Scott Derrickson's 2021 horror film "The Black Phone" was a huge surprise: an adaptation of a 2004 short story of the same name by Joe Hill that hit big with general audiences, and for good reason. The movie was scary and fun, with a huge heart, big laughs, an incredible villain mask. It featured standout performances from Ethan Hawke as the terrifying Grabber, Mason Thames as his latest kidnapping victim, Finney Blake, and Madeleine McGraw as Finney's sister, Gwen. It was a movie with a clear and definitive ending, content to leave its mark and end it with an exclamation point rather than an ellipsis.

A sequel made sense, of course, from a commercial standpoint. Not only was "The Black Phone" a box office hit , but Ethan Hawke's The Grabber had such presence and strong iconography that

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