The Black Phone 2 (2025)

Warning: I’ll not spoil the second act, but certainly parts of the ending here

Years after surviving his kidnapping by the Grabber (Ethan Hawke) in the first movie, Finn (Mason Thames), now a late teenager, struggles with his clearly untreated trauma, with pot and violence his main methods of control. Recently, his sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) has been having terrible nightmares featuring the ghosts of dead children at a snowy summer (winter?) camp and other curious details. These nightmares are now beginning to turn into feats of rather impressive sleepwalking, one of which leads Gwen to the Grabber’s old house and the black phone with the direct line to the dead in its cellar. There, she has a phone conversation with her and Finn’s dead mother. Some research and a bit of luck suggest to Gwen where the camp from her dreams is situated and because she’s convinced this is not a thing she can just ignore and hope it’ll go away, she, an unwilling Finn, and her prospective boyfriend Ernesto (Miguel Mora) make their way to snowy Montana (I believe), as camp counsellors in training. There, Finn, too, will have phone conversations with the dead again, and all will be haunted by the shadow of the Grabber.

On paper, The Black Phone 2, like the first one directed by Scott Derrickson and scripted by Derrickson and his eternal writing partner (lieutenant of Megaforce) C. Robert Cargill, is yet another exercise in 80s horror nostalgia, remixing elements of the original movie with A Nightmare on Elm Street. Particularly the establishing scenes hit that kind of nostalgia pretty hard, not just with pointedly cheesy bits of dialogue but also aesthetically. However, while the 80s never go away, they turn out only to be one of the movie’s touch stones, and are really an easy way to establish an aesthetic reality things then begin to deviate more and more from.

Once the dreams start in earnest, and even more so once the characters end up in the snow and ice, the film begins to let other eras, film stocks (well, probably digital filters to emulate other filmstocks, but it’s so well done, this really doesn’t matter), and ideas take over. The film then proceeds to create a mood of liminality, of drifting between dream and reality, of borders crossed and uncrossed without the characters realizing in so brilliant a manner, I found myself perfectly okay with its at its core very straightforward narrative and characterisation. But then, straightforward doesn’t mean bad – particularly the characters are likeable and clearly drawn, and some of the differences in how Gwen and Finn relate to their respective traumata feel as if they’ll become rather less straightforward on second or third watch. It’s also nice to watch a really well-made contemporary horror film that allows its characters to triumph about the monster (and work at their trauma) for once. I’m all for 70s horror downer endings, but have grown somewhat annoyed by serious contemporary horror’s insistence that fights are always hopeless, grief insurmountable, and so on and so forth. This is a movie that is convinced sometimes, you can ram evil’s face repeatedly against a frozen surface. A message I approve of.

But really, it’s the mood and the film’s consistently thought-through aesthetics that particularly excite me: Black Phone 2 is a mood held for the length of a whole movie.

The Gorge (2025)

Two highly skilled and emotionally messed up sharpshooters (Anya Taylor-Joy and Miles Teller) from what a couple of months ago were still the big international enemy blocks are stationed on opposite sides of a mysterious gorge of unknown location that’s covered with mines and auto-firing guns.

They are there to watch out for some kind of threat climbing up from the gorge. Communication between the two sides is forbidden – but apart from a dangerous abyss, there’s nobody around to police these rules.

So obviously, the two fall in love pretty much on first sight (who could blame them?) and end up learning quite a bit more about the place than the powers that be like. Also, they will shoot a lot of monsters and cause a more than sufficiently large explosions.

The Gorge is contrived, The Gorge is more than just a little silly, yet I found myself highly entertained by Scott Derrickson’s mix of horror, action and romance. It’s the sort of film that will always prefer a cool idea to a serious one, but it does so with the sense of joy and excitement, and the hidden glee at hiding away some cleverness you could find in the best films of Corman’s New World cinema phase.

Thus, this feels like the product of filmmakers enjoying themselves with the Apple money they somehow managed to get for making their high budget low budget movie, doing their best to get their audience to loosen up enough to enjoy themselves, as well. That’s how it worked out for me, at least.

Plus, Joy (whom I’d watch in anything, anyhow) and Teller have a pleasant degree of chemistry, there are some fun monster designs, sometimes great art direction, and the action is staged with verve as well as the expected professionalism. What’s not to like?

