Scott Derrickson: “I won’t make a movie as scary as ‘Sinister’ but ‘Black Phone’ is better”

Forced to drop his ‘Doctor Strange’ sequel over creative differences with Marvel, Scott Derrickson returns to terror with ‘Black Phone’, a dark seventies tale that presents us with the scariest version of Ethan Hawketurned into a masked villain who promises to become a new icon of the genre.

“I read the first story in that Joe Hill storybook and had to buy it”says the director and co-writer about the moment he came across the dark story that is already one of the 5 best adaptations of Joe Hill, the son of Stephen King.

With a masked villain and a phone with an afterlife connection, Derrickson talks about ‘Black Phone’ as “a wonderful combination of investigation, serial killer and a supernatural point. It caught my attention that, although it is such dark material, the passion with which it has been written is noticeable.

Derrickson thus returns to the terror with which he began his career directing titles such as ‘Hellraiser V: Inferno’ (2000), ‘The Exorcism of Emily Rose’ (2005) and ‘Ultimatum on Earth’ (2008) but with which he really stood out went with ‘Sinister’ (2012), which a study published by Forbes declared to be the scariest horror film ever made according to the measurements of the pulsations of the public during its viewing.

“Will I ever make a scarier movie than that? Probably not but I don’t feel bad about it,” he says. “I believe that ‘Black Phone’ Is Not Just As Good As ‘Sinister,’ It’s Probably Better. I have tried to do something unique, something that really felt like my own. I think it’s the best movie I’ve done so far.”

“Ethan Hawke is my favorite actor I’ve ever worked with.“, says Derrickson without a second’s hesitation, underlining his new collaboration with the star. “We’ve been friends since we worked together on ‘Sinister’. As a performer he dares with everything and, furthermore, he trusts me as a director and he knows that I trust him as an actor, he knew that he would bring great originality to the character. I didn’t have to give him much direction, he prepared himself for the part and achieved a perfect interpretation of what I had envisioned. And all captivatingly behind a mask for much of the movie, it’s an incredible feat.”

“Modest, pragmatic and considerably effective,” says Antonio Trashorras in our review of ‘Black Phone’. “It generates questions like this, just as more ambitious proposals did (I’m talking about formats, not necessarily creativity) like ‘It’ (Andrés Muschietti, 2017), ‘Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark’ (André Ovredal, 2019) , the series ‘Stranger Things’ or the excellent saga of direct-to-platform movies ‘La calle del terror'”.