waiting at the top of the basement stairs to punish him if he tries to leave, as part of a cruel game. At Billy's suggestion, Finney uses a hidden length of cable to climb up to the basement window; however, his weight pulls out the grate covering the pane, leaving him with no way to reach it again.
As Gwen confides to Terrence about her dreams of Finney's abduction, Wright and Miller question an eccentric man named Max who is staying in the area with his brother and has shown great interest in the Grabber's crimes. It is revealed that Finney is being held in Max's basement and that the Grabber is his brother.
Finney receives a call from Griffin, a third victim, who gives him the combination to the lock securing the house's front door and tells him that the Grabber has fallen asleep. He sneaks out and unlocks the door, but the Grabber quickly recaptures Finney after his dog Samson barks to wake him. A fourth victim, a juvenile delinquent named Vance, calls to tell Finney he can break through a wall and into a freezer in the adjacent room. Finney does so but finds the freezer door locked. As Finney despairs over his fate, he receives one last call from Robin, who urges him to stand up for himself and fight back by packing the phone receiver with dirt to use as a bludgeon.
After seeing the Grabber's house in a vision, Gwen calls Wright and Miller to give them the address. The police rush to the house and find the bodies of the Grabber's victims buried in the basement. Meanwhile, Max realizes Finney is being held in the basement and rushes to free him, but the Grabber kills him with an axe and attacks Finney, having decided to end his game. Finney uses the byproducts from his previous escape attempts to trap the Grabber in a pit he has dug, beats him with the receiver, and breaks his neck with the phone cord as his past victims taunt him.
Throwing a steak from the freezer to Samson as a distraction, Finney leaves the house, which turns out to be across the street from the one the police have raided. Terrence tearfully begs Finney and Gwen to forgive his earlier treatment of them. Sometime later, now viewed as a hero at school, a newly confident Finney sits next to his crush in class and says she can call him Finn.
The Black Phone emerged from filmmakers Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill's adaptation of Joe Hill's short story of the same name, published in the horror anthology 20th Century Ghosts (2005). Derrickson came across 20th Century Ghosts shortly after its initial US release.[4] The director was eager to conceive a film faithful to "The Black Phone", which fascinated him in its framing of a conventional serial killer story, but struggled to produce ideas of his own devising.[4][5] He shelved the project to focus on his professional relationship with Cargill, forged from Sinister (2012), and his contractual obligations to Marvel Studios as director of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022).[6] Cargill briefly pitched for a replacement director in the interim, stopping once Derrickson convinced him to wait until he was available to commit.[6] Their collaboration resumed after Derrickson resigned from Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness over disputes about the film's artistic direction.[6][7]
By early 2021, the starring cast featured Jeremy Davies, Ethan Hawke, and James Ransone, the latter two in their second film with Derrickson after Sinister.[16][17][18] The director and Cargill did not envision one particular actor as The Grabber in their original character treatments, but sent Hawke the script because they had a rapport.[6] Hawke was disinclined to play villainous parts as he feared being typecast.[6] Yet The Black Phone story resonated with the actor, and the idea of The Grabber being concealed by a mask further enticed him.[6][19] Hawke's experience on the set of Sinister was another influence shaping his decision.[20] He developed his performance by honing expression in his voice and body.[19] Derrickson did not have many discussions with Hawke regarding The Grabber's portrayal because he felt showing him the mask would best yield their desired interpretation.[20]
