The Grabber's Mask Is Secretly Deeper Than You Realize

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Warning: This article contains spoilers for The Black Phone.

The Grabber's mask in The Black Phone has a deeper meaning than a first glance might suggest. Played by Ethan Hawke in a role quite different from his standard fare, The Grabber is a terrifying new addition to the horror villain canon. While his mask seems as though it shares some commonality with other masked horror villains, there's something in the way he employs it that distinguishes The Grabber from his contemporaries.

It's revealed during The Black Phone that The Grabber has taken six victims, hiding them in his soundproofed basement and engaging in a sort of game-like ritual where he tries to get his victims to act "naughty" to justify his violence against them. Throughout this ritual, he changes the appearance of his mask as it has an interchangeable bottom piece. Sometimes Hawke's Grabber wears it with a wide and unsettling rictus, sometimes it features a deep frown, and sometimes it's completely blank and empty. The Grabber even opts to sometimes wear just the top of the mask, allowing his expression to be seen or, in a key scene, just the bottom piece, freezing the bottom of his face in the grin while violently threatening the film's protagonist, Finney.

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Unlike many horror villains who use their masks to hide their identity, The Black Phone's Grabber breaks a horror rule and is sometimes seen without part of or all of his mask. In this way, while his mask is important to his identity, it doesn't exist to conceal it from others. Instead, The Grabber employs the mask as a sort of theatre: the different variations of it represent different characters in a show he's putting on for