The Black Phone and the new sequel Black Phone 2 are a notable exception. Director Scott Derrickson and his longtime screenwriting partner C. Robert Cargill — also the duo behind Sinister and Sinister 2, among other horror projects — both identify as Christian. That emerges in their frankness about Christianity in the Black Phone movies, and particularly about “bad Christians” in Black Phone 2. But as they told Polygon in an interview after Black Phone 2’s world premiere at the 2025 Fantastic Fest, that doesn’t mean they want to be called “Christian filmmakers.” Even using the phrase made Derrickson visibly flinch.
“I don’t like that term,” he said. “‘Christian’ is a bad adjective. It is a proper noun, but it’s not a good adjective.”
In part, that’s because he and Cargill don’t want to be seen as religious mouthpieces. The Black Phone movies aren’t evangelical, and they don’t come across as Christian polemics, like so many of the faith-based movies that have been finding more space in multiplexes over the past few years. They just have a franker and more complicated view of religion than most modern horror movies, from how it should be practiced to the intimate, horrifying details of Hell itself.
Bringing a more thoughtful, examined view of religion into horror is important to both men, but as Derrickson puts it, this feels like a particularly good time for them to explore their own beliefs on screen.
“I think there is an interest in trying to venture out into real spirituality [in horror movies right now],” he said. “Especially at a time where a lot of people, myself included, have a feeling that our religion is getting hijacked in this country.”
Good Christians vs. bad Christians
In The Black Phone, siblings Finn (How to Train Your Dragon’s Mason Thames) and Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) face off against a notorious serial torturer and murderer known as The Grabber (Ethan Hawke), with the help of Finn’s ability to talk to the dead, and Gwen’s clairvoyant dreams. Finn isn’t particularly religious, but Gwen wears a cross pendant and credits her visions to Jesus, who she prays to with hilariously profane, unsentimental bluntness. There’s no outright proof of divine intervention in the movie, but Gwen begs Jesus for help in rescuing Finn, and her dreams eventually give her what she needs.
Black Phone 2 sends Gwen and Finn to a snowed-in Christian camp to deal with unfinished Grabber business, and Gwen ends up on the wrong side of a couple of self-righteous Christian employees, Barbara and Kenneth (which is to say, “Barbie and Ken”) who vocally judge Gwen for her foul mouth, curt manner, and petty rule-breaking. Before the movie is over, Gwen has told these two stuffy, self-righteous bit players that they aren’t exhibiting “true Christian behavior,” and answered their pious, caustic Scripture-quoting with a Bible verse of her own.
Cargill said that element of the movie was deeply personal. “One of the things that frustrates us both the most is people who like to announce that they’re Christian, but who act in very deeply un-Christian ways,” he said. “We’ve had so many experiences dealing with those people who wield Christianity as a weapon to embolden their awfulness. So we felt that was a perfect point to have the juxtaposition of exploring Gwen’s Christianity and the fact that she is a pure soul. Her belief is purely one of trying to figure out the universe. […] I love that the [Fantastic Fest] audience roared when Gwen stomps on Barbara with the Bible itself.”
Positive audience response to Gwen’s take on religion in The Black Phone emboldened both filmmakers to some degree, Cargill said, and let them spend more time on Christianity in the sequel. “With the first movie, so many people came to us, both atheist and Christian, who loved the portrayal,” he said. “They’d say, like, ‘Hey, this girl is Christian in your movie, but you’re not forcing that on us. It’s just who she is.’ So it was a great time to be able to explore that.”
Cargill says that while Kenneth and Barbara are minor characters, he wanted them in the movie to complicate Gwen’s situation: “We knew we needed to have some kind of antagonistic characters just to create a certain level of drama,” he said. “You never want everything to just be easy, for your characters to skate on through.”
But he also felt that if they were going to portray Gwen as having a positive, fulfilling relationship with religion, they had to show the opposite side of the equation as well: “If you’re going to talk about Christianity in a movie, you got to talk about all the elements, and that’s where you’re honest.”
At the same time, there’s wry humor in the conflict between Gwen, Barbara, and Kenneth, or in Gwen’s combination of sincere religious belief and creative, colorful profanity. Cargill has a simple response about the movie’s sense of play around Christianity: “It’s fun to make fun of people who piss you off!”
Why God’s presence in Black Phone 2 is opaque
Black Phone 2 remains ambiguous about whether Jesus or some other spiritual force is helping Gwen, who takes a more central role in this movie, and suffers a lot more for her beliefs. Derrickson says he and Cargill wanted to avoid spelling out too much about that aspect of the Black Phone world.
“There’s a lot in these movies that isn’t explained, and part of it is the relationship between God and Gwen,” he said. “I think part of what makes cinema work is understanding what the audience really does and doesn’t need to know, and what you can allow ’em to feel and interpret in their own ways. It’s the poetic side of media, even if you’re making a popular horror movie.”
That aspect of the film is both personal to Derrickson and intended to reflect reality — Christianity is based on faith in God, not certainty about his existence. But it’s also calculated to make Gwen and the film in general more approachable than the average faith-based movie might be.
“The questions about Gwen’s spirituality — I feel like the less that is said about that, the more people can infer something about their own spirituality on that character in an identifying way,” Derrickson said. “The one thing that is repeatedly made clear is that she has her own relationship with God, and it is individual. It doesn’t go through a church, it doesn’t go through a priest. It doesn’t go through doctrines and teachings, these sorts of things that can bog down a person’s actual relationship with God. She has something that is privately, powerfully between herself and her creator, as she understands her creator.”
“I’m not a spokesperson for religion”
Black Phone 2 has a unique take on Hell as a place where all the positive aspects of a human soul are stripped away, leaving only the most monstrous parts. That’s a particularly specific viewpoint with a lot of dramatic potential, but it feels different coming from a Christian with his own beliefs around Hell. Derrickson said that idea reflects one of the most important aspects of religions around the world.
“I think what is interesting [about religious belief] is [thinking about] what happens after death — the possibility that we endure,” he said. “Not just in Christianity, but in most major religions, there is a spectrum of [belief about experiences] one can have after death, going all the way back to the earliest religions that we know about, the earliest myth that we know about. […] I think all of that is in our DNA, that is anthropologically something that we possess as a species.”
That said, bringing this kind of detail into a movie doesn’t necessarily reflect his own beliefs.
“I want to recover some authenticity for religious experience,” he said. “Only it’s not important to me to be any kind of spokesperson. I have no interest in propagating my views on this subject. It has nothing to do with me wanting to demonstrate or express to people things that I think or believe. That is of zero interest. But I think [religious belief] has dramatic pertinent power for anybody. Even the most strict atheistic, scientific materialist, is still going to find meaning in stories about life after death, and find meaning in a religious character, if it is done properly. And I don’t see any reason not to explore that — I see reasons to be exploring that more now, not less.”
Black Phone 2 is in theaters now.
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