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.
Five decades ago, Stephen King published the story of a bullied girl with telekinetic powers and forever changed the world of horror.
Carrie follows a high school misfit who seeks revenge for a hideous prank by psychically destroying her senior prom. The name Carrie White has become synonymous with the concept of a formal dance thanks to a flawless adaptation from Brian De Palma. Now fifty years after the film’s release, Mike Flanagan is putting his own stamp on the troubling story.
Rather than a feature film, the writer/director will expand King’s relatively slim debut novel into an eight-episode miniseries for Amazon Prime set to premiere on October 7.
Flanagan is no stranger to the world of Stephen King. A long-time Constant Reader, he first made waves with his daring adaptation of Gerald’s Game (2017), a novel many fans considered un-filmable. His underrated Doctor Sleep merges the disparate plot of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining with King’s original source material, and his 2024 genre-bending tearjerker The Life of Chuck faithfully executes one of the author’s most metaphysical novellas.
He’s currently mired in pre-production for an expansive adaptation of The Dark Tower series, keystone to King’s connected universe, and Warner Bros. recently announced that Flanagan will helm a new version of The Mist, King’s 1980 novella which sees a small Maine town overrun by otherworldly monsters.
Considering the vast array of the author’s previously unadapted material, an obvious question arises. Why reimagine Carrie in 2026? Noting the timeless nature of the content, Flanagan expressed his desire to bring the story of a bullied girl into modern times, mirroring his approach to Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher. He explained, “The only way to approach it was to build something new out of the ingredients of Carrie. Otherwise, there’s really no purpose in trying to retread ground that’s been so beautifully walked before.”
His miniseries will maintain the novel’s bloody bookends while delivering “big surprises” along the way.
A New Prom Night Nightmare
The roughly 60-second teaser introduces Summer H. Howell as Carrie White just before the moment of catastrophe. Standing in a prom dress, she smiles at her applauding classmates with an ominous crown perched upon her head. Moments later, Carrie unleashes a rage-filled scream into the night air while promgoers rush for the exit doors. But careful examination of this scene shows Carrie wearing a different, albeit dirty dress as she seems to telekinetically punish her peers.
In an exclusive first look with Entertainment Weekly, Flanagan explains that in his version of the story, “the events of that prom are going to be completely different.” An open trunk emitting a crimson glow does hint at the pig’s blood dumped on Carrie’s head, but it’s likely Flanagan’s formal dance will be a different kind of horror altogether. Despite these changes, the series may end with the widespread destruction outlined in the source material. Unlike any previous adaptations, King’s novel ends with the near-total destruction of Chamberlain, Maine. A flaming street in Flanagan’s trailer promises similar carnage no matter what prank sparks Carrie’s deadly revenge.
The Monstrous Addition of Social Media
On the opposite end of this fiery conclusion is an extreme act of bullying that brings together the story’s main cast. King’s novel begins as Carrie gets her first period while showering in the girls’ locker room. Completely unaware of the concept of menstruation, the sheltered girl thinks she’s bleeding to death. Her classmates respond with vitriolic rage. Led by ultra-mean girl Chris Hargensen (Alison Thornton), they mock the terrified teen while pelting her with tampons. Glimpses of this disturbing event reveal that Flanagan has excised the scene’s nudity while adding a seismic update. As Carrie sobs in the shower stall, Chris and her friends film the breakdown with their phones.
Other scenes note the presence of social media, bringing King’s fifty-year-old story into the digital age.
Flanagan’s adaptation promises to explore the destructive power of social media, an often invisible entity with a potential for harm rivaling Carrie’s own powers. While King’s tormented heroine suffers in front of a small group of girls, Flanagan’s version of the incident will likely become a viral video, potentially circling the globe on social media. Similar to Katt Shea’s criminally underrated The Rage: Carrie 2, which includes elements of revenge porn exploitation, Flanagan’s modern retelling will distinguish itself by exploring the nebulous cruelty of online bullying, a force ten times more powerful than the irl pranks King first envisioned.
A Completely Reimagined White Family
In addition to modernizing these canon events, Flanagan hints at updates to Carrie’s oppressive upbringing at the hands of her mother, Margaret White (Samantha Sloyan). Dead before the novel begins, we never meet Carrie’s domineering father Ralph, known to carry a bible alongside his gun. Flanagan’s White household will be an altogether different beast. In his version of the story, Carrie and her mother have been hidden away in the unassuming home, forced out of hiding by Ralph’s unexpected death. Perhaps we will finally meet this elusive man whose shadow hangs over his wife and child. Considering the White family’s fundamentalist lifestyle, this reimagining hints at tradwife culture and a home ruled by staunch patriarchal control.
