Pop Culture Happy Hour - Black Phone 2 And What’s Making Us Happy

Episode Date: October 17, 2025

Grabbers gonna grab, even from beyond the grave. In Black Phone 2, Ethan Hawke returns from the dead as the serial killer who hides behind a demonic mask. It’s four years later, and the siblings (Mason Thames and Madeleine McGraw) who survived the Grabber’s killing spree are having a hard time with things. They head off to camp to investigate Gwen's psychic nightmares of the Grabber's early victims.Follow Pop Culture Happy Hour on Letterboxd at letterboxd.com/nprpopcultureSee pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Grabber's going to grab, even from beyond the grave. That's what Black Phone 2 is all about. In the original, Ethan Hawk played a child of doctor-slash serial killer who hid behind a demonic mask. It's four years later, and the one kid who survived the Grabber's killing spree is having a hard time of things. To say nothing of his psychic little sister

whose dreams are literally haunted by the killer. I'm Glenn Welton, and today we're talking about Black Phone 2 on Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. Joining me today is Jordan Cruciola. She's a writer and producer and the host of the podcast feeling scene on Maximum Fun. Welcome back, Jordan. Hello, thank you so much for having me at this reunion special. Exactly, because this is the OG crew.

We reviewed the first one. Also with us is Kristen Mineser. She co-host The Nightly on Hatch Plus. Hey, Kristen. Hey, great to be back with you, too. Great to be back. Let's start it up again. In Blackphone 2, it's 1982.

Four years have passed since Finn, played by Mason Thames, escape the grabber's basement by killing him. Finn's in high school now and struggling because trauma. His little sister Gwen, whose psychic visions help the cops find Finn, is being tortured by dreams of the grabber murdering boys at a remote Christian camp. Gwen is once again played by Madeline McGraw. Together, because this is a horror movie and it's the kind of decision people only make in horror movies, Finn and Gwen decide to visit the camp in question in the middle of a blizzard.

If you're asking how Ethan Hawks Grabber can come back for the sequel, given that the character is dead, you really need to see more horror movies. Black Phone 2 is written and directed by the same folks behind the original. It's in theaters now. Kristen, if I may paraphrase the Steve Miller Band, as I'm often so want to do, Abra-A-A-Cadabra did this reach out and grab you. Oh, my God. Okay.

As with the original, I really liked the last. look of this movie. It has that super eight faded Polaroid sort of feeling. I like the characters and the costumes and set pieces. I really enjoyed all of that. But there are also things this time around that are different that I like. The claustrophobia of the basement, as you mentioned, Glenn, is now replaced with the endlessness of the snowy wilderness at this camp, which keeps it from feeling like a lazy repeat, which I was kind of afraid of. I'm like, oh, is this just going

to be back in the basement again, but it's not. More black phones. Yes. And it also. feels like the supernatural elements are more integrated into the story this time. And the first movie I sometimes felt like, where did that come from? But this time it's really folded in. And the movie overall has almost more of a nightmare on Umstreet feel versus a... This is Blackphone Dream Warriors for sure. Yes. Yes. This is Dream Warriors. Absolutely. And I loved that about it. I loved it that went in a different direction, a different direction, which, in my opinion, was less scary than the first movie, but way more cohesive.

Okay. That's interesting. Jordan. What'd you think? I'm very much on the same page as Kristen. I really enjoy Black Phone Dream Warriors. I, Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill, the director and writer duo, who made this movie as well, the first one. They also made Sinister. They are really good at putting kids in peril. They have a real fearlessness in a way that we don't see as much of an American studio cinema with the things that they will do violently to children.

And that to me is what Blackbone felt like. like the first one. It felt like moments of really scary stuff that was really, really messed up and stuck with you. This Blackphone, too, is a superior movie. It felt like the first one was starting blocks to get us to this point. I think that's a great aspect of it, Kristen. The, like, the supernatural stuff was kind of like, why is this one ghosty thing happening in an otherwise very unguasty world? And this one, we fully entered the dream state, the world of the supernatural, the meshing of the living in the dead. the kids have aged into like really good like mid-teen actors fortunately like they're still really well suited for these roles Madeline McGraw is an excellent crying actress and thankfully in this grabber which is very ambiently dreadful as opposed to like more punctuated moments of like really gross terror that I feel like you get more in the first one

we can fully dispose of the mincing homosexual cosplay that Ethan Hawk is doing as the grabber in the first movie that was absolutely needless And now he's just like more upsetting Freddie. And I think that's an elevation over the whole first one. Okay, interesting. I'm coming at this film from a slightly different angle. I kind of thought this whole film was pretty cheesy. But you know what? It's fall.