Brett Jutkiewicz was The Black Phone's director of photography. Jutkiewicz had just finished filming Scream (2022) when he received the script from his agent. Derrickson approached him in mid-December 2020 to discuss ideas raised from Jutkiewicz's reading of The Black Phone script. They also bonded from discussing Jutkiewicz's work in the satirical horror film Ready or Not (2019), which had impressed Derrickson. After an interviewing period, the producers formally contracted Jutkiewicz that January.[29] Derrickson's instruction was to implement a look evoking the 1970s period in which the film is set. The production used source material, such as New York-set 1970s movies, not so much to glean textural ideas as to establish the appropriate tone for the setting and storytelling.[29] This, according to Jutkiewicz, meant experimenting with color grading techniques to produce a high contrast, muted, but not desaturated, visual palette.[29] To achieve this image quality, and to reduce the picture's range of hues, filmmakers mixed colors using specialized lookup tables (LUT).[29] The choice of LUTs was contingent on the brightness of sets; for example, Jutkiewicz employed a darker LUT to preserve the image palette of dimly-lit basement scenes.[29]
VFX Legion was responsible for The Black Phone's visual effects, in their second project with Derrickson.[30] Development of the visual effects began in pre-production, under the supervision of VFX Legion co-founders James David Hattin and Nate Smalley. Their work for the film comprised 200 shots of matte and digital compositing effects, such as green screening, set extensions, superimposed practical stunt effects, camera transitions, computer-generated imagery (CGI), and rig removal.[30] Maya, Nuke, Houdini, and Redshift were among the software used to handle rendering and animation tasks. VFX Legion was also present on set to critique the shoot and rectify problems with the filmmaking.[30]
One of the special effect team's most complex assignments was rendering the stunt of a Grabber victim's violent retreat to the spiritual realm. VFX Legion supervisor Ken Johnson managed the scene's filming on set. VFX Legion then developed a digital model of the actor from a 3D scan animated with retopologized graphics and textures, allowing them to employ ragdoll physics for fluid movement. This was a labor intensive process because the filmmakers wanted the movement of the digital model to project a loss of control, and the stunt's combined animation to be slow enough to show that the victim was being forced into a void.[30] Another challenging sequence saw VFX Legion modify in-home tracking shots with CGI, which entailed altering the frame rate of footage to maintain a continuously steady speed.[30]
Designing The Grabber's masks became a core goal, in part because Blumhouse Productions planned to showcase them in ads for the film.[31] While the script detailed a prototype of two worn leather masks painted with a smiling and a frowning devil, this concept evolved when Derrickson proposed the addition of a mouthless mask. They convey despair, joy, and nihility in exaggerated form, reminiscent of tragic comic masks of ancient Greek theatre.[32] Derrickson and Blumhouse producer Ryan Turek solicited five visual effects companies for the mask-making, including Callosum Studios, a Pittsburgh-based studio founded by prosthetic makeup artists Jason Baker and Tom Savini.[31][32][33] Of the illustrations submitted, Callosum's most closely resembled the vision of the producers. Savini and Baker were engaged to handle the creation of up to 30 masks for gags, stunts, specific scenes, and pandemic mitigation, in a process that lasted a month. The approval of sketches took about two weeks, followed by the construction of pieces in about a day or two.[32] The filmmakers drew on diverse material for reference, among them ceramic masks, circus masks, antique dolls, William Hickey's Coney Island Barker, the horror film Mr. Sardonicus (1961), and the exaggerated grin of Conrad Veidt's Gwynplaine in the silent film The Man Who Laughs (1928).[31][32]
Derrickson imagined the mouthless mask after Hawke was hired, since he wanted the actor's face to be partially displayed in some of The Black Phone.[20] He developed the design further by envisioning scenarios that examined The Grabber's motivations, his choice of masks in interactions with Finney, et cetera.[32] The fully realized concept surfaced from Savini's original sketches, at which point the filmmakers began contemplating age, consistency, and the application of each mask.[20] They constructed the pieces from moldings of procured life masks of Hawke's face, a task complicated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Callosum conducted the face casting sessions in Hawke's home office in New York because the actor was not comfortable traveling. They then sculpted masks from their Pittsburgh studio before returning to New York for test fittings.[32] The finished pieces were created from a fiberglass-resin mixture paneled with felt and foam padding. As well, the filmmakers constructed replicas for stunts out of lightweight rubber and latex.[32]
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