Is Black Phone 2 a Stealth Nightmare on Elm Street Movie?
Spoilers ahead for the plot and ending of Black Phone 2.
“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” sounds like a quote made up by someone who wanted a pass for light plagiarism, but there’s still some truth to it. In horror, a genre that’s always building on itself, homage is par for the course. While that sometimes means lazy pastiche and shameless rip-offs, there are canonical classics like Scream and Get Out that expand on and deepen the films they borrow from. In many ways, the best-case scenario for horror is a movie that’s in conversation with those that came before it, attempting something thoroughly original alongside loving tributes to the genre’s past.
Black Phone 2 is not a best-case scenario. The problem is not that it cribs from one of the greatest horror franchises of all time — though it does, repeatedly — but that it’s a watered-down version of something done much better decades ago. The first Black Phone, based on a Joe Hill short story of the same name, had a fairly original conceit if arguably lackluster execution: After Finney (Mason Thames) is kidnapped by a serial child killer known as the Grabber (Ethan Hawke), he begins receiving calls from the spirits of the Grabber’s previous victims, who help Finney fight back and escape. The new sequel, meanwhile, solves the problem of the Grabber’s demise at the end of the last movie by giving him the power to attack Finney’s little sister, Gwen (Madeleine McGraw), in her dreams. Straying far from Hill’s source material, screenwriters Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill have their central villain go full Freddy Krueger.
To be fair, some of the groundwork for this twist was laid in The Black Phone, which saw Gwen’s prophetic dreams lead police to the location of the Grabber’s buried victims. That movie also established that death is not the end in this universe, so it’s not exactly surprising that the killer would find a way to return. But there are enough specific similarities between Black Phone 2 and various Nightmare on Elm Street films that the new movie starts to feel like it’s in the wrong franchise. Given that the future of the Nightmare series has been in limbo since the dreadful 2010 remake, is Black Phone 2 Universal’s way around procuring the rights? Let’s break down the overlap.
The Grabber returns from the dead to attack through dreams.
We’ll start with the obvious: After getting his neck snapped by Finney in The Black Phone, the Grabber is, at least initially, only able to attack through Gwen’s dreams. That’s Freddy Krueger’s entire M.O., of course, as is being motivated by revenge. In A Nightmare on Elm Street and its sequels, Freddy seeks retribution against the parents who burned him alive by going after their children. The Grabber wants revenge against Finney for killing him, so he goes after the person Finney loves most: his sister. Like Freddy, particularly as explained in movies like The Dream Master and The Dream Child, the Grabber gains strength from the souls of his victims. This has brought him to Alpine Lake, a Christian camp where he committed his first murders in the ’50s. He’s feeding off the aimless spirits of the three boys he slaughtered, whose bodies were never found. Those same boys have drawn Gwen to Alpine Lake, where she — along with Finney, their friend Ernesto (Miguel Mora), camp supervisor Armando (Demián Bichir), and other Alpine Lake staff — must figure out how to put their souls to rest.
Things go south for Gwen almost immediately at Alpine Lake. The first night she’s there, she dreams of the murdered boys and is shocked to discover that things that happen to her physically while she’s dreaming also happen to her body in the real world. But the Nightmare vibes skyrocket once the Grabber starts showing up in Gwen’s dreams. He’s clearly borrowing from Freddy when he leads her into the camp kitchens — the blazing fire in the ovens gives the space a real boiler-room feel — and starts throwing her around the room. When Finney, Ernesto, and the camp employees find Gwen, she’s being tossed around the kitchen by an invisible force. It looks awfully close to Tina’s death in the first Nightmare on Elm Street, though Gwen thankfully wakes up before she’s torn to shreds.
The Grabber gets a familiar backstory.
It’s bizarrely treated as a big reveal when we learn that the person responsible for killing three boys in the ’50s is the same person who kidnapped Finney and murdered several other children. Before he became known as the Grabber, he was a maintenance man at Alpine Lake who everyone called Wild Bill Hickok. (No one knows his real name, apparently. How else to explain that Armando never made the connection between the man identified as the Grabber and a former camp employee?) This origin story doesn’t exactly match that of Freddy Krueger in the original eight movies, where he was a janitor at a power plant in his human life, but it’s very close to the Freddy backstory we get in the 2010 remake. In that movie, he was a preschool groundskeeper who spent plenty of time with children before he began sexually abusing and murdering them.
The Grabber is not expressly a pedophile, but the Black Phone movies keep this intentionally vague. The same is true in the original Nightmare on Elm Street series — Wes Craven first conceived of Freddy as a child molester, then decided to soften that to child killer. But the association, articulated more clearly in the remake, is certainly there in all the Nightmare movies. And it’s there in the Black Phone films, where the Grabber’s predilection for adolescent boys is simply never remarked on. When he tells Finney about his “insatiable need” or asks Armando to “tell the boys I miss them,” it’s hard to ignore the connotation. Similarly, Finney’s trauma over what happened to him in the Grabber’s basement is paired with an insistence that no one knows what he went through down there. As in Nightmare, Black Phone 2 wants us to imagine something it wisely refuses to spell out.
Gwen becomes a dream warrior.
If there’s a Nightmare movie that Black Phone 2 owes a direct debt to, it’s 1987’s Dream Warriors. In that sequel, original Final Girl Nancy (Heather Langenkamp) returns to teach Freddy’s new victims how to use their dream powers to fight back. In Black Phone 2, Finney guides his little sister on, well, how to use her dream powers to fight back. She’s been studying lucid dreaming (just like the titular dream warriors), and at a pivotal moment, she discovers that she can take control of her dream and pull out a supernatural strength she doesn’t have in the real world. We see that when she uses the power of her mind to explode a phone booth in which the Grabber has trapped her. Black Phone 2 doesn’t make nearly as much use of Gwen’s dream-warrior status as it should, but it’s clear Derrickson and Cargill are fans of the third Nightmare film.
The Grabber is defeated through the proper burial of bones.
Freddy Krueger can never really die — the sixth movie is called Freddy’s Dead, and he returned in New Nightmare and Freddy vs. Jason — but he is defeated in most of his movies. On more than one occasion, that’s accomplished by finding bones. In Dream Warriors, Neil (Craig Wasson) and Nancy’s dad (John Saxon) have to locate Freddy’s bones and sprinkle them with holy water to put his soul to rest. In The Dream Child, Yvonne (Kelly Jo Minter) has to find the remains of Freddy’s mother for reasons that are slightly less clear, though it’s the same basic idea: Proper burials solve a lot of problems.
It’s no surprise, then, that the climax of Black Phone 2 hinges on finding the bones of the three murdered campers, which the Grabber hid under the ice in a frozen lake. In a convoluted finale that sees the Grabber on skates (one of Black Phone 2’s few highlights), a sleeping Gwen is able to swim under the ice and locate the barrels where the boys’ bodies have been stashed. Gwen and Finney beat the crap out of the Grabber, with an assist from the spirits of the murdered children, who help drag him away. That’s not exactly a direct lift, though the souls of Freddy’s victims do tear him apart in The Dream Master. And, sure, the concept of ghosts as restless spirits is not unique to Nightmare on Elm Street, but in the context of a movie that cribs so heavily from the Nightmare series, it’s impossible not to make the connection. In the end, though, Black Phone 2’s relationship to Nightmare on Elm Street feels less like plagiarism than narrative laziness — but if the Grabber returns in a few years to fight Jason Voorhees, Freddy might want to consult a lawyer.
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