Tis the season. Give me some stilton and walnuts by the fire. Melt some greer over my French onion soup. I'll take the cheese. I'm not going to complain about it. I will say, though, that if one of the things you liked about that first film was it's, I guess we'd say linear plotting, like the ghost tells them to do X, which causes Y to happen. So another ghost can come along and tell them to do Z that could only happen because Y happened.

Yeah, there's none of that here. As you mentioned, we're deep into the supernatural, which means it's a lot more hand wavy and a lot more woo-woo. And that's what I didn't react to. I mean, there's a lot of lore somehow, even though there's a lot more kind of like hand-waving about how the grabber gets his power, how to take away the grabber's power, which is where for me the cheesiness really comes in and all those very clunky monologues that poor Madelie. McGraw as Gwen. Yeah. It was great. There's exposition happening in this movie for sure.

There are moments of downloading. It's also the way it's delivered. Like she gets settled with this lore about how to defeat the grabber, which she knows because ghosts, because magic. She knows things that we never hear the ghosts tell her because she's psychic. And when she's doing all that, here's how we can rob the grabber of his power. In part because of the earnestness, in part because it's being delivered by a 15-year-old character, but mostly because the name the grabber is really dumb.

It's never gotten back. It's never gotten better. This is otherwise a often quite gory horror film that in those moments gets kind of kicked for me into goosebumps. Are You Afraid of the Dark Territory? That's very fair. I actually like that about it. That's a very good parallel. This is what I want people to know. Because like if this is a me thing, listeners should know this is a me thing. Do you feel what I'm saying? I feel what you're saying. And there were a couple of moments where I definitely said, oh, this is Scooby-Doo now. You know, now it's time for Daphne to explain what is really behind the grandfather. clock. There's such YAA elements about this. Oh my gosh. This is maybe my thing. Yes. Yeah. So there are a couple of Scooby-Doo moments, but I was willing to give myself over to that because, as I said earlier, at least it seemed more cohesive. The supernatural wasn't just dropped in out of nowhere from time to time. It was folded in, even if it was folded in a cheesy way sometimes. Thank goodness the mask is so effective on the grabber. I had an exchange that I hadn't really thought about, but like the lack of new created horror iconography, which is in part due to the death of the monoculture. We're like, we're not. We're not. all rallying around the same things. And who besides kind of art the clown is like a new face thing that we're like,

that is the face of horror. And I do think having a Tom Savini mask that this guy, and I like that it comes sort of in parts in this one, like there's a sort of evolving face of the grabber that I think is really interesting. And I like that sort of nonsensical things about him can be chalked up to the supernatural, like the way the face changes and the top mask, bottom mask. And I really like that this movie transfers all. onto the shoulders of Madeline McGraw in a big way.

And I think there is a nice freshening up of going from Mason's perspective to Madeline's perspective in this movie, going from Finney to Gwen. I think that's a nice refreshing. I really like their dynamic as brother and sister. I like the arc of him caring for her and, you know, his struggles with how he feels like he can't protect her. And that, to me, gave an emotional undergirding to this word. I cried. I did. Me and my wife were sitting next to each other crying at the end of a black phone.

And if you had told me that I was going to do that at the end of the first black phone, I would have been like, I don't think this writer and director pair are capable of bringing that out of me. So, like, I was appreciating the emotional aspect of it a lot. And also, the way they filmed the dream sequences, I thought super effective. The transporting back and forth between those kinds of consciousness was really cool. Yeah. I mean, Kristen mentioned the grainy film stock and that very crunchy sound design during the dreams. I really enjoyed that, too.

There is a climactic scene that takes place on the ice. that I certainly hope will get adapted into an Olympic couple's figure skating routine at some point because I do think it would be improved by sequins as most things would.

