Black Phone 2 isn’t an overtly faith-based movie — at least, it isn’t the kind of religious-themed film people are usually thinking about when they discuss Christian movies finding a foothold in modern multiplexes. But director Scott Derrickson and co-writer C. Robert Cargill (partners on both Black Phone movies, Sinister, and Sinister 2), who both identify as Christians, do openly address Christian beliefs, the nature of Hell, and particularly what separates a “true Christian” from a pious hypocrite.
Religion is such a personal topic that bringing it into an otherwise mainstream movie could risk alienating or angering audiences. But Cargill has a unique take on that concern — he told Polygon that horror movies automatically turn viewers into Christians, at least for the film’s run time.
“The minute an audience sits down for a horror movie, everyone in that audience is a Christian,” Cargill says. “If there’s a demon in the movie, everyone’s immediately like, Yes, reading from the Bible can chase it away. Yes, Hell is a real place. Yes, of course, the devil can impregnate a woman, you can have a child of the devil. That makes total sense. And then they get up and leave it all there in the movie theater.”
With that in mind, he and Derrickson felt they could address Christianity in the Black Phone sequel more directly than they did in the first movie. “It doesn’t matter what religion you are when you sit down for horror,” he says. “Christianity is baked into our horror to the point where people understand and acknowledge the rules, so we knew we could just say it out loud.”
Derrickson adds that the Christian element in Black Phone 2 gives it a positivity that a lot of modern horror films lack — and not just horror films, either. “People are not going to see dramas the way they used to, and I think one of the reasons is, those dramas are in horror films now,” he says. “Horror has developed into the genre where the best dramas are being told. […] And because that’s the way we’re moving, I wanted to explore feelings of hope that belong in horror now, in ways they didn’t even 10, 15 years ago.”
He says the “big feelings of fear and love” have always drawn him to horror movies, and the fear of Hell and creatures from Hell as they’re portrayed in Black Phone 2 is part of the movie’s core, alongside the love between its sibling protagonists, Finn (Mason Thames) and Gwen (Madeleine McGraw). “So there’s a lot of beauty around the awfulness and the terror of making a movie about a sadistic child killer back from the dead.”
Black Phone 2 is in theaters now.
