A new young adult horror movie is on the way that is bringing together some burgeoning genre stars for an all-new adventure. The upcoming Bad Influence comes from screenwriter Brandon Cohen and director Jason Perlman.
According to Deadline, Scream VI star Jack Champion and The Black Phone star Madeleine McGraw have joined the movie, as has Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness star Xochitl Gomez. The movie is described as “a modern-day Thelma & Louise fueled by female rage, following Isabelle (McGraw) and Kira (Gomez) on a road trip home for spring break, when they pick up mysterious hitchhiker (Champion), who is not what he seems.”
Debbie Liebling, Joel David Moore, and Zachary Burgess will produce the movie, and executive producers include Steven Silverstein, Cathy Raduns, Raymond Merrill, Carmelo Chimera, Syed Ali Saeed, Denis Schoenhofer, Natalie Kline, and Jarod Einsohn.
The new movie marks only the latest genre entry on McGraw’s growing resume. Back in 2022, she expressed her love for horror when speaking about her work on The Black Phone.
“I love horror things. I love that scared feeling like when your heart drops,” McGraw revealed to Bloody Disgusting. “I was so excited to get to do this, and I was so happy that I got to do it because my mom doesn’t let me watch a lot of scary things. So, I knew she would have to let me watch it since I was in it.”
The original The Black Phone was based on the Joe Hill short story of the same name, while the sequel was an all-new narrative. Director of both movies, Scott Derrickson, previously expressed to Variety what his outlook was on getting a Black Phone 3.
“What I can say is that my attitude toward a sequel is that there’s really no justification for making a sequel unless you are genuinely attempting to make a movie that’s better than the first movie you’re making a sequel to. If you’re 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,” the filmmaker confessed. “Looking back on the history of cinema, I think Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead trilogy and George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead trilogy are probably the only two trilogies of movies where they’re all three great movies and get progressively better.”
He added, “What would be important to me in considering any ideas is that it’s just not a retread, and that we don’t feel like we’re seeing, ‘Oh, now we establish this new rule for the Grabber. So let’s just do that again.’ That’s the only thing I couldn’t do.”
Luckily, even without a third Black Phone, McGraw is clearly intentionally exploring more stories in the horror realm.
Stay tuned for updates on Bad Influence.
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