The Black Phone 2 director teases horror sequel has ‘more intensity and more gore’ than first film

The Black Phone 2 director Scott Derrickson has teased the sequel has “more intensity and more gore” than the original movie.

The upcoming horror flick will see The Grabber (Ethan Hawke) return from beyond the grave as he torments Finney (Mason Thames), and Derrickson - who co-wrote the film with C. Robert Cargill - has now explained The Black Phone 2 will be “more violent and more aggressive” now that Finney is a teenager.

During an interview with SFX magazine, the 59-year-old filmmaker said: “The reason I wanted to do a high school movie was that it has more interesting emotional stakes.

“It requires a different tone than a middle school coming-of-age supernatural movie.

“You just invariably are going to need to be more violent and more aggressive and maybe more shocking, to escalate aspects of the movie beyond what the first movie did, because a good portion of the audience, the teenagers who grew up really loving The Black Phone, they're older now. They're the kids who paid to see Terrifier.

“So there's certainly more intensity and more gore. We were rated R, and one of the things we were rated R for was gore. There's no gore in the first movie at all.”

Derrickson added he didn’t want to make The Black Phone 2 more intense than the 2021 original just to be “edgy”, but thought introducing a more mature tone would allow him to explore the “emotions” of the characters further.

He said: “The change that you go through between middle school and high school may be one of the biggest, most dramatic changes you go through in your lifetime, and I was really interested in who these characters have become, having gone through something so extraordinary.

“I didn't want to intensify the violence and horror to be more edgy. I was interested in being more mature, going deeper into the emotions of these characters and trying to make a movie that worked as a pair.”

The Black Phone 2 - which hits cinemas on October 17, 2025 - follows Finney (Thames) and his sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) four years after his escape from The Grabber (Hawke) as they struggle with the lingering trauma of his crimes.

When Gwen’s visions draw them to a remote winter camp, the siblings uncover a dark family secret and face the vengeful spirit of the killer they thought was gone forever.

Derrickson revealed the experiences he had staying at a winter camp in his younger years had inspired the eerie setting for The Black Phone 2.

He told Den of Geek: “Winter camps in the Rockies are something I went to as a teenager.

“I [brought in] specifically the dangerousness of the weather, and the idea that there are these old structures that were old in 1982. They would rattle in the storms; they didn’t feel safe when you were in them, and you probably weren’t as safe as you thought you were.

“Being 16 or 17 years old, there’s a heightened sense of existence when you’re in an environment like that, especially at night when it can be 20 or 30 degrees below zero in a storm.

“I think all of that, and the spiritual texture with it [in] Gwen’s dreams, and the religious conversations, all of that was very real to my high school experience.”