Editorials
36 Things We Learned from the ‘Black Phone 2’ Commentary with Scott Derrickson
Black Phone 2 is that rare horror sequel that builds on and improves upon the original movie while still delivering the goods at the box office. It made a little less than the first film, but it’s still a clear hit that’s continuing to find new audiences on VOD, streaming, and physical disc.
It’s that last format that we’re celebrating here as the new 4K UHD/Blu-ray release comes with special features like deleted scenes, featurettes, and more. Also included is a new commentary track with the film’s co-writer and director, Scott Derrickson. His usual partner-in-crime (co-writer C. Robert Cargill) is nowhere to be found, but Derrickson delivers a fantastic solo commentary track digging into the filmmaking details, how/why various story threads came together, and the talents of his entire cast and crew.
Now keep reading to see what I heard on the commentary for…
Black Phone 2 (2025)
Commentator: Scott Derrickson (director, co-writer)
(from left) Gwen (Madeleine McGraw), Mustang (Arianna Rivas) and Ernesto (Miguel Mora) in Black Phone 2, directed by Scott Derrickson. Sabrina Lantos/Universal Pictures and Blumhouse.
1. The Universal logo at the start is circa 1982, which is the year the film is set in, and it “was one of the last creative decisions we made.”
2. While the first film is a serial killer/horror film, he sees this sequel as more of a mystery. What is this camp, and what does it have to do with the Grabber?
3. The opening credits design is meant to suggest that the Grabber has gone to a frozen hell, and it’s an idea that certain lines of dialogue play into later.
4. Universal reached out to Derrickson on the Monday after The Black Phone’s opening weekend back in 2022, and they wanted to talk about a sequel. It’s understandable as the film was a big hit, but he wasn’t all that interested at first. That changed when Joe Hill, the author of the original short story that the first film is based on, gave Derrickson a suggestion as to where the story could go from there. He decided to hold out for a few years, which would allow time for his two lead protagonists, Finn and Gwen – and the actors who play them, Mason Thames and Madeleine McGraw – to age into high school.
5. While the first film ends on a note about the need to stand up and fight against bullies, oppressors, and whackadoos in cool masks, Derrickson liked the idea of following up on that a few years later. How have Finn’s trauma and survival carried him forward into the volatility of his teenage years?
6. Maggie Levin, Derrickson’s wife, did some 2nd unit directing here, including the Super 8 dream kills at the camp. He wasn’t even on set for these sequences, in part because “the ambition of the movie far exceeded the budget.” He says the only way to make it work was to have Levin shoot “a surprising amount of the footage.”
7. “I think Super 8 footage is incredibly powerful,” he says, adding that it has an “aesthetic richness” and “dread” about it that he just loves. He doesn’t name names, but he knocks films that try to fake Super 8 using apps with digital footage.
8. One for the tech geeks… while he loves Super 8 and much of the footage here is filmed with it, he points out that it’s a very reckless format with flaws and can often stutter in the camera gate. He also “realized there’s a great limitation in terms of what you can do with lenses.” As a way around that, they actually shot some of these sequences on 16mm so they could use different lenses, but wanted the same grain as the Super 8. To do that, they “shot on 16 but framed for half the film stock image to be exposed, so when we extracted that image, what we extracted was 8mm imagery.” The result was a perfect match in grain and color between the 8mm and 16mm footage.
9. The second camp kill nightmare, the one with the kid getting chopped, was filmed in below-zero temperatures. The Super 8 camera was freezing up, resulting in a shot that appears undercranked, and the result is one of Derrickson’s favorites. Levin did a few takes of it, all with that one performer being shirtless, and they knew they had it when the kid let out a genuine scream. “These kids were amazing.”
10. “I really wrote this movie for her,” he says about McGraw, whom he goes on to praise. While the first film focused on Finn, the sequel puts her right up front. He calls her an “emotional engine, that she has this landscape of feelings that she can access.”
11. There’s an unexpectedly heartbreaking beat when James Ransone appears for a brief cameo. This track was recorded about two months before Ransone’s tragic death in December of last year, and hearing Derrickson refer to him as “my old friend” hits hard.
12. “I was really interested in bringing him back and having him on a path to redemption,” he says about Jeremy Davies’ character, Terrence. He’s Finn’s and Gwen’s dad, and the first film highlighted his abusive behaviors while drinking, so here he’s on the sober track. He understands why the kids wouldn’t rush to forgive him, but “I also didn’t feel like he deserved to be vilified and written off.”
