From Sinister to The Black Phone : Doctor Strange director Scott Derrickson's life in horror
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The Black Phone (out June 24) finds filmmaker Scott Derrickson returning to his horror roots after a spell in the MCU during which he directed 2016's Doctor Strange and worked on its sequel before departing the project over creative differences.
"The Black Phone is about a 12-year-old named Finney who has a younger sister named Gwen, and they live in a rough-and-tumble neighborhood with an alcoholic, abusive father," says Derrickson. "Finney is abducted by a child killer who has been taking and killing children in the neighborhood, and we follow him as he is abducted. His sister, who has paranormal abilities, tries to find him."
Rob Kim/Getty Images The Black Phone director Scott Derrickson
Derrickson initially came across Joe Hill's tale "The Black Phone" when the director bought a copy of the author's short story collection 20th Century Ghosts.
"I first read Joe's story when it was first published 17 or 18 years ago," says Derrickson. "I just pulled it off a bookshelf in Los Feliz and read the first short story while I stood there. I was like: This is amazing. I didn't know that Joe Hill was Stephen King's son at that point, but I bought it. I read the stories. The Black Phone always stood out to me as a movie."
The Black Phone is a reunion of the creative team responsible for 2012's creepfest Sinister, with Derrickson regrouping with longtime writing partner C. Robert Cargill, producer Jason Blum, and actors James Ransone and Ethan Hawke, the latter of whom plays the film's villain, "The Grabber."
"We really got the band back together for this one," says the director.
Below, Derrickson talks about the highs and lows of his career in horror.
Hellraiser: Inferno (2000)
"My reach extended my grasp, or whatever that phrase is. I was reaching for something that was too much. The budget that I had for that movie didn't fit the script, that's for sure. But I also had a lot to learn about how to make something scary. That said, I like the uniqueness of that movie. I think that, for the Hellraiser franchise, it's a great addition, and I still like it. Whenever people post scenes or something from it online, I think: That's a very ambitious, very unusual little movie. And there's a lot of me in it. I look at it and I can see echoes of things that showed up later in my career."
The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005)
"The making of the movie was an amazing experience. My son had just been born. We shot it in Vancouver — first time shooting in a foreign city. That was all wonderful. I also think of the research phase as being one of the scariest experiences I've ever had. I read so many books on possession and exorcism, from all points of view, skeptical and religious and everything in between. Boy, that was dark material, man. Really dark material. But I look at that movie now and I can see ways that I was green and new, but I can also see somebody who's really ambitious and excited to be working in cinema. I have a lot of affection for that movie. I'm still proud of the fact that, at the time I made it, no one had really made a successful exorcism movie since The Exorcist, and that movie relaunched the possession and exorcism genre. I'm very proud of that fact. The cast is so good. Jennifer Carpenter is extraordinary, and I love Laura [Linney] and I love Tom Wilkinson, and they're terrific in it. Yeah, I still think that's a really unique, interesting movie."
Sinister (2012)
"That was such a satisfying experience. I had come off of a very bad experience shooting a big-budget film [2008's The Day The Earth Stood Still]. Jason [Blum] gave me $3 million and final cut, so I had total control, and it was so refreshing as an artist. I didn't know if the movie was going to succeed or not but I knew that it was going to be my movie. I knew that I was going to make exactly the movie that I wanted to make, and that's exactly what I needed at the time. It was a very personal film about things that I was experiencing at that time of my life, and a lot of the raw scariness in that movie feels like a catharsis of a lot of things that I needed to get out. Ethan was amazing — the fact that he did it was amazing. So I think of that as an incredible experience and Jason Blum [was] 100 percent protective of me on that movie. That's why I went back to him with Black Phone. He really protects me as a director and lets me make exactly the movie I want."
Deliver Us from Evil (2014)
"Being really cold is the first thing that comes to mind. Every night we shot, it was freezing cold rain, in the Bronx, a lot of it exterior. That was a very difficult shoot, certainly the most difficult physical production, and in some ways even emotional production, that I've had. Critics didn't like it. I think it had the wrong release date. I still like a lot of things about that movie. I still think I made the movie I wanted to make. But I had a rough experience making that film, I will say that. It was physically difficult, there were a lot of personality issues going on. I was fighting a lot with the studio. I had PTSD after that movie, let me put it that way. [Laughs]"
The Black Phone (2022)
"When I left Doctor Strange 2, I had been in therapy, really dealing with trauma from my own childhood, and violence from my own childhood, for about three years. [I] was kind of on the tail end of doing that, and was thinking about trying to write a story that's kind of like an American 400 Blows, like the François Truffaut film, which was autobiographical. I didn't think I had a story as interesting as his, and then I thought: What if I combined my childhood memories with that story that Joe wrote, The Black Phone? And that's really what the movie is. It's characters and memories and feelings and tone drawn from my childhood growing up in North Denver in the late '70s, and Joe's story. That's what the movie is.
We looked at hundreds of kids for those roles and I'll admit it, I got lucky. Mason [Thames] is a movie star. You watch. You'll see. He had the ability to emotionally process exactly what's happening with his character, beat by beat, as he's shooting each shot of the movie, and he can somehow express that with such nuance. It's the look in his eyes, it's the expression on his face — it's so truthful, so real, and you cannot teach that. You can teach people how to be better at it, but you can either do that instinctively or you can't."
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