At the end of the day, I did not have a very strong reaction either way to this film makes sense because he didn't have a very strong reaction to the first but many, many people did. It made a lot of money. I mentioned in the intro

that this movie is playing in a sandbox a lot of other horror movies have done. We mentioned Dream Warriors. We could spend the whole podcast shouting out the nightmare in Elm Street references, the shining references, Friday the 13th references. I thought it was mostly in control of those references, using them,

expanding on them, not just kind of drafting off them. How'd you guys feel? Yeah, I think so too. I mean, overall, the movie really did seem more confident and more in charge of what it was trying to be. I feel the first one. And I think a lot of the reason, just to echo what Jordan said, those core relationships with the brother and sister are so believable. I feel like from minute one, we know they have each other's backs, but they also get on each other's nerves. And maybe one of you is going to on the other. And also, I'm totally here for you, but God, you are such a loser. And there's definitely all these complex feelings that come up between these siblings where I think sometimes there's the risk in a movie like this of like, let's make them 2A or 2B or 2C. But this kind of

captures all of the complications of having a sibling who maybe reacts to trauma in a different way than you do and who's still your sibling no matter what. And it seemed like a natural evolution of the characters from the first movie, in my opinion. Like, what Finn turned into between the first movie and this one, very agro, very antisocial, very dependent on substance abuse to get through the day. And what Gwen became, which is essentially like a detective in lots of ways, it makes so much sense that the characters turn into what they turn into. And so I think because of those two at the heart of this, and all the supporting characters, I have to say also, were very well written and played as well.

They expanded, but they didn't take it too far. I didn't feel. like I was really losing track of the extra people. They added good texture. This is probably a quibble, but in the original film, one of the bits was that little 11-year-old, then-11-year-old Gwen had, as my mom used to say, a mouth on her. And she does hear, too, but I don't know. There's something weirdly baroque about her cursing in this. Like, there's a little bit too much salt in the soup, a little bit of saltiness.

It's marbles in the mouth. Like, so choice, that's going to cost a mint. It's like you've never heard these terms of phrase in your life. I love the 80s, sure. But it's also like it leeches some power from it when you say, and I guess this is intentional, but at one point you call someone a rotting poop stain. And she doesn't say poop. And I was sitting there going, is rotting the right intensifier there?

Also, keep in mind, her character's supposed to be like 15. And when somebody of that age is trying to evolve their swear game, when they're trying to take their swear game up a level, sometimes. they're just going to say really dumb stuff, right? So true. You're right. You can feel the performance of the swearing, like, as a character, but as a person. It's a thing that both of these movies do that I just kind of like, I throw my hands up. I'm like, why'd you need to do that? Just because, like, there's an avatar that's, like, picked in each of these movies to be like, and you're going to be the 80s. We know it's

1982, man, the clothes look great. Like, this is, I don't mind the swears. I think they're funny. I love who she roasts in this movie for the most part. It's, it's, there are great, delivery moments for that. It feels like Derrickson and Cargill just kind of showing off. Like, hey, guys, we were 80s kids. Like, you remember the 80s? It's like, oh, God, you guys. Maybe that's it.

It doesn't feel like it's actually happening in the movie. In the story, it feels like it's a runner that the writers are doing for Gen X or something. No, sure. And I shouldn't be sitting here strunk and whiting elements of style her curse game. I guess that's the answer. It clunks for me. It did in the first one and it did with this. It does clunk.

We're not proving anything by saying that you remember we said radical at a point in time, all of the time. Yes, but I will say again, I do think the swearing is very funny at moments. The swearing is really fun. Yes. And you're so right about the elevating the swear game. That is a process we all must go through. That's certainly true.

And then we pull it back as we realize. Some of us do. We can swear better than this. I have a better vocabulary than this. We do when we're on NPR. We do we're on NPR. I'd also love to gauge your thoughts on the camp itself. I thought it looked great on screen and completely not at all like my experience.

sleepaway camp where you have like 25 bunk beds in four by four feet where you're packed in together like sardines. Okay. Actually, great fact check question. Is it routine for like a bunking cabin to be the size of a hotel lobby? Yeah, it's huge. It's huge. There's like a full sprint through it at one point that takes a wild.

It was enormous. Yeah. And also the logistics of placing a lonely phone booth that close to a lake, which is going to flood? That's not a thing you do. I'm like, is this a climate change issue where it used to be further away from the shore? Yes. Has there been encroachment on the shore?

Is that what we're talking about here? They would not have that phone there because we all know anybody who's been to sleepaway camp. The only phone anywhere within 100 miles is in that office with the very, very territorial office lady. Absolutely. And they nailed that. They nailed the one true phone. If the phone was there before the camp, who on earth went up to the top of a mountain in the Rockies to just put a phone that a camp would one day pop up around? And no one's like, yeah, it's crazy that the phone's there, but it doesn't work anymore.

