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‘Black Phone 2’ Director Scott Derrickson on Perfect Horror Sequels, Making High School Scares and His Thoughts About ‘Black Phone 3’

20 Oct 2025, 16:21 by Jack Dunn · Variety

“Evil Dead II,” “A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors,” “Dawn of the Dead,” “M3GAN 2.0”: It’s carved into horror’s bloody history that not all sequels are created equal. However, the significance of the sequel, threequel and so on cannot be understated in the context of genre iconography. While they sometimes drive the horror canon to thrilling new heights, franchise follow-ups can bring an unhinged surrealism that, for better or worse, disrupts the rule book with a bucket of guts in hand.

“Black Phone 2” is a rare film that succeeds at both. At its beating heart is a devastating brother-sister story about generational trauma and teenage growing pains. And at its climax, the Grabber, the franchise killer played by Ethan Hawke, gracefully stalks his victims on ice skates, ready to lop some heads with an axe.

Director Scott Derrickson describes this bloody ballet as a “balancing act” that hinges on a precise alchemy of delivering on fan expectations, while never retreading over exhausted ground.

“You can fall to the left or to the right,” Derrickson says. “On the left, you can make something that’s too faithful and try to recreate the experience of the original film. We’ve all experienced something that feels like a rehashing, and that’s disappointing. Then on the right, if you stray from it too much, you’re in danger of losing [the audience] because it doesn’t feel like it belongs in the same world. I think I stretched my balance to the right on this one. But I feel like I was still making a movie that was going to elevate and not lessen appreciation for the first film.”

Derrickson takes the world of “The Black Phone” from middle school innocence to serious teenage angst in “Black Phone 2.” In the Blumhouse sequel, Finney (Mason Thames) and Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) are understandably shaken by the events of the first film, an issue that manifests in vivid night terrors for Gwen, and pot-smoking and fist fights for Finney. Tormented by visions of the Grabber and her deceased mother, Gwen convinces Finney to join her at a Christian youth camp where their mom once worked. There, the clairvoyant siblings do battle with the Grabber from beyond the grave, and reckon with the truth behind their mother’s death.

Before the premiere of “Black Phone 2,” which hit theaters Oct. 16, Derrickson sat down with Variety to discuss aging up the gore, along with his leading duo, tapping into the horror iconography of his youth and the possibility of a “Black Phone 3.”

Having directed ‘Doctor Strange’ and ‘Hellraiser: Inferno,’ were there any lessons you took from those IP movies when building out your own universe?

I had a great experience making “Doctor Strange” because it wasn’t tied to the MCU at all. It really was a standalone movie in its own universe. After I made “The Black Phone,” I didn’t have any thoughts about making a sequel, and it wasn’t until [screenwriter] Joe Hill gave me some ideas and got my mind going about it. I started noodling on it, and eventually came up with the idea of what if I wait, make another film, and these kids are in high school, then I can make a high school horror film as a sequel. That was interesting.

‘The Black Phone’ felt isolated, but ‘Black Phone 2’ embraced a lot of horror iconography. Was that a deliberate choice or a matter of subconscious influence?

That was very conscious. Part of what was exciting to me about waiting until the kids were in high school was that a high school horror movie demands more violence and more scariness than a middle school supernatural thriller, which is really what “The Black Phone” is. In terms of the influences, I recognized that I was making a movie set in 1982, and that’s the era of all those summer camp slasher movies that were following “Friday the 13th.” I watched dozens of those in the ’80s, and what I liked was the idea of doing that, but setting it in the winter camps that I went to in the Rocky Mountains. That’s not something I had seen before. There’s something very distinctive about those locations and the perilousness of the weather, the cinematic power of the landscape and the enclosed quality of it. So on the one hand, I thought it belonged to the horror genre of that era, and on the other hand, it was quite fresh.

Tell me about evolving the themes of the first movie for ‘Black Phone 2’ and pulling forward the relationship between Finney, Gwen and their reformed father as they reconcile with the truth about their mom’s death?

This goes back to letting them get into high school. From a character point of view, what was exciting about that to me was, who would these kids be? Who would Finney and Gwen be four years later, after these events, which would have been really traumatizing and horrific, and how would they be processing them? When I thought about that, I liked the idea of Finn having become angry and that anger masking the fear he’s been unable to process, and smoking too much weed. And Gwen is continuing to develop this ability that we know she got from her mother in the first film, but her mother went crazy and killed herself, and what does that feel like to her? She’s approaching womanhood and feeling like an awkward teenage girl who’s gonna go crazy like her mom, and people think she’s a witch. All of that seemed very truthful to both the story and to the normal struggles of teenagers.

There are some interesting themes about religion and the existence of evil. What was behind the push and pull of Demián Bichir’s counselor character, who takes Finney under his wing, and the god-fearing couple, played by Maev Beaty and Graham Abbey, who reject Gwen?

Those were rooted in my own experience. After the traumatic events of my early life, I did find some power and hope in communal spirituality with other teenagers. A lot of teenagers are very spiritual and they’re experienced. You don’t see that in movies very often. But I also, in good conscience, couldn’t represent that unless I was going to reckon with the nonsense that I would learn in places like that. You know, the fear-based, restrictive, more moralistic religion that’s being pressed on teenagers in environments like that so often. That needed to be part of the tapestry, and that was easy for me to handle because I’ve got Gwen. Her spirituality is so individualized. It belongs to her and her alone and isn’t linked to any religion or any particular church or denomination. That was a backdrop where we could have a legitimate exploration of Gwen’s spirituality and contrast it with this different brand of Christianity.

How did you land on implementing the Super 8 footage into the story?

I can’t think of a film that has more Super 8 material in it. I knew that I was interested in exploring it with Gwen’s dreams, but in the writing, the dreams kept expanding until the decision was made to only have the attacks happen in dreams. The script is very confusing to read, cutting back and forth between the dream world and reality. I knew I needed to have a visual methodology by which the audience could easily distinguish between the dream world and reality, so shooting only the dreams in Super 8 became that tool. One of the greatest accomplishments of the movie is that, as we went to test it, no one was confused by that anymore, even when we’re cutting back and forth quickly between those two realms. So it was both a simple tool that also allowed me to accomplish that higher goal of trying to create a movie that doesn’t look like any other film that you’ve seen. That was important to me.

One comparison that kept coming to mind was ‘Halloween 3’, seeing this new dimension of the Grabber in a completely new space in time. If there is a ‘Black Phone 3,’ could you see the Grabber, or possibly another evil like him, creep into the lives of other families?

What I can say is that my attitude toward a sequel is that there’s really no justification for making a sequel unless you are genuinely attempting to make a movie that’s better than the first movie you’re making a sequel to. If you’re going to make a third one, it needs to be better than the second one, which is better than the first one. Very few films do that. Looking back on the history of cinema, I think Sam Raimi’s “Evil Dead” trilogy and George Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead” trilogy are probably the only two trilogies of movies where they’re all three great movies and get progressively better. What would be important to me in considering any ideas is that it’s just not a retread, and that we don’t feel like we’re seeing, “Oh, now we establish this new rule for the Grabber. So let’s just do that again.” That’s the only thing I couldn’t do.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.