Warning: This post contains spoilers for Black Phone 2.
By the end of 2022’s The Black Phone, 13-year-old Finney Shaw (Mason Thames) had managed to kill the serial child abductor and murderer known as the Grabber (Ethan Hawke) with the help of the spirits of some of his previous victims—all of whom were able to contact Finney through a disconnected rotary phone mounted to the wall of the basement where the Grabber was keeping his intended prey.
Unfortunately, it soon becomes clear in Black Phone 2, now in theaters, that the Grabber is still a threat from beyond the grave. Set in 1982, four years after the events of the original, the sequel follows a now-17-year-old Finney and his psychic 15-year-old sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) as they track the origins of the Grabber’s horrifying exploits to a Christian winter camp deep in the Rocky Mountains and realize their family’s tormenter isn’t exactly gone for good.
Writer-director Scott Derrickson (Sinister, Doctor Strange) and his co-writer, C. Robert Cargill, have said the seeds of the idea for the follow-up film came from Joe Hill, the author of the 2004 short story on which the first movie was based and son of horror legend Stephen King. “He just said, ‘A phone rings, Finney answers, and it’s the Grabber calling from Hell,'” Cargill told Bloody Disgusting.
However, according to Derrickson, the concept of the Grabber’s Hell being a realm of freezing cold and ice rather than burning heat and fire was lifted from the Inferno, the famed first section of Dante Alighieri’s 14th-century narrative poem “The Divine Comedy.” “The whole idea of Hell being a cold place, that all comes from Dante, and the old literature philosophy students, and my love for the Inferno,” he told Bloody Disgusting. “I just think that the idea of the Grabber being the worst of the worst and coming from the ninth circle of Hell, where people are frozen in ice, is a compelling idea.”
The Shaw siblings decide to visit the camp at Alpine Lake after…