They're like, oh, yeah, that phone's not a service for years. Can you tell me why it exists in the first place? What is the phone booth doing here at the camp on top of a mountain? It is positioned in the landscape like a TARDIS, and I think that's probably the answer. It is. It is building is phone booth. It totally is. All right, well, tell us what you think about black phone two.

Grab us on Facebook or on Letterbox. We'll have a link in our episode description. Up next, what is making us happy? this week. Now it is time for our favorite segment of this week and every week. What's making us happy this week? Jordan, kick us off. What's making you happy this week? I'm going to go with the woman in Cabin, which is now streaming on Netflix. A bunch of billionaires on a yacht, a journalist is brought on board after a particularly harrowing assignment to come and take an easy puff piece about the nonprofit that the matriarch of this one particular billionaire couple, she's passing away

due to illness. And this puff piece is going to talk about the charity work this couple do. Of course, that's not what happens. And Karenightly, the guardian journalist, ends up on this boat and nefarious things start happening. It's a thriller on the high seas. If you're looking for a Tuesday night, something that is low investment, but a little high entertainment yield, and you get to see Hannah Waddingham vamping around a space in finery. Guy Pearce dripping with sinister feelings. Oh, he's so smart. He's a human spoiler. He's like Stellan Scarce. Guard. You see the guy you're like, bad intentions. Woman in Cabin Ten, give it a spin on the old Netflix machine. All right. That's the woman in Cabin Ten on Netflix. Thank you, Jordan. Kristen Mineser, what's making you happy this week? In honor of Diane Keaton, who recently passed away, I want to shout out a recent movie of hers that I don't think a lot of Americans have seen.

It's a British production called Arthur's Whiskey. It really showcases Keaton's charm while also not leaning too heavily on the trope of her, freaking out and crying, which I think a lot of her later movies did. In Arthur's Whiskey, she and her two best friends come across an elixir that transforms them into their younger selves for a small window of time. The three use the elixir to have fun, to settle scores, to seek closure, and do what they now feel too old to do. But the magic of the movie is that they come to realize that maybe they didn't need

the elixir at all to do those things. They had it in them all along. It's so cheerful. It's so upbeat. It's nice and snappy. It's only 90 minutes. And it has some fun cameos, including Boy George and Haley Mills. Again, that's Arthur's Whiskey.

Oh, my God, I want to watch this. This is great. Arthur's Whiskey. And that, I guess, is streaming wherever you can stream things, yes? Yes, it is. Thank you very much. All right, what's making me happy this week? Abrams Books just put out a huge, gorgeous coffee table book called

The Essential Peanuts by Charles M. Schultz, the greatest comic strip of all time. Do not sleep on this book. It's written by comics historian Mark E veneer, and it walks you through the evolution of the strip, era by era, as the Swifties would say. It places all the changes that Sheltz made over the years in context and reminds you, which I think some people probably need some reminding of,

which is that while the merchandising around the strip always leaned hard into the cute and the twee, the happiness is a warm puppy of it all. The strip itself was, as we say, a richer text, darker, sadder. existential, I would say. Existential, exactly, Chris. Never talked down to the audience.

I always appreciated that the life lessons it imparted were really clear-eyed and realistic and practical. So, yes, happiness may be a warm puppy, but people do get depressed around the holidays and trees will eat your kite. And you will meet in life. Many people like Lucy who will always, always, always pull the football away every time, don't be a sucker. It is coming out in time for holidays, and it will make a great gift for that one nerd in your family. That is The Essential Peanuts by Charles M. Shelts, the greatest comic strip of all time, which is a hell of a subtitle, but it makes a good case for it. And that is what is making me grabby this week. If you want to grab some links for what we recommended, plus some more recommendations, sign up for our newsletter at npr.org slash pop culture newsletter.

That brings us to the end of our show. Kristen Meinser, Jordan Cruciola. It's great getting the old gang together again. Thanks for being here. Thanks, guys. See you, Blackphone 3. Yes. Oh, God.

This episode was produced by Liz Metzger, Jenei Morris, and Mike Katz have been edited by our sure-rutter, Jessica Ritty, and Hello, Come In, provides our theme music. Thank you for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. I'm Glenn Weldon, and we'll see you all next week.