With horror sequel Black Phone 2 opening at number one last weekend, a new generation of audiences not only got scared, they also got introduced to one of the defining songs of the 1980s, with the inclusion of Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall, Pt. 1.”
The ominous track was actually recorded and released as part of the era-defining album The Wall in late 1979, but it didn’t top the charts until January 1980, where it stayed at number one for 15 weeks. “It’s very cinematic music,” said director Scott Derrickson, who admits to being a massive Pink Floyd fan. In fact, this is actually the third time that he and Austin-based writer C. Robert Cargill have featured the music of the great British prog band in their movies, with a needle drop of “Interstellar Overdrive” in Doctor Strange, and “On the Run” appearing on the soundtrack of The Black Phone (plus, Cargill noted, Vincent D’Onofrio wears a Pink Floyd shirt in their first film together, Sinister).
So how do they keep getting the rights? Derrickson explained that it helps if filmmaker Maggie Levin, daughter of Pink Floyd session bassist Tony Levin, is your second unit director. “And I think they like us,” Derrickson said, “because they always give us a break on the price.”
The musical choices reflect the shift between The Black Phone and Black Phone 2. “On the Run” was part of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, their 1973 album that defined the decade as much as The Wall set the tone for the Eighties. Cargill noted that the inspiration for the first film was that Derrickson wanted to make a film that referenced his youth, growing up in late Seventies suburban Colorado, “so it’s set very much in ’78, and he grounded it and had all those details from his childhood. And of course we move forward four years to ’82, and that’s very much my childhood, so it’s drawing in the details, those things that we grew up [with] that we loved at that time, the music and the clothing.”
Derrickson recalled that the time jump was part of what convinced him to direct a sequel to a film that didn’t cry out for one. In the original The Black Phone, the Grabber (Ethan Hawke) abducts middle schooler Finney (Mason Thames), only for the teen to be assisted in beating the serial killer by the voices of his previous victims, and the burgeoning psychic powers of his little sister, Gwen (Madeleine McGraw). When discussing the idea of a sequel, Cargill said they were trying to avoid “The Taken 3 problem – how does the same kid end up in another basement?” The solution actually came from Joe Hill, on whose short story the first film was based. Cargill said, “Joe texted me one day and goes, ‘Can I call you?’ ‘Yeah.’ So he calls me up and says, ‘I have the dumbest idea.’ Great, I love dumb ideas. ’Cause I remember on Sinister, I had called up Scott and said, ‘I have the dumbest idea,’ and he goes, ‘That’s not dumb, that’s great.’ So whenever someone brilliant like Joe says ‘I have a dumb idea,’ I’m all ears. So he goes, ‘A phone rings, Finney answers, it’s the Grabber calling from Hell.’ Boom. It’s a bolt of lightning. Of course that’s what the movie has to be about.”
However, Derrickson admitted that he didn’t feel an immediate urge to push out a sequel. Hill’s idea was “compelling enough to think about,” but he wanted to make another, bigger movie in between the Black Phone films to allow him to age up the characters deeper into their teen years. Production on hybrid romance/action/creature feature The Gorge gave him the three years that he and the characters needed. “To me, that became what justified a sequel,” Derrickson said. “See who these characters are, three or four years after this very intense thing has happened to them and meet them in high school.”
The intervening years have not been kind to either Gwen or Finney. The young man has pulled back into himself, becoming sullen and withdrawn, an emotional state that Derrickson called “the only honest thing to do” for a teenage boy processing trauma. Meanwhile Derrickson said he found more narrative potential with Gwen, “a teenage girl, 15 years old, who feels like a freak, and who thinks she is going to go crazy, doesn’t fit in, doesn’t feel like anyone can understand her, doesn’t trust people.”
The end result is that while the first film was really Finney and Gwen’s story, Black Phone 2 is more about Gwen and Finney’s story.
Derrickson laughed. “That’s 100 percent accurate. For the rest of my press, I’m stealing that. It’s the best articulation of what it is that I’ve heard.”
For Cargill, that change of emphasis between the siblings was easy because Gwen was so ready to be put in the spotlight. “We loved her character from the first movie, and she really connected with other people. Audiences just loved her, and we wanted to really play around with that character a lot more. One of the really interesting things about revisiting these characters is that both of these kids had supernatural experiences, and it changed them both in different ways. We wanted to be able to explore that, and a big part of that was Gwen. … And when you have an actress as incredible as Maddie, it’s very easy to go, ‘Well, we’re just going to give her more to do.’”
The change in time, the aging of the characters, and the idea of the Grabber now reaching out from beyond the grave also allowed Derrickson to completely change genre between the two films. He said, “I think that The Black Phone is a coming-of-age supernatural thriller. By moving to high school, I wanted to make a horror.”
With both films being period pieces, it was important to re-create what Cargill called “the reality of the time. I feel that far too many films have almost a satire of the era. The Eighties is a pastiche of bright pastel colors and crazy hair, and that really wasn’t what it was like. People dressed very conservatively in the Eighties, and had lots of wood in their house, cheap wood paneling, very bland, very brown, and it was different to how people think they remember it.”
“What I’m not interested in as a director is nostalgia,” Derrickson said, “and I’m not interested in the things that are the signifiers of a particular era. Instead, it’s about the specificity of one’s own experience in an era. Not trying to capture this detail or that detail but trying to capture what it felt like to be that age in 1982.”
That’s why Gwen doesn’t wear a Nagel-esque coat but instead spends the winter in a puffy jacket in that kind of grayish-lavender – a color picked out by Derrickson for being ubiquitous at the time. Similarly, Finney isn’t watching MTV but Night Flight, USA Network’s must-see late-night show for the future weirdos of what would become known as Gen X. Cargill explained, “People remember, ‘Oh, 1982, MTV was the biggest thing.’ No. 1982, MTV was in three cities. It wasn’t until ’84 and ’85 that it was everywhere. But we all had the USA Network, and we all watched Night Flight when our parents went to bed. I would sneak downstairs and watch these music videos and these crazy short films, seeing Night of the Living Dead for the first time. That’s the touchstone, and everyone who was alive in 1982 was watching.”
However, that authenticity isn’t just about appeasing fiftysomething recovering teenage insomniacs. Derrickson said, “I think that even if you’re a person with no memory of that, was not alive at that time, came from a completely different culture or city or place in the world altogether, when that detail is done authentically and honestly, I think people realize that. They realize, ‘Oh, this feels like a very distinctive time and place,’ and the tactile reality is somehow communicated.”