Three Films Make A Post: Murder is so 1987.

Apparently it’s “movies I liked a lot more than the critical consensus” week this late October around here, as these three films prove.

Pet Sematary: Bloodlines (2023): So yes, I did indeed like Lindsey Anderson Beer’s prequel to the (horrible) Pet Sematary Remake quite a bit. Not as a logical extension of that other movie’s world, nor of that of the novel (one of Stephen King’s very best, if you ask me), but as a very atmospheric horror movie that may not treat its tale about the horrors of familial responsibility with any subtlety, but certainly knows what it is talking about. A palpable sense of dread and doom runs through much of the film, and an acceptance of that dread and doom by the older generation as a fact of life, a feeling that’s occasionally broken by downright nasty violence of the type that really doesn’t care whether characters deserve what happens to them. The third act becomes a bit unfocussed for my tastes, but otherwise, this is the only Pet Sematary movie I genuinely like.

V/H/S/85 (2023): This entry in the traditional bro horror anthology series is not terribly bro at all anymore. In fact, most of the segments, as directed by David Bruckner, Scott Derrickson, Natasha Kermani, Mike P. Nelson and Gigi Saul Guerrero, seem rather more interested in doing cool things with the POV horror set-up of the series. I thought Derrickson’s “Dreamkill” was a particularly strong entry – as well as a nice sibling piece to The Black Phone – with some particularly clever use of found footage as parts of its plot, but there’s not a single segment here that doesn’t do something clever, or freakish, or interesting with its part of the anthology.

Totally Killer (2023): Back to the Future+Happy Death Day+The Final Girls=Totally Killer, and strangely enough, I’m perfectly okay with the equation of Nahnatchka Khan’s movie. More than okay, actually, for I found this slasher time travel comedy often surprisingly funny (the great comical timing of particularly Kiernan Shipka helps a lot there), the jokes never getting so meta-genre I’d lose patience with them, even though there’s a lot of genre consciousness visible during the slasher bits. The emotional beats hit very well as well, so much so that I’d suggest this bit of horror arithmetic has some actual heart.

Short Film Friday: Shadowprowler

Deliver Us from Evil (2014)

Like The Conjuring, this is “based on true events”, so watch out for demonically possessed serial killers and consult your local Catholic priest, I guess. Also, watch out which writing on what walls you read.

Anyway, tough cop Sergeant Sarchie (Eric Bana) and his obviously not long for this world self-declared adrenaline junkie partner Butler (Joel McHale) – who for some reason carries two combat knifes on the job - are having an even worse time than is usual in their jobs. There’s a series of violent crimes committed by a random assortment of people. The perpetrators don’t all fit too well into the usual scheme of normal people just losing it, and their behaviour reaches the point where “crazy” isn’t really the best explanation for their deeds anymore anymore. A family complains of the supernaturally caused noises in their cellar; and Sarchie who always had a curious sense for coming trouble now starts to have visions connected to these seemingly disconnected cases that just might be more than mere hallucinations.

Something really bad might be going on in the city’s dark streets, and formerly junkie priest Mendoza (Édgar Ramírez) might just be right with his dark mumblings about demonic possession. Of course, it’ll take a bit for Sarchie to believe this, and he himself just might be bringing more of his work home than can be good for his family.

As you know, Jim, I’m not a fan of possession horror movies but when a film is as well realized as Scott Derrickson’s Deliver Us from Evil, I am willing and able to get over myself and enjoy it, even though this particular film contains the even less well-loved element of the lapsed believer coming back into the fold because DEMONS(!).Clearly, that godhood isn’t one for subtlety. At least, unlike with The Conjuring, the relapse into religion makes psychological sense for Sarchie, and the demonic possessions as realized by Derrickson are creepy enough to convince me this is a man acting sane towards an insane world instead of one creeping back into psychological childhood. It does of course help that the film goes out of its way to portray Mendoza, our personified religious authority, as flawed and human as any of us, and does even – without outright stating it – make a convincing case as the priest for a vessel through which the powers of his godhood flow and not the one actually owning and controlling them. And while I don’t share in its theology, I really appreciate the film taking its time and space to integrate these things into the actual plot and not treating priests and exorcisms either as a deus ex machina (ha!) or some kind of superhero. This does also feed into making the main characters convincing and their doubts and suffering much more relatable by it, even if you don’t buy into their religion, or many of the tenants of the plot, at all.

