Andrew Cook
Over the last few decades, Scott Derrickson has emerged as one of the most crowd-pleasing filmmakers in Hollywood. His films are largely successful both theatrically and critically, but though I’d seen some of his films many years ago I hadn’t kept up with his work until a chance viewing of one of his short films spurred me to revisit his career. I started with his 1995 student film Love in the Ruins, then made my way through his horror work, shorts and features, up until 2025’s Black Phone 2. The trip turned out to be one of the most rewarding cinematic journeys I’ve taken in 2026. I’ve come to see Derrickson as one of the indispensable filmmakers of our era, with many of his horror films serving as key additions to modern cinema, his finger ever on the pulse of America’s quivering id.
Though some of his most popular films have been outside the horror genre, Derrickson’s work is sharpest and most plaintive within the realm of the macabre. Derrickson is a devout Christian, and he explores the material and spiritual worlds and the complexities (and often hypocrisies) of modern American faith most effectively in his darkest works. His films, while wholly original and coming from a deeply personal place, can perhaps be understood in shorthand as a meld of Ingmar Bergman and Wes Craven, just as Craven himself started out with Last House on the Left, a modern comment on Bergman’s Virgin Spring.
Love in the Ruins (1995)
Derrickson’s 1995 short film Love in the Ruins, produced while in college at USC, serves as his thesis not only for graduation, but for his entire career to come. It tells the story of two demons (Al Spenser and Michael Denney), one tutoring the other in the most effective methods of feeding on human pain by observing an incident of violence at a Los Angeles gas station. Despite being rough around the edges, Love in the Ruins remains a worthy piece of work. The highly precise framing, blocking, and camera movement which will come to define Derrickson’s work, his evocative use of music, not to mention his knack for painterly images and unsettling atmosphere, is all present here though still in nascent form. Interesting as well is just how experimental the piece is narratively. The plot of the 35-minute film is an event which could easily unfold in just a few scant minutes of real time, but Derrickson luxuriates in character, time, and place, and in so doing his perspective is revealed.
The demons observe as a number of different people converge at a gas station just in time for one of the passersby, concerned about shady people he’s fallen in with, to be shot in a drive-by. The shooting victim and his friend, an Asian-American family buying gas as the father worries about recent gambling losses, a truckload of immigrants concerned over their impoverished living conditions and the violence their loved ones could face if they’re caught crossing the border illegally, a bigoted middle-aged man and his wife looking for directions, a young man facing car trouble, and the gas station attendant, all here at this moment. Despite this, all of them are alienated and atomized, living their own separate, desperate lives, seeing each other with hostility, prejudice, and suspicion, if they see each other at all.
Derrickson revels in their interior humanity, both good and bad, looking beyond the basic objectivity of events often reported briefly in the news. He wants us to remember every such story involves people just like us, with lives as important as ours.The demons make their way to the gas station from a bridge in a downtrodden part of the city, all this ruin combining with the personal misery of the characters to make Derrickson’s ultimate point that the structures of modern America are inhospitable to human life on a personal, economic, spiritual, and even familial level. In Love in the Ruins, the typical chaos of the horror movie is but a drop in the bucket, the real pain at a social level, in a nihilistic culture which only exists to entrap as many people as possible for the promise of financial gain. Love in the Ruins features everything which will come to characterize Derrickson’s career: dark forces intruding into the material world, emphasis on the experiential possibility of cinema, and running commentary on the state of the world and the people in it. His eye here is as grungy as it is fluid, cinematography calling to mind filmmakers like Spike Lee, and it’s something we’ll see Derrickson return to later.
Hellraiser: Inferno (2000)
Derrickson’s feature film debut is the 2000 horror film Hellraiser: Inferno. Inferno went straight-to-video, and while it’s a deeply flawed film as most such films are, it’s also a fascinating one. It tells the story of Joseph Thorne (Craig Sheffer), a corrupt detective in the Denver police department. He steals evidence, does drugs on duty, and is unable to communicate his needs to his wife, indulging in prostitutes instead. Thorne sees the world, and his life, as a series of puzzles to solve, with doing so granting him control over himself and others.
Although the screenplay often feels unpolished and lacking in subtlety, Derrickson’s direction buoys the film. The descent from film noir into nightmare odyssey is fascinating to see, with a striking, giallo-influenced use of color seeping into Derrickson’s grungy cinematic palate. Its best moments are highly effective, true visual poetry presaging what Martin Scorsese will later do in Shutter Island by nearly a decade. The Cenobites are approached slightly differently in the film than in past films, with less of a focus on creator Clive Barker’s BDSM theme. Derrickson recasts them as more traditional demons tasked with punishing the sinful, demons will become the most significant recurring element of his work. It’s through this lens he explores the real horror: people given license and power by the state who choose to abuse that power, abdicating their responsibilities to their friends, family, and society at large.
