‘Black Phone 2’ Writer: Everyone Becomes ‘a Christian’ When Watching Horror Movies

Black Phone 2 is not marketed as a conventional faith film, yet director Scott Derrickson and co-writer C. Robert Cargill—collaborators on both entries in the Black Phone series as well as Sinister and its sequel—consciously engage Christian ideas, including portrayals of Hell and the line between sincere belief and performative piety.

Bringing explicit religious themes into mainstream horror can be fraught; to some viewers it risks alienation. Cargill, however, suggests that horror already invites temporarily religious thinking. He argues that audiences instinctively accept certain Christian concepts—demons, scripture as protection, the reality of Hell—for the duration of a frightening film, even if those beliefs are set aside once they leave the theater.

That confidence allowed Derrickson and Cargill to address Christian motifs more openly in the sequel than they did in the first installment. The filmmakers felt that because many horror conventions are steeped in religious imagery and rules, naming those elements outright would feel natural rather than didactic.

Derrickson says that injecting Christianity into the sequel gives the film an unexpected emotional uplift. He believes horror has evolved into a vehicle for complex drama, where the genre now often carries the kinds of weighty human stories audiences used to find in straight dramas. With that evolution, he wanted to foreground hope and the redemptive impulses that have become integral to contemporary horror.

At the heart of Black Phone 2 are the twin engines of dread and devotion: the film interrogates the fear of Hell and otherworldly evil while also centering the fierce bond between siblings Finn (played by Mason Thames) and Gwen (Madeleine McGraw). Derrickson describes the result as a film that finds beauty amid brutality—an attempt to balance true emotional warmth against the horrors at its core.

Black Phone 2 is in theaters now.

Source: Polygon