Joe Hill<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n\t\t\u2018The Black Phone\u2019 felt isolated, but \u2018Black Phone 2\u2019 embraced a lot of horror iconography. Was that a deliberate choice or a matter of subconscious influence?\t<\/p>\n
\n\tThat 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 \u201cThe Black Phone\u201d is. In terms of the influences, I recognized that I was making a movie set in 1982, and that\u2019s the era of all those summer camp slasher movies that were following \u201cFriday the 13th.\u201d I watched dozens of those in the \u201980s, 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\u2019s not something I had seen before. There\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\t\tTell me about evolving the themes of the first movie for \u2018Black Phone 2\u2019 and pulling forward the relationship between Finney, Gwen and their reformed father as they reconcile with the truth about their mom\u2019s death?\t<\/p>\n
\n\tThis 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\u2019s 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\u2019s approaching womanhood and feeling like an awkward teenage girl who\u2019s gonna go crazy like her mom, and people think she\u2019s a witch. All of that seemed very truthful to both the story and to the normal struggles of teenagers.<\/p>\n
\t\tThere are some interesting themes about religion and the existence of evil. What was behind the push and pull of Demi\u00e1n Bichir\u2019s counselor character, who takes Finney under his wing, and the god-fearing couple, played by Maev Beaty and Graham Abbey, who reject Gwen?\t<\/p>\n
\n\tThose 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\u2019re experienced. You don\u2019t see that in movies very often. But I also, in good conscience, couldn\u2019t 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\u2019s 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\u2019ve got Gwen. Her spirituality is so individualized. It belongs to her and her alone and isn\u2019t linked to any religion or any particular church or denomination. That was a backdrop where we could have a legitimate exploration of Gwen\u2019s spirituality and contrast it with this different brand of Christianity.<\/p>\n
\t\tHow did you land on implementing the Super 8 footage into the story?\t<\/p>\n
\n\tI can\u2019t think of a film that has more Super 8 material in it. I knew that I was interested in exploring it with Gwen\u2019s 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\u2019re 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\u2019t look like any other film that you\u2019ve seen. That was important to me.<\/p>\n
\t\tOne comparison that kept coming to mind was \u2018Halloween 3\u2019, seeing this new dimension of the Grabber in a completely new space in time. If there is a \u2018Black Phone 3,\u2019 could you see the Grabber, or possibly another evil like him, creep into the lives of other families?\t<\/p>\n
\n\tWhat I can say is that my attitude toward a sequel is that there\u2019s really no justification for making a sequel unless you are genuinely attempting to make a movie that\u2019s better than the first movie you\u2019re making a sequel to. If you\u2019re 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\u2019s \u201cEvil Dead\u201d trilogy and George Romero\u2019s \u201cNight of the Living Dead\u201d trilogy are probably the only two trilogies of movies where they\u2019re all three great movies and get progressively better. What would be important to me in considering any ideas is that it\u2019s just not a retread, and that we don\u2019t feel like we\u2019re seeing, \u201cOh, now we establish this new rule for the Grabber. So let\u2019s just do that again.\u201d That\u2019s the only thing I couldn\u2019t do.<\/p>\n
\n\tThis interview has been edited for clarity and length.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cEvil Dead II,\u201d \u201cA Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors,\u201d \u201cDawn of the Dead,\u201d \u201cM3GAN 2.0\u201d: It\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":228091,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[64,63,70276,11117,134,344,83906],"class_list":["post-228090","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-black-phone-2","tag-blumhouse","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-scott-derrickson"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228090","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=228090"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228090\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/228091"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=228090"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=228090"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=228090"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}