“The Black Phone” is ringing again.
The follow-up to 2022’s surprise hit, which made over $161 million worldwide on a budget of around $14 million, arrives on October 17. And this time, the villainous Grabber (Ethan Hawke), is on the other end of the mystical phone. Watch the brand-new trailer below and read on for from co-writer/director Scott Derrickson.
Derrickson, who also helmed Apple’s big hit “The Gorge,” which was out earlier this year, said that he “didn’t feel any obligation to do a sequel,” even after “The Black Phone” became a huge hit.
“The studio was pushing for one right away and I didn’t really think very seriously about it,” Derrickson said. But then Joe Hill, the writer whose short story inspired the original, sent Derrickson an email with an idea. He said the idea, which he used half of, cracked open his approach to the sequel. (The idea, Derrickson said, was not revealed in the trailer.)
What got Derrickson really excited, he said, was combining Hill’s idea with another element.
“When I realized, well, wait a minute, if I go make another movie now, especially if it’s a bigger movie, then by the time I finish, these kids are going to be in high school,” Derrickson said. “And I can make it a high school horror film in the same way ‘The Black Phone’ was a middle school, coming-of-age film. That became very interesting to me, because it’s a very different genre in a very different tone. And it gave me a lot of excitement to be able to continue these characters during a different phase of their lives.”
Based on the trailer, “Black Phone 2” looks to combine two staples of the horror genre – the summer camp movie (a la “Friday the 13th”) and the snowy horror movie, like “The Shining” (Hill’s father is Stephen King) or “Ravenous.” Derrickson said that he grew up in Denver and went to Christian camps in the summer and the winter, in awe of the mighty power of the Rocky Mountains. “I felt like that was a setting that I was interested in putting on film, because it was something I experienced so much growing up. I spent a lot of my teenage years in the Rocky Mountains during the winter,” Derrickson said. (He said 90% of the snow is the movie is real. “There’s nothing worse than fake snow,” Derrickson said.)
It’s the combination of the weather and the location that makes “Black Phone 2” so dynamic, according to Derrickson. “The snowbound environment is not something that has been pillaged as much as the summer camp environment has,” Derrickson said.
Of course, the big reveal in the trailer is that the Grabber is now on the other end of the titular phone. In the original phone, the Grabber is a child murderer who sequesters our hero, played by Mason Thames, in a dingy basement. Thames’ Finney answers the phone and hears from the ghosts of other child victims of the killer, who help Finney escape. And death has not mellowed the Grabber at all, by the looks of it.
“I knew that if we would make an actual sequel, and not a prequel of any kind, that that was going to have the case. That was an idea that I had early on. I thought, Well, it would be fun if I ever did this to have Ethan be a ghost. I thought that would be scary and menacing and we could have a lot of fun with that,” Derrickson said. As for Hawke, when Derrickson sent him the script, the actor sent him a note saying that he was nervous because he’d never done a sequel before. When Derrickson brought up the “Before …” movies that he’d made with Richard Linklater, Hawke said that those didn’t count since he had co-written them too. “When he read it, he texted me right away his incredible excitement for it and enthusiasm for it. And I think that he felt that there was a reason to make it, and that it, while being a very different kind of story, maintained some of the point of view of the first movie, which he really liked,” Derrickson said.
But would Derrickson push his luck and make a third “Black Phone” entry? He referred to a discussion that Quentin Tarantino and Bill Maher recently had about how few perfect trilogies there are. (They discussed “Toy Story” and Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name trilogy. This was the same discussion where Tarantino said he’d never watch “Toy Story 4.”)
“It really didn’t hit me until I watched that interview how few great trilogies there are. And in order to be a great trilogy, you’ve got to make a second film that tops the first and a third film that tops the second. And there have been a lot of sequels, in my opinion, that have topped the original movie. People talk about how that never happens. Well, it’s happened a lot,” Derrickson said. “There been a lot of a lot of sequels that are better films than the original, but the third film very rarely tops a great sequel. You really have got to have your game on if you dare to do something like that.”
All that said, Derrickson revealed that he does have an idea for the third film. Not that he’s ready to tell us what it is. “Not in a million years would I tell anybody,” Derrickson said.
Originally, “Black Phone 2” was going to debut this summer, but it got pushed to closer to Halloween. “I think that summer horror is a very distinctive thing, as opposed to fall and winter horror audiences. I think audiences have a certain expectation of feeling in the kinds of films that they go to see,” Derrickson said. “And summer movies are big fun movies for a reason. It’s not just because everybody’s out of school and there’s bigger audiences. The summertime just invites big pop entertainment. And summer horror that’s successful tends to be really funhouse horror.” (Summer horror movies include “The Conjuring,” “Midsommar,” “Jaws” and “The Frighteners,” among others.)
“Black Phone 2,” Derrickson said, “felt more like what people want at Halloween.” Derrickson conferred with Blumhouse head Jason Blum about the schedule. At the time “M3GAN 2.0” was scheduled for October and “Black Phone 2” was meant for June, around the same time the original opened in 2022. “I said, ‘I think we should switch, these dates. I think these are a better date for each film if we switch them.’ And he agreed, and we did it.” While it made more sense, overall, Derrickson said there was an ulterior motive too. “I’m not going to say that having more time to finish my film was also a motive,” he said.
“Black Phone 2” arrives on October 17. Get ready to see a lot of people in that freaky Grabber mask this Halloween.
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