Scott Derrickson Reveals the One Thing He Won’t Do for Black Phone 3

Scott Derrickson has killed a lot of people. And a surprising amount of them have been children. Okay, no, Derrickson hasn’t actually killed people, but he has imagined many deaths and put them on screen, including the three mutilated tykes murdered by the Grabber in his most recent movie Black Phone 2.

Black Phone 2 is off to a pretty great start at the box office, which means that there’s already talk about a third entry in the series. And with it, Derrickson is setting up his boundaries, indicating the lines he won’t cross for his next movie. When asked about Black Phone 3, the director told Variety, “What would be important to me in considering any ideas is that it’s just not a retread.” In particular, Derrickson rules out building the sequel around new lore. “Oh, now we establish this new rule for the Grabber. So let’s just do that again,” he mused, by way of example. “That’s the only thing I couldn’t do.”

Derrickson’s comments might strike some Black Phone 2 viewers as surprising, given the way the sequel reimagines the Grabber, the killer played by Ethan Hawke. In addition to establishing more backstory about the character’s connection to leads Finn (Mason Thames) and Gwen (Madeleine McGraw), Black Phone 2, which Derrickson based on the Joe Hill story and co-wrote with C. Robert Cargill, also brings the Grabber back from the dead and imagines him as a Freddy Krueger-like killer. That’s a pretty different set of rules from the first film, where he just kidnaps and kills children.

However, there is a difference between establishing a new status quo for a character and changing the rules. Examples of the latter include the late Hammer movies featuring Christopher Lee’s Dracula, in which a character randomly declares that the Prince of Darkness cannot pass through woods or cross over running water, and, lo and behold, the movie ends with the Count caught in the woods or stymied by running water. An example of the former includes the Friday the 13th franchise, in which Jason is a (very resilient) flesh and blood human in the first four movies, and an unkillable zombie after his resurrection in the sixth film.

Whatever direction he decides to go in, Derrickson is adamant that he must improve on what’s come before. “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,” he explained, before pointing to a few, rare examples.

“Very few films do that. 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.”

Of course, Romero went on to make three more movies in the Living Dead series, movies that are okay (Land of the Dead) to terrible, which perhaps only proves Derrickson’s point. Because he’s already done enough terrible things on screen. He’s not about to add to it by doing a bad sequel.

Black Phone 2 is now in theaters.