Whereas King’s Carrie has been tormented by her classmates since Kindergarten, Flanagan’s Carrie will be a wide-eyed newcomer to public school, eager to make friends and engage with her peers. We glimpse Carrie cozying up to Chris and the equally popular Sue Snell (Siena Agudong) as she navigates a new social scene. Of course, we know this kindness is part of an elaborate plot designed to lull Carrie into a false sense of camaraderie, setting up an atrocious act of public humiliation. These brief moments of feigned compassion put Sue’s own complicity into question. Will Flanagan’s version of the character find the courage to defend Carrie from vicious bullies or will she succumb to peer pressure and join in the mob mentality?
Perhaps the biggest deviation from King’s original text is the relationship between Carrie and her mother. King’s Margaret White is a horrifically abusive religious zealot whose worldview has been hardened by internalized misogyny. She shames Carrie for menstruating, locks her in a closet to “pray,” and regrets not killing her child in infancy. She’s also responsible for Carrie’s social ostracization. Known to berate her neighbors for their “sins,” Margaret forces her daughter to live by an extreme code of conduct and disallows any potential friends lest they corrupt the girl with their worldly ways.
Flanagan’s version of the character is perhaps just as much a victim as Carrie herself. Also trapped inside her home, his Margaret is overly vigilant, her own trauma manifesting as strict control. Describing a more sympathetic depiction of the iconic villain, Flanagan explains, “Our Margaret White is a woman who fiercely loves her daughter and wants to protect her from this world … [She] doesn’t know how to do that and thinks the way to protect her is to close her off; not punitively, but to create this private utopia.”
Despite this potential softening, Sloyan’s Margaret may still have a sharp edge. Though she has appeared in many Flanagan projects, from Hush (2016) to The Fall of the House of Usher (2023), she is best known for her role as the abhorrent Bev Keane in the poignant saga Midnight Mass (2021). Perhaps inspired by King’s Margaret White, Bev is pious and sadistic, willing to punish anyone who does not adhere to her warped approximation of Catholicism.
Flanagan specifically wrote Margaret with Sloyan in mind, likely remembering the actress’s eerie ability to create deceptive empathy and shift our allegiances on a dime.
Expanding Stephen King’s Telekinetic Universe
While most of King’s story deals with an unthinkable prom night in Chamberlain, Maine, large sections of the semi-epistolary novel see experts debating the nature of telekinesis. Do Carrie’s frightening abilities represent a new phase in human evolution or is the prom night carnage merely a fluke? King settles the debate with a shocking denouement in which a young mother recounts her infant daughter’s ability to dangle her crib toys in midair. We’re left to wonder if she will become another tormented girl who surprises the world with metaphysical strength.
Flanagan plans to build out this brief scene while amplifying themes of female empowerment. After introducing our main cast of characters, episode two will open with an unrelated story in which we meet another girl with the TK gene. Each subsequent chapter will expand this world, building out a roster of telekinetic young women. Considering King’s fondness for stories about powerful kids, often described as possessing “the shining,” Constant Readers will no doubt have their eyes peeled for various Easter Eggs nodding to the author’s vast catalogue.
Giving Carrie Her Own Voice
Perhaps the most striking distinction in Flanagan’s new trailer is the extent to which we hear Carrie’s voice. The sneak peek is fully narrated by the titular prom queen as she demands accountability. “I want to know why,” she explains while detailing Chris’ elaborate plan. Aside from the aforementioned coda, King’s book essentially ends with the aftermath of the prom night tragedy, leaving little time for Carrie to reflect. His shifting narrative does bring the reader into her fragile mind, though not before she’s been cowed by relentless cruelty. We watch Carrie sink into bloodthirsty revenge, but never hear a considered desire for justice or repair.
Flanagan’s original monologue allows Carrie to voice her pain and mourn the life she could have had. We’re also treated to a mug shot-style photo of Chris with a bruised and bandaged face, implying that the mean girl will have to answer for her senseless sadism.
Flanagan is known for filling his series adaptations with heartwrenching speeches that cut to the heart of his thematic intentions, and this teaser seems to follow suit. After years of fans, critics, and scholars analyzing Carrie’s pain, perhaps his modern retelling will offer the titular anti-hero a chance to finally speak for herself.
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