Four years ago, 13-year-old Finn (Mason Thames) killed his abductor and escaped, becoming the sole survivor of the Grabber (Ethan Hawke). But, in Black Phone 2, true evil transcends death … and the phone is ringing again.
As Finn, now 17, struggles with life after his captivity, the headstrong 15-year-old
Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) begins receiving calls in her dreams from the black phone and seeing disturbing visions of three boys being stalked at a winter camp known as Alpine Lake.
Determined to solve the mystery and end the torment for both her and her brother,
Gwen persuades Finn to visit the camp during a winter storm. Together, she and Finn must confront a killer who has grown more powerful in death and more significant to them than either could imagine.
As Black Phone 2 calls into Australian cinemas on October 16, Nick L’Barrow spoke with the films director and co-writer, Scott Derrickson, about utilising the most Super 8 film footage ever used in a mainstream feature film, and the catharsis of the horror genre.
Nick: Scott, it’s a pleasure to chat with you again, man! How are you today?
Scott Derrickson: I’m doing well, Nick. How are you?
Nick: I’m doing great! Thank you for taking the time to chat. Black Phone 2 is genuinely one of my favourite movies of the year! So, I’m excited to break it all down with you!
Scott Derrickson: Oh, that’s great! Thank you!
Nick: This story is way more emotionally moving than I was expecting it to be, and I think the script has this real empathetic lens that it explores Finn and Gwen’s trauma through. I’m curious to know what the conversations were like with Mason and Madi in exploring their character’s grief through empathy?
Scott Derrickson: Well, I didn’t tell either one of them anything about the script until it was finished! I just gave it to them. I think Madi was the most surprised when I gave it to her because she really is the lead this time, you know? She was shocked by that.
I mean, I hadn’t stayed in contact with them much in the three years between making these two movies, but for those three years, while they aged out of middle school and became high schoolers themselves, I knew them well enough to know that they would understand where the characters are in this movie. That the events of the first movie informed who they had become. We didn’t have a lot of conversations, but they immediately understood and were excited that their characters are dealing with real problems that were rooted in the first movie.
Nick: What is it about the horror genre that is such a malleable genre to explore such human and resonate themes like grief and trauma?
Scott Derrickson: I think that’s what the horror genre is for me. It’s a way of confronting the horrors of life. It’s a way of confronting the unspoken fears and traumas that we all have to deal with in our lives. And we all have them in very unique, distinctive ways.
But, if you make a horror film where the horrible things that happen to people is honest, and unflinching, and taken in a serious way, that movie speaks to people. In my life, the horror genre, in both making horror and watching or reading horror, has been instrumental in my own process in dealing with the trauma of my life, my childhood, aspects of my adulthood, like the death of my father. I could take all of these horrible things, the really dark passages I’ve gone through, and can point directly to the way horror filmmaking and watching horror movies has been a big part of how I’ve dealt with it all.
Nick: As a filmmaker and a storyteller, how much does location and setting dictate the story you want to tell? You have this blizzard-laden, church camp with no escape that feels so claustrophobic, but what sort of dictated the other – setting or story?
Scott Derrickson: It was very early on that I decided on the setting, before I even decided on the story. And I think part of the reason why is because I felt like if I was going to make a sequel to The Black Phone, it was going to have to be cinematically ambitious in the same way the first one was. You’re really relying on the camera movements and production design to sort of carry the cinematic qualities of the movie.
In this one, I wanted it to be a much richer, more powerful, visceral experience, you know? The goal was pretty straightforward. I wanted to make a movie that didn’t look like any more people had seen before, and I think we achieved that. I don’t think there’s a movie that’s used as much Super 8 as we did!
Nick: There is one shot in particular that comes to mind when I think of that “cinematic” feeling you’re going for, and that’s when Finney is in the phone booth, and 3 apparitions are talking to him and approaching him, all in one unbroken take. I’m curious to know how that scene evolved from the page to the screen?
Scott Derrickson: Yeah, that was a scene I saw very clearly. It’s funny you bring that one up, because I saw it so clearly in the writing of it. It’s written almost exactly as it was shot. I could see the speed of the camera, the reveal of characters as they sort of slide in and out of frame. And this moment sort of came at a break point in the movie where we needed some haunting visual power. It’s not a super dynamic or violent scene, but I wanted that sort of tent pole of aesthetic richness in something that was more eerie than scary.
Nick: The sound design played a big part of that eeriness for me. The Super 8 scenes of Gwen’s dreamscapes looked amazing, but that sound design was truly unsettling.
Scott Derrickson: Well, the goal there was that when we finished the script, none of that sound design was in there. And when I read it back, I thought this movie might actually be a bit confusing, and I had to find a simple language where the audience would never have to work hard to figure out whether they were in a dream or reality, even though we were intercutting between the digital and Super 8 material.
Very quickly I found that static sound that you would hear on film projection would work. It had that feeling of watching a science film reel in middle school or something, those 60mm projections. It felt very unnerving.
Thank you so much to Scott for his time, and to Universal Pictures for organising the interview. Black Phone 2 is in Australian cinemas October 16.
