The Black Phone 2 director Scott Derrickson would only return for a third film if one key condition was met.
Scott Derrickson sees “no justification” for Black Phone 3 unless it can be “better than the first”.
The 59-year-old filmmaker has returned this month with a follow-up to his 2021 modern horror classic starring Ethan Hawke as The Grabber, but he isn’t rushing to expand the series to a trilogy.
He told Variety: “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 director pointed to Evil Dead and Night of the Living Dead as the “only two trilogies” to succeed.
He added: “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.”
The Black Phone 2 saw The Grabber take a Nightmare On Elm Street-esque supernatural twist as he became a threat from beyond the grave, but Derrickson has no interest in changing the character’s lore for the sake of it.
He explained: “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.”
Derrickson admitted he made a “very conscious” decision to shift the tone for the sequel, particularly with the timing and location, as well as moving on the characters of Finney (Mason Thames) and Gwen (Madeleine McGraw).
He said: “Part of what was exciting to me about waiting until the kids were in high school was that a high school horror movie demands more violence and more scariness than a middle school supernatural thriller, which is really what The Black Phone is.
“In terms of the influences, I recognised that I was making a movie set in 1982, and that’s the era of all those summer camp slasher movies that were following Friday the 13th.
“I watched dozens of those in the ’80s, and what I liked was the idea of doing that, but setting it in the winter camps that I went to in the Rocky Mountains. That’s not something I had seen before.”
Scott Derrickson insist Black Phone 3 can only happen on one major condition