13. There’s a poster for The Thing That Couldn’t Die in Finn’s room, and it’s the first film Derrickson ever saw as a kid. “It was really scary,” he says.
14. He gives a shout-out to Pink Floyd and thanks them for letting him use their music for a great price. Derrickson’s a big fan, and he recounts using a Pink Floyd t-shirt in Sinister, the song “Interstellar Overdrive” in Doctor Strange, “On the Run” in Black Phone, and then “Another Brick in the Wall” here.
15. “In horror films, there’s a push all the time by producers and production companies and studios to get to the horror quickly,” he says, adding that he understands why audiences want that horror fix. “The good horror films oftentimes will take their time to let us feel their world,” he says, and acknowledges that’s what he’s aiming for here as well. A slow build-up, spotted with horror beats, but that builds to the actual horror sequences and setpieces. “Once it takes off, it really goes,” he says, adding that the shot at 29:05 “is the beginning of the horror movie.”
16. The film is a real family affair, as in addition to Derrickson directing and co-writing, his wife handles 2nd unit direction, and his son Atticus Derrickson composed the score. He compliments the score’s use of low sounds and credits Atticus’ early efforts in crafting hip-hop beats for giving him a “distinctive ear” for that low end. He says that Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross are his favorite composers, but adds that his son’s work here is on par. Frankly, it sounds like he just has a thing for composers named Atticus.
17. The bit where Ernesto (Miguel Mora) tells Gwen that her talking to Jesus is “hot” always gets the biggest laugh from audiences, and Derrickson added it for that reason. It works as a little tension reliever after an intense sequence.
18. Derrickson isn’t a fan of the word “theme” in regard to movies, and he shares a great quote from Flannery O’Connor on the idea – “If you can easily state the theme of a story, you can be sure it’s not a very good one.” That said, if he has to touch on it, he says one of this film’s themes is in regard to how young men process their pain and suffering.
19. The Hateful Eight is one of Derrickson’s favorite Quentin Tarantino films.
20. Derrickson recalls his time as a teenager attending similar Christian camps in the Rocky Mountains, and the character of Mando (Demian Bichir) is a nod to the Mexican-American counselors who worked there. He also mentions that those camps of how youth were more hardcore Christian and often preached things he no longer believes in.
21. “I don’t think of this as a religious movie,” he says, adding that it is a movie about the afterlife. “This is not about Christianity, this is not about religion, it is about the spirituality of these individual characters.” He laughs off an early negative review that claimed the film is “trying to make Christianity look cool and edgy.”
22. He shares a Dashiell Hammett quote, “tension starts when the action stops,” and he applies that idea to scenes around the midpoint where nothing of importance is being said, but audiences can still feel the seriousness and the danger ramping up. Fittingly, it’s around where we first see The Grabber (Ethan Hawke) at the phone booth as he tells Finn that “fear is just the warm-up.”
23. The Grabber’s rant about why he’s back, starting at 56:32, was meant solely as a voiceover to play while Gwen is in the kitchen, but when Hawke recited it at the phone booth, he did so with such visceral intensity that Derrickson decided to keep us on that scene instead. “I didn’t expect him to scream like that or to get so passionate,” so Derrickson redesigned the scene to take advantage of it.
24. He didn’t set out to showcase his influences from the 80s, but “having written the script, I realized how much they were like the movies of this era.” He didn’t really connect on that until he was shooting the film and began thinking about the slashers of the early 80s, so many of which were set in a camp. “I’m less interested in thinking consciously about influences and always love to work on something and then realize what the influences were.”
25. Derrickson offers up a great tip for writers when it comes to the scene immediately following the kitchen attack. All seven characters at the camp are gathered in the chapel, and they’re talking. Some would label this as exposition, but he sees it more as an example of discovery. Exposition is characters simply stating things some know while others don’t, but here, it’s more about Mando trying to understand what the hell is going on here. It’s about character as he acquires evidence to join Finn’s and Gwen’s cause. “That’s not exposition, that’s storytelling.”
26. The studio wanted Derrickson to cut numerous scenes to help keep the budget in check, but one he refused to snip is the sequence with Mando in his shack, hearing The Grabber over the radio. They said it wasn’t scary, cool, or necessary, but Derrickson shot it anyway and added effects, and it ended up ranking very high with test audiences.
27. He’s a firm believer in good pacing in horror, and he tries not to go more than ten minutes or so in his horror movies without a creepy beat. He doesn’t mention this, but that’s actually the exact same mentality behind Japan’s pinku films – hour-long T&A movies that can be any genre, from comedies to science fiction, but must have a sex scene every ten minutes or so.