Not surprisingly given my predilections, I don’t think the Christian mythology the film uses is as creepy as the mostly made-up one from Derrickson’s fantastic Sinister but the film is really good at convincing the audience to be in the presence of actual supernatural Evil instead of some quipping asshole that pukes green stuff because that’s what happened in The Exorcist or that someone who does that whole floating in a ceiling corner rigmarole as taken from The Last Exorcism.

There’s also the simple fact that Derrickson is just plain great at staging horror scenes, using clichés in the best possible manner, which is as a common ground between himself and his audience on which he can build whatever horrific image he has in mind. And, he does have quite a few of those in mind, often easily reaching the point – at least for me – where things truly become disturbing.

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Sinister (2012)

True crime writer Ellison Oswalt (Ethan Hawke), with a career ever on the downward path after his first book hit big, has a modus operandi that isn't bound to make him any friends: he and his family - wife Tracy (Juliet Rylance), daughter Ashley (Clare Foley) and son Trevor (Michael Hall D'Addario) - move to the community where the crimes Ellison is going to write about took place in what one can't help but assume is some sort of writer method acting; writing highly critical of the local police generally follows. Needless to say, it's not a very good way to make friends, or have a peaceful family life.

This time around, in his quest to solve the murders of a family of four and the disappearance of their daughter, Ellison even goes a step further. Without anyone's knowledge but Ellison's, the Oswalts move into the house the victims lived in and in whose backyard they died by hanging. Tracy is sure going to be happy if she finds out.

On the very first day in the house, the writer finds a box full of super-8 movies. Instead of the expected home movies, these films show a series of murders that began some time in the 1960s. The find seems to set something in motion around Ellison. Increasingly bizarre things happen to him in the house at night, things that soon enough can't be explained away as natural anymore. The writer's further research turns up disquieting facts that suggest the murders could be part of an occult ritual connected to a Babylonian godhood known as The Eater of Children. The more Ellison learns and suspects, the more horrifying his nights become.

It's as if Ellison's attempts to find a hidden truth had started a process leading - perhaps - to knowledge but also to an inexorable doom.

I'm repeating myself, I think, yet it's still true: sometimes, writing about the films that impress me the most - or in this particular case actually leave this hardened horror movie watcher anxious and not too happy to be rather close to his bed time at the time of writing - is the most difficult because whatever I could write about a movie like Sinister makes an inspired achievement in the "horror movie as nightmare" part of the genre sound like just another well-made movie. Of course, Scott Derrickson's Sinister is a well-made movie, one where sound and vision (hi, David!) very consciously come together to near hypnotic effect, where no scene hasn't a clear - and in hindsight often rather horrifying - reason to be on screen. Sinister is a tight film, seemingly slow-paced but actually relentlessly economic, with more than one sequence I find difficult to get out of my mind now.

Of course, I'm pretty much the ideal viewer for this sort of thing; supernatural horror about weird, ritualistic occurrences, films with a tendency to let the real slowly bleed into the realm of nightmare (or maybe the other way around), horror that is beholden to the Weird, all belong to a fictional area where I feel at home. I'm bound to like a film like this nearly automatically, particularly when it is so damn good at what it does as Sinister is. There are a lot of ideas and concepts in here I love in horror: the unstoppable doom once a protagonist has quite innocently stepped over an invisible line dividing the quotidian world from something dark and not really explicable, the strange and psychologically horrific mechanisms of said doom, the base in a vague mythology that isn't meant to explain things but rather to make them feel more pervasive, the way the film uses the sinister undertones and physicality of analogue film technology, the intensity with which the personal drama and failings of the protagonist and the basis of the horror are feeding off each other without the whole affair turning into a morality play where the abnatural's function is to punish the protagonist for these failings (the film's universe seems much crueller, or just less moral than that).

I could go on and on and never truly get to the point of what makes Sinister so special, so I'm just going to shut up and recommend anyone interested in horror to watch it in a cop-out write-up ending I stole from mainstream film critics.

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