The big question around Black Phone 2 is, How does one actually make a Black Phone 2?

The Grabber, Ethan Hawke‘s serial-killing child napper, died in brilliant fashion by the end of it. However, as we saw from the mysterious black phone itself that kept Finney (Mason Thames), the sole survivor of the Grabber, connected to the ghosts of the previous victims while locked in a basement, there are ways to commune with the other side.

“I’m doing the best I can to keep some of the key aspects of the movie secretive,” Scott Derrickson, who directed and co-wrote both films with scribe C. Robert Cargill, tells Entertainment Weekly in an August interview, “but the trailer definitely gives you a feel for what the movie is.”

The sequel, in theaters this Oct. 17, picks up years after the 1978-set movie, and Finney is now a 17-year-old high schooler. His sister, Gwen (Madeleine McGraw), 15, starts having visions in her dreams from the black phone, which leads her to the Alpine Lake winter camp. They visit the site during a winter storm and discover an unsettling connection between the Grabber and their own family’s history.

The trailer that Derrickson mentions shows the Grabber has only grown more powerful in death, capable of violently harming Gwen in her dreams.

Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) and Finn (Mason Thames) in ‘Black Phone 2’.

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“The way the Grabber is in this film reminds me a lot of Freddy Krueger, just angrier and, to me, a lot scarier just ’cause he is trying to kill me,” Thames tells EW, referring to Robert Englund’s classic A Nightmare on Elm Street mass murderer. “Genuinely, he is terrifying. This movie and the powers he’s gained, without saying anything, it’s crazy and it’s so scary to see ’cause it is truly almost like an unstoppable force, that guy.”

The Grabber’s new abilities are an expansion of the mythology developed for the first film and exactly what ghosts can and cannot do in this narrative. The sequel is also now a Finney and Gwen two-hander, which enhances the stakes. The Grabber, Thames says, “realizes killing Finney or trying to hurt him wouldn’t affect him as much as hurting the person he loved.”

Derrickson wasn’t thinking about a sequel, but when Black Phone came out in theaters and made significant dough, the studio inevitably wanted to know what was next. “The very first thing that got me thinking was an email from Joe,” the filmmaker says of Joe Hill, the author behind the original Black Phone short story that inspired the movie. “He pitched me an idea for a sequel. I didn’t use all of it, but the central idea in that pitch was something I had never thought of.”

Derrickson then combined the concept with the idea for a high school movie, “which,” he adds, “would be more aggressive, more violent, I think scarier” than the middle school-aged story of the first Black Phone. He just wanted his actors to convincingly look high school-aged, so he went ahead and made his 2025 sci-fi action movie, The Gorge, to give his stars space to grow up.

“Returning to this character four years later, I’ve changed so much since I was 13 and, obviously, so has Finney,” Thames, now 18, says, having filmed the starring role in the live-action How to Train Your Dragon studio movie in the interim. “Coming back to that character, it was kind of surreal. It was kind of crazy.”

Mustang (Arianna Rivas), Gwen (Madeleine McGraw), and Finn (Mason Thames) in ‘Black Phone 2’.

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Finney has not adjusted well to life after the Grabber. He’s a brooding teen with few friends besides his sister. He’s often seen lost in the sounds of Pink Floyd blasting over his Walkman, which features in one particular sequence that Thames can’t wait for audiences to see. “He really does not want to deal with what happened, but he will not admit that,” the actor prefaces. “Because of that, he’s a very angry person. Finney is definitely a big curveball, just seeing how he’s dealt with the trauma.”

The biggest challenge for Thames was finding the voice again. He spent so much time portraying Hiccup, a higher-pitched fast talker in How to Train Your Dragon, that by the time he came to set to shoot Black Phone 2, Derrickson would often call out over the walkie every time Thames sounded less like Finney.

“I was like, ‘Damnit!'” he recalls. “I feel like that was the main thing that took me a couple days to get out of, just the cadence of Finney, ’cause it’s been a long time since I played this character.”

Just like with the first film, Derrickson sought to capture something real about his own younger years with this sequel. In the 1980s, he went to winter camps in the Rocky Mountains in Colorado as a teen, where the weather, especially the snowstorms, was brutal (and continues to be).

“Those camps that I went to were Christian winter camps, most of them run by pretty conservative churches and that sort of thing,” Derrickson explains. “It was a very interesting experience to be transported into this cold, below-zero at night, freezing, sometimes really snow-bound environment, and to be talking about spiritual things and religious feelings. Even though I rejected a lot of the conservatism and fundamentalism that was fed to me in places like that when I was young, there’s still almost a euphoric, divine feeling that you only feel when you’re young, that you feel in a heightened way in a place like that.”

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For Black Phone 2, he decided to flip that feeling on its head, where the spiritual feeling became dark instead. “That experience is a bell that has not stopped ringing in my life,” he adds.

The crew traveled north to Toronto to film at a campsite “very far up in the middle of nowhere,” Thames describes. “I’ve never seen that much snow in my life, nor do I really want to again,” the young star says candidly. “It was a lot,” he adds, laughing. “It was truly very difficult and so cold. I couldn’t feel my hands or my face half the time. It was a lot of pain, but I just had to deal with it and put it away for the character. That helped me get into the headspace of Finney.”

What’s more deadly, the cold or the Grabber? Thames says it’s a close debate. “I think the cold was gonna kill me before the Grabber,” he jests.