The Black Phone 2 (2025)

Scott Derrickson has long argued that horror is a morally serious genre. It is the genre least willing to deny the reality of evil. In its best moments, horror forces audiences to sit with fear, guilt, and suffering without easy explanations. It can sneak moral truths into its stories. The Black Phone understood this well. Its spiritual elements were present but restrained. Faith hovered at the edges of the story, never announced, never explained. Evil was real. Help came, but not cheaply. The film trusted story to do the work.

The Black Phone 2 makes a different choice. What was once implicit becomes explicit. Christianity moves from subtext to foreground. Prayer, Jesus, Heaven, and Christian spaces are named directly. The question is not whether the film has a Christian angle. It clearly does. The question is whether that clarity strengthens or weakens what the story is trying to accomplish.

The sequel deserves credit for refusing to sentimentalize faith. Prayer does not cancel trauma. Christian spaces are not automatically safe. Belief is shown as fragile, contested, and costly. Derrickson is clearly uninterested in presenting faith as a magic solution. That seriousness is commendable.

At the same time, the film reveals a central difficulty in using cinema, and especially horror, to explore faith. When belief is explained rather than embodied, it begins to function as message rather than meaning. Prayer becomes a narrative device. Religious language starts to feel instrumental. Mystery gives way to explanation, and horror in particular loses some of its power when too much is made clear.

The first Black Phone worked because it trusted silence. The dead spoke, but sparingly. The supernatural intervened, but only enough. Fear lived in what was withheld. The sequel is more eager to say out loud what was once suggested. That may satisfy viewers who want faith named directly, but horror thrives on ambiguity, and theology often does as well.

This exposes a broader challenge. Film is not a sermon, and horror in particular resists instruction. It works through atmosphere, tension, and implication. When faith is preached, even gently, the story can begin to feel crowded by its own intentions. The message becomes louder, but the meaning grows thinner.

The Black Phone 2 is not cynical, nor is it dismissive of faith. It is earnest and serious, and that alone sets it apart from most horror sequels. But it illustrates the risk of saying too much. Stories persuade by showing, not explaining. Horror speaks most clearly when it leaves room for fear, doubt, and unanswered questions.

Derrickson remains committed to the idea that horror can confront evil honestly. This film suggests that the harder task is knowing when to let the story speak, and when to resist the urge to explain what the story has already said.