28. The lake sequence is filmed on a stage – understandably, but it’s one of the film’s only visual missteps as it looks entirely fake – and the mountain backdrops are actual photographs of the peaks surrounding the real lake this one is based upon. “It looks real because it is real,” he says, and we’re gonna allow him this one bit of bs because both the movie and this commentary are fantastic.
29. The scene where Gwen dreams about seeing her mother investigate The Grabber and then be abducted by him ends with him showing Gwen his mother’s hanging corpse. That reveal, that she didn’t kill herself and was instead murdered by The Grabber, was the suggestion by Hill that convinced Derrickson to sign on to the sequel.
30. The Grabber’s dialogue while perched at the back of the van isn’t something that Derrickson would give to just any actor, but he knows Hawke could make it work. He recalls the actor coming up to him after filming the scene and saying, “It’s not every day that you get to say a line like ‘I am a bottomless pit of sin.’”
31. Gwen, in her dream, is sitting in a phone booth when The Grabber wraps the cord around her neck and slams her into the roof of the booth. Derrickson mentions that the stunt performer’s legs appear to disappear at 1:25:24, but he promises they’re still there.
32. Thames prepped for an hour before shooting the scene at 1:29:30, where Gwen confronts Finn about how he hides from his fears instead of facing them. It’s an intense performance that sees Thames break down and cry, but everybody realized too late that he wasn’t wearing gloves – both a continuity error and a logic issue. They weren’t sure he could recapture that intensity, but the visual effects supervisor stepped in and said with confidence that he could put gloves on him. The result is pretty damn incredible.
33. Yes, that is an intentional homage to 1983’s Curtains at 1:36:38.
34. There was originally another scene at the end showing that Barbara (Maev Beaty) and Ken (Graham Abbey), the conservative Christian couple, were both alive and a bit more understanding with Gwen, but Derrickson cut it as he felt it was both unnecessary and one ending too many.
35. Early testing revealed one major issue with audiences – they didn’t feel that The Grabber was punished enough at the end. “I forgot one of the rules of horror, which is the catharsis of defeating the villain needs to come with some visceral power.” The original ending featured the ghost kids pulling him down into the water, where he disappears into the darkness. They did a single reshoot for the film, and it was to buff up the ending with Gwen and Finn absolutely destroying The Grabber before he’s pulled down to hell.
36. Hawke referred to the first movie as “a horror film told from the point of view of love,” and he was thrilled to see that the sequel achieves that same feeling.
Photo Credit: Robin Cymbaly / Universal Pictures and Blumhouse
Quotes Without Context
“If you found Super 8 films in your grandmother’s closet and put them on a projector and watched them, no matter what’s on them, they would be a little creepy.”
“Everybody on the set felt bad, was like, ‘this is wrong, what we’re doing.’ That’s always a good sign.”
“I really love Pink Floyd’s music, I think it’s incredibly cinematic.”
“And here’s our black phone in our movie Black Phone 2.”
“This is so horrible. Every time I see this, I always feel like, oh man, this is really, really bad, really wrong. And we worked really hard to get the brains sliding…”
“I’m more interested in critiquing false religion than I am promoting any kind of true religion.”
Keep up with more horror commentary breakdowns here.
Despite what the higher-ups at Marvel would have you believe, Stan Lee’s original vision for Spider-Man was very different from the friendly neighborhood wall-crawler that fans ultimately got.
It was comics maestro Steve Ditko that turned him into the lovable web-head that we all know and love, though even that first draft of the character wasn’t exactly meant to be a child-friendly mascot. Ditko envisioned an uncanny arachnid-human hybrid whose freakish poses and dark costume would strike terror into the hearts of criminals, with the inclusion of web-shooters possibly having been a suggestion by Ditko’s roommate at the time, renowned fetish artist and bondage enthusiast Eric Stanton.
These more adult-oriented origins may have changed over the years, but one could argue that Spidey never completely lost his darker side. In fact, we’d eventually see several grim storylines that explored the horrific consequences of Spider-Man’s radioactive blood. While having his irradiated body fluids give Mary Jane cancer is likely the most terrifying of these yarns (track down Spider-Man: Reign if you’re up for a depressing read that was at one point set to be adapted to film by Michael Jackson), one of the most memorable horror-adjacent moments in these comics has to be the acceleration of Peter Parker’s mutation and the eventual introduction of Man-Spider – a storyline that appears to have been one of the main inspirations behind the upcoming Spider-Man: Brand New Day.
