Scott Derrickson on Black Phone 2 Horror, thoughts on the third film

“Evil Dead II”, “A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors”, “Dawn of the Dead”, “M3GAN 2.0” – it’s etched in the bloody history of horror that not all sequels are created equal. However, the importance of the sequel, the third and so on, cannot be underestimated in the context of the iconography of the genre. While they sometimes take the horror canon to exciting new heights, the franchise’s sequels can bring unhinged surrealism that, for better or worse, upsets the rulebook with a bucket of guts in hand.

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

Director Scott Derrickson describes this bloody ballet as a “balancing act” that depends on a precise alchemy to meet fans’ expectations, without retreading tired ground.

“You can fall to the left or to the right,” Derrickson says. «On the left, you can do something that is too faithful and try to recreate the experience of the original film. We’ve all experienced something that feels like a rehash, and that’s disappointing. Then, on the right, if you deviate too much from that, you are in danger of losing.” (the audience) because it doesn’t feel like it belongs to 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 diminish appreciation for the first movie.”

Derrickson takes the world of “The Black Phone” from high school innocence to serious teen 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, a problem that manifests itself in vivid night terrors for Gwen, and marijuana smoking and fistfights for Finney. Haunted by visions of Grabber and her deceased mother, Gwen convinces Finney to join her at a Christian youth camp where her mother once worked. There, the clairvoyant brothers fight the Grabber from beyond and discover the truth behind their mother’s death.

Ahead of the release of “Black Phone 2,” which hit theaters Oct. 16, Derrickson sat down with Variety to talk about the aging of blood, along with his main duo, drawing on the horror iconography of his youth and the possibility of a “Black Phone 3.”

Having directed ‘Doctor Strange’ and ‘Hellraiser: Inferno’, did you learn any lessons from those IP films when building your own universe?

I had a great experience doing “Doctor Strange” because it wasn’t tied to the MCU at all. It really was a standalone movie in its own universe. After making “The Black Phone,” I didn’t think about making a sequel, and it wasn’t until (screenwriter) Joe Hill gave me some ideas and made me think about it. I started mulling it over and finally came up with the idea of ​​what if I wait, make another movie, and these kids are in high school, then I can make a high school horror movie as a sequel. That was interesting.

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

That was very conscious. Part of what I found exciting about waiting until the kids were in high school was that a high school horror movie demands more violence and more terror than a high school supernatural thriller, which is really what “The Black Phone” is. In terms of influences, I recognized that I was making a movie set in 1982, and that’s the era of all those summer camp horror movies that followed “Friday the 13th.” I saw dozens of them in the ’80s, and what I liked was the idea of ​​doing it, but setting it in the winter camps I went to in the Rocky Mountains. That’s not something I’ve seen before. There is something very distinctive about those places and the dangerousness of the climate, the cinematic power of the landscape and its closed quality. So on the one hand I thought it belonged to the horror genre of that time and on the other hand it was pretty fresh.

Tell me about evolving the themes of the first ‘Black Phone 2’ film and moving forward the relationship between Finney, Gwen and their reformed father as they come to terms with the truth about their mother’s death?

This goes back to allowing them to enter high school. From a character standpoint, the exciting thing for 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 horrible, and how would they process them? When I thought about that, I liked the idea that Finn had gotten angry and that anger masked the fear he hadn’t been able to process and smoked too much marijuana. And Gwen continues to develop this ability that we know she got from her mother in the first movie, but her mother went crazy and committed suicide, and what does that feel like for her? She is approaching adulthood and feels like an awkward teenager who will go crazy like her mother, and people think she is a witch. That all seemed very true to both the story and the normal struggles of teenagers.

There are some interesting themes about religion and the existence of evil. What was behind the push and pull between 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 found some power and hope in communal spirituality with other teenagers. Many teenagers are very spiritual and experienced. You don’t see that very often in movies. But I couldn’t in good conscience represent that unless I took into account the nonsense I would learn in places like that. You know, the more moralistic, restrictive, fear-based religion that is so often imposed on teenagers in environments like that. That had to be part of the tapestry, and it was easy for me to handle because I have Gwen. Their spirituality is very individualized. It belongs to her and her alone and is not linked to any religion or any particular church or denomination. That was a backdrop where we could do a legitimate exploration of Gwen’s spirituality and contrast it with this different type of Christianity.

How did you come to implement the Super 8 footage into the story?

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

A comparison that came 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, infiltrate 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’re really trying to make a movie that’s better than the first movie you’re making a sequel to. If you are going to make a third, it has to be better than the second, which is better than the first. Very few movies do that. Looking back at film history, I think Sam Raimi’s “Evil Dead” trilogy and George Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead” trilogy are probably the only two movie trilogies where all three are great movies and get progressively better. What would be important to me when considering any idea is that it’s just not a retread and that we don’t feel like we’re looking at, “Oh, now we’re setting this new rule for the Grabber. So let’s do it again.” That’s the only thing I couldn’t do.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.