CALL ME BACK

THE GRABBER RETURNS! SFX MEETS THE DIRECTOR OF BLACK PHONE 2 TO TALK SEQUELS, GHOSTS, MASKS, AND ETHAN HAWKE

- WORDS: JACK SHEPHERD

SCOTT DERRICKSON HAS ONLY ever directed one sequel - his direct-to-video debut Hellraiser V: Inferno - and for good reason.

“A lot of times, for horror sequels, the expectation is a recycled version of the first movie,” he tells SFX. “I’m usually not that interested in those kinds of sequels, and I'm certainly not interested in making one.” It’s a mantra the filmmaker had when making Hellraiser V (reviews of the movie note how his onscreen nightmare wildly differs from its predecessors), and it’s an attitude Derrickson had when approaching his followup to The Black Phone. “You're in a perilous position as a writer/director, making a sequel to a movie that has done very well, and in my case, a movie that was very personal,” he says. “What eventually got me interested in doing a sequel was seeing how I could build upon the first movie and do something that is not a repeat. It had a lot to do with seeing that I could make a film that's an evolution from the first by waiting until the kids got a couple of years older, and making it a high school movie [between ages 14 and 18], as opposed to a middle school movie [between ages 11 and 14].”

TEENAGE KICKS

Based on a short story by Joe Hill, the '80s-set original sees young Finney (Mason Thames) attending school with his sister, Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) when a masked man, nicknamed The Grabber by the newspapers, grabs Finney and traps him in a basement. Hanging on a grubby wall is a disconnected phone, which Finney receives calls on from the spirits of the Grabber's previous victims. The movie climaxes with Finney killing the Grabber, played with terrifying aplomb by Oscar-winner Ethan Hawke. So how exactly is the villain back in the sequel? Well, as the new movie's tagline says, in this supernatural world, dead is just a word.