I sincerely doubt that Marvel Studios is really going to give their toy-selling juggernaut a Cronenbergian rebrand, but the most recent trailer for Brand New Day suggests that the creative team is pulling from some surprisingly spooky source material in this latest superhero sequel. Specifically, the trailer makes it seem like the film is set to be a loose adaptation of the Neogenic Nightmare arc from Spider-Man: The Animated Series, commonly known as the best exploration of Spidey’s radioactive dark side that also features the most iconic version of Man-Spider.
If you’re wondering what these influences could mean for the upcoming film, I’d like to invite you to join me as we look back on some of the animated series’ most horror-tinged episodes.
A fourteen-episode story arc that made up the show’s second season, Neogenic Nightmare began airing in September of 1995. At this point, the series had already earned a reputation as the definitive version of Spider-Man despite dealing with absurd levels of censorship and executive meddling. It’s widely known at this point that this incarnation of Spidey was prohibited from ever punching his villains, and the studio even insisted that realistic guns should be replaced with futuristic laser weapons in order to avoid enraging concerned parents.
And that’s not even mentioning bizarre demands like setting up Hobgoblin as the original Goblin villain simply because the folks responsible for the toy-line had already prepared the character’s merchandise before scripts were even written.
At the end of the day. the show’s success mostly came down to John Semper’s excellent writing, with the (mostly) faithful recreation of the Spider-Man’s core principals and a handful of iconic storylines (coupled with an excellent cast behind the scenes) elevating a what was intended to be a kid’s show promoting ToyBiz products.
Naturally, the rampant cartoon censorship of the 90s couldn’t keep Semper from wanting to explore darker themes from his own favorite Spider-Man comics, and that’s how his team came up with a season-long re-imagining of iconic arcs like the Six-Arm Saga, The Mutant Agenda and even the first appearance of the Sinister Six. These stories would be enhanced with additional “dark” characters like Blade, The Punisher and even Morbius (though the latter had to exchange his vampiric blood-drinking for bizarre plasma-absorbing powers in order to conform to network guidelines).
If you haven’t yet seen it, the complete Neogenic Nightmare arc follows Spider-Man as he discovers that his mutation is progressing beyond his initial superpowers and threatening to turn him into a more monstrous hybrid. After developing extra arms, Spidey goes so far as to request help from both the X-Men and several other super-heroes as he becomes embroiled in a criminal conspiracy involving a team-up between some of his most iconic villains. The arc eventually introduces us to the show’s version of Man-Spider, which is depicted here as the monstrous final stage of the process which began when Peter was first bitten by that radioactive spider.
Personally, I think this werewolf-like addition to Spidey’s genetic curse is the best incarnation of Man-Spider that we’ve ever seen. This is because the six-armed body horror of it all adds even more weight to Peter’s decision to keep helping others regardless of what his powers may cost him, with the creature’s final rampage even giving the supporting cast a chance to help Spider-Man for a change. While I don’t hate the Morbius movie as much as some other comic fans, it’s a shame that Sony relegated that story to a solo film instead of later incorporating it into the Man-Spider saga like Neogenic Nightmare did.
Season two of the animated series ended up being an even bigger hit than the first, with fans loving the show’s take on an expanded Marvel Universe (which even included the ’90s X-Men cast) as well as the darker take on a more monstrous Spider-Man. That’s why it makes sense that the MCU’s return to street-level comic adventures would harken back to this particular storyline – especially since it appears that the Disney wishes to use the upcoming film as an opportunity to shine a light on other Marvel characters just like Semper did back in the day.
From what we can see in the trailer, Tom Holland’s Spider-Man appears to be going through his own additional transformations, including creepy fully black eyes and organic web-shooter, as well as the cocoon-building behavior previously seen in Marvel’s The Other arc in the comics. As I mentioned before, I doubt that the MCU will allow this particular cash cow to fully transform into a nightmarish spider freak that can scare away children, but there’s always a chance that the studio could surprise us with more horror elements. I’d also love to see the story explore Spidey’s mutation and use that as an excuse to formally introduce X-Men’s mutants into the MCU, especially since Sadie Sink is rumored to be playing Jean Grey in the flick.
However, even if Brand New Day doesn’t adapt as much of the Neogenic Nightmare as the promotional material has suggested, I’d argue that this particular season of Spider-Man: The Animated Series is still worth revisiting simply because it’s a great example of artists being able to work past network limitations in order to tell complex stories that approach full-on body-horror.
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