Black Phone 2. Hell’s Frozen Over.

While Dante’s Inferno (1321) conjures up all sorts of images of hell as this fiery, never-ending nightmare, the worst circle of damnation is all ice. A frozen lake named Cocytus, reserved for traitors, where you find such characters as Brutus and Cassius, murderers of Julius Caesar, and Judas, betrayer of Jesus Christ. Shivering in “eternal shade,” Dante writes that the lake is so frozen that “The semblance had of glass, and not of water.” It’s a horrifying sight, especially as he witnesses:

a thousand faces, made

Purple with cold; whence o’er me comes a shudder,

And evermore will come, at frozen ponds.¹Translation Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1867

Or, as Ethan Hawke says, in Black Phone 2 (Scott Derrickson, 2025): “Hell isn’t flames. It’s ice!”

The frostiest release since Lucile Hadžihalilović’s The Ice Tower (2025), Black Phone 2 (2025) sees reliable journeyman Derrickson traffic in all kinds of wintry images, channelling Dante’s vision of the ultimate hell in surprisingly effective ways. But while the images and aesthetic bring a much-needed chill to the Black Phoniverse (admittedly, a franchise I had more or less forgotten about), it’s undone by Derrickson and co-writer C. Robert Cargill‘s tendency to overwrite their characters and themes to death, bringing ideas out in the open that should’ve stayed well below the surface.

It starts, as many horror sequels do, with the key question: how on earth can I move beyond the trauma of the last movie? Just as Martin Brody (Roy Scheider) is haunted by the prospect of another shark attack in Jaws 2 (Jeannot Szwarc, 1978), leaving him prone to violence and erratic outbursts, The Black Phone’s (2021) Finney (Mason Thames) cannot get The Grabber (Ethan Hawke) out of his mind.

In an early scene, he is reprimanded by his psychic sister, Gwen (Madeleine McGraw), for beating up another new kid who teased him about being a kidnappee. To try and push thoughts of Ethan Hawke in a scary mask out of his mind, he self-medicates with copious amounts of weed. Unfortunately for him, that damned phone keeps ringing. Despite his death, The Grabber isn’t finished with him…

By moving the villain from your local playground pedophile/child murderer to a entity that is trapped somewhere between hell and earth, Black Phone 2 uncorks a far more tantalising premise than the original, especially as Gwen and her potential boyfriend Miguel (Ernesto Arellano) convince him to spend the winter in a creepy snow-covered Jesus Camp up in the hills that may have been the site of Mr Grabber’s First Kills. Cue a deeply satisfying premise where under every snowflake, unknown frosty terrors may lurk. The initial fright fest that ensues makes great use of this space, especially with Gwen’s dream sequences seemingly shot on blown-out, low-resolution film, evoking a lost horror from the 70s rather than anything released in this century. Unfortunately, instead of leaning into the chaos, Derrickson spoils it with your run-of-the-mill trauma horror emotion-fest, where all the wonderfully submerged feelings are awkwardly vomited up in unnecessary detailing of things that we already knew.

This tendency is best encapsulated by the Dante inspiration. It was fun to figure that out on my own. Then Ethan Hawke just straight up says, “Abandon all hope ye who enter here.” By that point, I considered my hopes thoroughly dashed.