(From left) Finn (Mason Thames) and The Grabber (Ethan Hawke) in ‘Black Phone 2.’
Universal Studios
“I didn’t feel obliged to make a sequel at all,” explains director Scott Derrickson as we discuss supernatural slasher sequel Black Phone 2. “Jeff Shell, who was the chairman of Universal when the first movie came out, emailed me the Monday after the opening weekend and said, ‘You’re going to make a sequel, right?’ They wanted a sequel immediately, based on just the first opening weekend.”
Critics and audiences loved The Black Phone, which went on to gross $161.4 million worldwide on a budget of less than $20 million. However, the filmmaker, who has also given audiences Doctor Strange, Sinister, and The Exorcism of Emily Rose, wanted to take his time.
“I didn’t have any real thoughts about it until Joe Hill, who came up with the original idea, emailed me some thoughts that he had. His basic premise was that The Grabber calls Finney, his victim who escapes in the first film, from Hell. I was like, ‘Well, that sounds kind of cool and obvious, because the first movie was full of dead people who are calling Finney already.’ I didn’t feel like it was that much of a stretch when it came to the logic of the universe and the first movie.”
Here’s What Influenced ‘Black Phone 2’
Set four years after The Black Phone, Black Phone 2 sees Finney, played once again by How to Train Your Dragon’s Mason Thames, struggling with life after his captivity at the hands of The Grabber, whom he killed before escaping. When his sister starts receiving unsettling calls in her dreams from the black phone and sees disturbing visions of three boys being stalked at Alpine Lake, a winter camp, they decide to investigate what is happening, why, and how. Ethan Hawke returns as the now iconic boogieman, The Grabber. Black Phone 2 is R-rated and lands in theaters on Friday, October 17, 2025.
“I think the first movie is really a supernatural thriller, and the idea of then making a real high school horror film this time was interesting,” Derrickson, who also co-wrote the script, says as we chat over Zoom. “I went to these Christian winter camps when I was a teenager, and they’re very visual, visceral, and emotionally effective places. With all those combined, and when I got the charm of the story going, is the point at which I said to Universal and Blumhouse that I had an idea for a sequel I’d like to do. They just said, ‘Do it.’ They paid me to write the script and greenlit it as soon as they read it.”
(From left) Executive Producer Jason Blumenfeld, Arianna Rivas, Mason Thames, Miguel Mora, Madeleine McGraw and Director Scott Derrickson on the set of ‘Black Phone 2.’
Universal Studios
Black Phone 2 is stylistically even bolder than the first, really leaning into the films and formats of the period. While many people might draw a comparison with the A Nightmare on Elm Street movies, especially Dream Warriors, his love of Italian horror was also hugely instrumental, subconsciously.
“Suspiria is my favorite horror film and I love Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci, and the whole subgenre of giallo films,” Derrickson enthuses. “That was a big influence in trying to take a high, bold, artistic approach to the visual design of the movie. That’s something Italians have always done, which you don’t see done a lot in American horror cinema. You see it sometimes, but it’s not the norm. I wasn’t thinking about it directly and saying, ‘I want to pull this aspect of this particular film.’ Still, it’s more the visual high art sensibility of it, and the discipline that it takes to create a visual tapestry. My interest in doing that as a filmmaker in general comes purely from Argento.”
“Even A Nightmare on Elm Street wasn’t so much an influence, but I found myself writing the story, and just discovering we were in A Nightmare on Elm Street territory. It was less about conscious influences and more about realizing that this is a movie set in 1982, which led me to decide to shoot a lot of it on old film stock and Super 8. I felt really good about that. That was the era of all the camp slasher movies that followed Friday the 13th. The Shining came out in 1980, but there was a blizzard. I found that compelling because we’re having an ongoing conversation with those movies, which probably led me to take that shot from the 1983 film Curtains and pay a very unabashed homage to that movie with the image of The Grabber on the ice. All of this also made me realize that I too needed to create something that is interesting.”
(From left) The Grabber (Ethan Hawke) and Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) in ‘Black Phone 2.’
Universal Studios
How Scott Derrickson Finds Beauty In Horror
Because of the film’s visual texture and the breadth of classic cinema, both international and domestic, Black Phone 2 is likely to inspire potential cinephiles to check out the movies that had an impact on Derrickson and this work.
“And that’s wonderful,” he says. “Every filmmaker is drawing on other filmmakers. We all stand on the shoulders of giants, in some regard. That’s the nature of the flow of global cinema, which is something I spent a lot of my young adult life really studying. I examined how different movements emerged, giving way to new ones, and how directors transitioned. I think a really exciting part of the art form is to be able to jump into that lineage and swim upstream to see where things have come from.”
“Black Phone 2 going back more to that Italian sensibility is because those are the films that made me want to be a horror filmmaker. When I was in film school and I saw Suspiria for the first time, I was like, ‘Oh, my God, you can do this? This is a slasher movie, and it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.’ The score, the atmosphere, the ethereal tone, especially the first 20 minutes of that movie, is so mind-bogglingly sublime that I think that it made me realize there are much higher ambitions that you can have as a horror director than I think a lot of horror directors really allow themselves to have.”
(From left) Ethan Hawke and director Scott Derrickson on the set of ‘Black Phone 2.’
Universal Studios
When it came to guardrails and parameters for the expanded universe of Black Phone 2, the director, who co-wrote and co-produced the movie with C. Robert Cargill, has learnt that it’s better to create and follow his own rules rather than be bound by traditional genre tropes.
“You have to use good sense about what the audience is going to want to know and not know and trust your own instinct,” he explains. “Anybody can bring the hammer of logic to a supernatural film, especially a ghost story, bring that down and break it apart and say, ‘This doesn’t make sense. This doesn’t hold up. If they could do that, why didn’t they do this?’ Every ghost story that I’ve seen, that is good, has some sense of the frustration of the ghost limitations that vary throughout the movie.”
“My feeling is that we didn’t bend or break the rules of the first movie with Black Phone 2. The rules were established in the first movie, and we elaborated on them. My attitude when watching a supernatural movie is that the rules are what I see, because there is no reality I can grasp with Aristotelian logic to determine how things are. Some things may not make a lot of sense, but that’s what’s happening in the movie because that’s the universe I’m in. I have to accept that. That’s a much more exciting and honest way to watch supernatural cinema than trying to spend your time pinning down the rigid rules within the universe of that realm.”
(From left) Director Scott Derrickson and Madeleine McGraw on the set of ‘Black Phone 2.’
Universal Studios
With anticipation high for Black Phone 2, horror continuing to be on a roll at the box office, and Halloween falling less than two weeks after the film’s theatrical release, it looks set to repeat the success of its predecessor. So, should the call come from Universal for another film, what are Derrickson’s thoughts?
“I don’t have any thoughts about that one way or another,” he confesses. “I think you have to approach each movie on its own and not worry about that. If you’re thinking about a future franchise, you’re going to end up creatively restrictive in the movie. I made Doctor Strange, but I was fortunate that it was a movie with no ties to the MCU. It was a standalone movie. I wasn’t restricted by any of that, and it was wonderful. In this case, I made the first movie with no thoughts of a sequel. I ended up making a sequel, but I still have no thoughts of a prequel or sequel. Does that mean I won’t make one? No, but I just finished Black Phone 2, and it was important to me to finish it without any of that in mind.”
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