How is it that Halloween of 2025 couldn’t give us a better horror movie than “Black Phone 2”? It’s not that I’m shocked that a Halloween horror movie is a disappointment. I’m just shocked that we got such a disappointing movie this year. 2025 has been such a banner year for horror thus far. “Sinners,” “Weapons,” “Final Destination: Bloodlines,” and “The Conjuring: Last Rites” were all blockbusters. There’s serious Oscar talk around those first two films, the latter two are the best box office performers of their respective franchises. We should have gotten a film that could stand alongside those giants for Halloween.

Instead, we got “Black Phone 2,” a movie that has barely scrounged up an estimated $60 million at the domestic box office in its three weekends of release. With Halloween over, the film is not only highly unlikely to wind up a blockbuster, it’s highly unlikely to make more than its 2022 predecessor. It might even fall short of preventing already-notorious flop “Tron: Ares” from being the biggest release of October 2025. That covers the commercial disappointment. Creatively, the film has its defenders (it currently has a “Certified Fresh” 72 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes), but I personally found it to be similarly disappointing.

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The film takes place in 1982, four years after the original, where teenager Finney Blake (Mason Thames) managed to overcome and kill serial child murderer The Grabber (Ethan Hawke) by talking to the villain’s past victims with the help of the mysterious Black Phone. Now Finney and his sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) are trying to move on with their lives, despite him not being able to overcome his trauma and her unable to stop having violent psychic visions. She thinks they need to go on a mission of some kind at the behest of their late mother.

The kids’ journey takes them to a snowed-in Christian youth camp that their mother attended 25 years ago. Gwen’s visions start to intensify and she has increasingly severe nightmares and sleepwalking episodes. Also, despite the camp’s director (Demián Bechir) insisting that it is inoperative, Finney starts getting calls on the camp’s (Black) pay Phone. Some of the calls are from scared children that Finney has never met, though whom Gwen has seen in her dreams. But one call is from The Grabber. Somehow he can still make things happen from beyond the grave. And one of the things he wants to make happen is revenge.

Early stages of the film show promise. We don’t know exactly what tools the dead Grabber has at his disposal, so we don’t know how he can affect the characters and the world around them. He could do something shocking. But as the film goes along and he shows his hand more and more, he gets less and less scary. By the end, he’s basically a less-smart Freddy Krueger, and the film has taken on the unfunny slapstick of a late-stage “Nightmare on Elm Street” sequel.

Speaking of sequels with diminishing returns, “Black Phone 2” is guilty of running several halfway decent ideas into the ground. Gwen had a memorably-profane outburst in the first movie, this one has her go on about a half-dozen over-rehearsed vulgar tirades. The first movie was good at heartfelt inter-family dialogue, this movie gets so wordy that it feels about twenty minutes too long. Most overdone is the trope of showing grainy footage of murder victims in happier times, followed by “horrific” footage. This is because director Scott Derrickson employed the same trick in his two “Sinister” movies before he made “The Black Phone,” so I’ve had to put up with this device for four movies now instead of two, and Derrickson isn’t upping his game. “Black Phone 2” has had its Halloween heyday, and there’s no point in seeing it now, without the kind of big responsive horror crowd that this movie desperately needs for it to even approach being fun.

Grade: C-

“Black Phone 2” is rated R for strong violent content, gore, teen drug use, and language. Its running time is 114 minutes.

Contact Bob Garver at rrg251@nyu.edu.