‘Black Phone 2’ Writer/Director Says Sequel Has “More Intensity & More Gore” Than Original: “A Different Tone”

Returning to the scene of the crime four years later, Black Phone 2‘s co-writer and director has upped the stakes for the sequel.

Scott Derrickson, who created the Blumhouse franchise with C. Robert Cargill, recently explained how the followup expands on the lore of the 2021 supernatural horror film with “more intensity and more gore,” now that Finney (Mason Thames) is a teenager.

“The reason I wanted to do a high school movie was that it has more interesting emotional stakes,” Derrickson told SFX Magazine of the sequel, which premieres Oct. 17 in theaters.

After escaping the Grabber’s (Ethan Hawke) clutches and putting his killing spree to a permanent end in The Black Phone, Finney investigates a winter camp with his younger sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw), who’s had visions of the killer stalking three young boys from beyond the grave.

“It requires a different tone than a middle school coming-of-age supernatural movie,” the writer/director explained. “You just invariably are going to need to be more violent and more aggressive and maybe more shocking, to escalate aspects of the movie beyond what the first movie did, because a good portion of the audience, the teenagers who grew up really loving The Black Phone, they’re older now. They’re the kids who paid to see Terrifier. So there’s certainly more intensity and more gore. We were rated R, and one of the things we were rated R for was gore. There’s no gore in the first movie at all.”

Derrickson added, “The change that you go through between middle school and high school may be one of the biggest, most dramatic changes you go through in your lifetime, and I was really interested in who these characters have become, having gone through something so extraordinary. I didn’t want to intensify the violence and horror to be more edgy. I was interested in being more mature, going deeper into the emotions of these characters and trying to make a movie that worked as a pair.”

Black Phone 2 had its world premiere last month at Fantastic Fest in Austin, after the original 1978-set film saw the Grabber kidnap young Finney, who’s guided to his escape by phantom phone calls from the killer’s previous victims. The first movie was a surprise post-quarantine box office success, surpassing $161 million worldwide.