Black Phone 2 goes to places longtime horror fans may recognize. While the 2025 sequel follows the same protagonists and villain from 2021’s The Black Phone — a serial killer and the kids who use supernatural powers to stop his run of kidnapping, torturing, and murdering children — it expands on the first film’s world, and brings in a few familiar elements from other horror movies. It’d take a deep-cut horror specialist to recognize the ice-skating elements from 1983’s Curtains, but the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise inspirations are clearer — especially the ties to A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors.
Wes Craven and New Line Cinema turned Nightmare on Elm Street into a nine-film franchise, complete with novels, comics, a video game, and a TV spin-off. Could The Black Phone have the same staying power? Could this become a long-running horror series like the Freddy Krueger movies, but with longer-lived protagonists instead of a new batch of Freddy-chum in every installment? Before any of that, the first question would be, “Will there be a Black Phone 3?”
“I can’t think about filmmaking that way,” director Scott Derrickson told Polygon at Fantastic Fest 2025, after Black Phone 2’s world premiere. “I understand that’s the business of the studios, trying to create film franchises. And I certainly respect film franchises as a horror fan. But as a filmmaker, I have to go one film at a time, and any film that I work on, I have to feel like this might be the last one I get to do. So it had to be complete. We haven’t had one conversation about a Black Phone 3, and I don’t know that we will.”
“Would we love to work with [Black Phone stars Mason Thames, Madeleine McGraw, and Ethan Hawke] again? Absolutely,” said C. Robert Cargill, Derrickson’s writing partner on both Black Phone movies, along with Sinister, Sinister 2, and other projects. “Would we love to get the band back together? Absolutely. Would I love to explore those characters some more? I thought about it. But it all comes down to: Is there a good enough idea to justify us putting a year of our life into making that? When you commit to a movie, that becomes part of your life for at least a year. So it’s really got to be something really great and inspiring for us to want to make a third one.”
The initial pitch for Black Phone 2 came from Locke & Key and NOS4A2 author Joe Hill, whose 2004 short story inspired the first movie.
“Joe Hill called me and said, ‘I have the dumbest idea,’ And I’m like, ‘I love dumb ideas!’” Cargill said. “The core idea was, ‘A phone rings, Finny answers, and it’s The Grabber calling from Hell.’ And Joe had a couple other great ideas, like, ‘The mask is now just his face, that’s who he is, what’s left of him.’ Some of those ideas ended up in the film, some didn’t, but the call was the core idea that was like, ‘Oh yeah, we can make a movie out of this. That’s an idea where we have the mythology [already] set up from the first film. There’s lots of stuff to explore there.’”
Both men emphasized that they’re open to a Black Phone 3 if they run across a similarly hooky core idea, from Hill or elsewhere, but they don’t want to make a sequel just for the sake of a franchise.
“If it happens, it happens,” Derrickson said. “But it was the same thing after the first movie — the day after opening weekend, Jeff Shell, the chairman of NBCUniversal, emailed me and said, ‘You’re going to make a sequel, right?’ And I was like, ‘I have no idea.’”
Derrickson pointed out that horror is full of film franchises, but in his opinion, there are “only two great horror trilogies”: Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead trilogy and George A. Romero’s original Night of the Living Dead and its two direct sequels, Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead.
“I don’t think there’s another trilogy that by itself is truly great, where all three films are excellent, and it can be argued that, in both cases, the sequel is better than the original, and the third film is better than the sequel,” Derrickson said. “I don’t know how I could possibly continue to work on any film franchise unless I was at least trying to do that.”
Black Phone 2 is in theaters now.
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