The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005)
Derrickson comes into his own with his second film, 2005’s The Exorcism of Emily Rose, a courtroom drama about American societal rot masquerading as a horror film. It tells the story of Erin Bruner (Laura Linney), an ambitious attorney who takes a Catholic priest named Richard Moore (Tom Wilkinson) on as a client, in a high profile case revolving around the miserable death of a young woman (the titular Emily Rose, played by Jennifer Carpenter) who’d been allegedly possessed by demons. The case is sure to become a media circus, and Bruner takes it in exchange for becoming a senior partner at her firm. She has no religious belief, but her prosecutorial counterpart Ethan Thomas (Campbell Scott), is himself a devout Christian. The state wants the priest to go down for negligent homicide, and as the trial plays out we learn Emily’s story in a series of flashbacks. While The Exorcism of Emily Rose was a theatrical success, its critical reception was mixed. I, however, believe it to be an excellent film, and a definitive piece of Bush-era American cinema. Derrickson’s work here is a highly perceptive and nuanced look at American culture and the structures it has produced, with all Derrickson’s observations only becoming more pronounced in the subsequent two decades.
The film revels in ambiguity. What exactly happens here is in many ways left for the viewer to decide. Emily came from a family of strict and devout Christians, growing up in a remote rural area, leaving home for the first time to attend college. Soon after starting school she begins to experience visions and seizures. The church argues she was possessed. The state argues she was epileptic and schizophrenic. Was Emily’s stress exacerbated by the long-held distrust of urban areas and higher education held by Christians in the US? Emily was prescribed medication for psychosis and epilepsy, but she stopped taking both under her own advisement and the advice of Father Moore. Did the medication fail to help because it hadn’t yet built up in her system? Was it simply the wrong medication for her, which in some cases can make problems worse? The state calls an expert witness to offer the very specific diagnosis of “psychotic epileptic disorder” for Emily’s problems even though he never treated her. His insight feels shallow and he personally feels slimy, the product of a “professional” witness, the kind who tailors their testimony to the needs of the attorneys paying them handsomely for the time.
Erin begins the story as a pure mercenary, having long since sold out her personal integrity in order to better excel in the adversarial justice system and receive career advancement as a result. As the case begins to turn against her she finds her own expert witness, a professor at Northwestern who provides Father Moore’s story a scientific patina in an attempt to lend legitimacy to the experience of possession and exorcism as a treatment. Erin has a lot riding on this case, potentially facing consequences to her career if she fails, and so she cherry-picks and elevates this quack scientist for her own personal gain.
The question of Father Moore’s guilt is something we’re invited to consider throughout the film. He isn’t a medical professional, but it was potentially his advice which led to Emily’s death. How much weight should his opinion in that regard carry? Emily was a grown woman, capable of making her own decisions and ultimately the person responsible for whether or not to take her medication. Given this fact, is the state merely looking for someone to punish? This leads us to the contradictions of the prosecutor. He’s a devout Christian, a faith which professes tolerance and forgiveness, yet he’s a deeply punitive person. America isn’t a Christian nation, but nearly two thirds of its populace are Christian, and American Christianity is often associated with deeply punitive attitudes.
The justice system we’ve built is both punitive and adversarial, often seeking to secure convictions over finding out the truth, with the fate of defendants being left up to the personal ability of one attorney to out-argue another. Do these systems square with the spiritual and philosophical outlooks we often claim to support? Erin’s agnostic skepticism begins to wane as the trial drags on. She finds herself beset by all manner of ill omens and accidents, often occurring at three in the morning, the same time Emily’s episodes would begin. Is Erin merely growing superstitious as she buckles under the stress of the case, or is she under attack by dark forces? Perhaps Erin isn’t the one under attack, maybe the country itself is, gripped in a decades-long structural and spiritual malaise. During George W. Bush’s two terms as President, we saw the United States embrace faith-based initiatives, a war in Iraq with military briefings which included quotations from the Christian Bible, attempts to block the writ of habeas corpus, the passing of the PATRIOT Act, and the expansion of mass incarceration. We also saw a general rise of quack scientists denying the existence of widely accepted phenomena such as climate change, stances quite useful for personal financial gain.
Formally, the film is excellent. The precision of Derrickson’s blocking and his use of color and negative space has taken a step up from what was already solid work. The giallo influence visible in Hellraiser: Inferno has developed further, interpreted through a diegetic lighting paradigm which is both unsettling and in keeping with the film’s ambiguity. All this combines together to create a particularly rancid atmosphere, something which will only become more intoxicatingly off-putting as Derrickson’s career progresses.
Sinister (2012)
Derrickson followed The Exorcism of Emily Rose with a 2008 remake of Robert Wise’s classic The Day the Earth Stood Still, a film which was theatrically successful but poorly received. He also toiled away on a number of scuttled projects before finally returning to horror with 2012’s Sinister. Sinister was a theatrical success and enjoyed solid critical reception, and just as I consider Emily Rose a definitive film for the Bush era, I consider Sinister a definitive film for the Obama era. It tells the story of Ellison Oswalt (Ethan Hawke), a true crime author desperate for a hit after one successful project was followed by a few duds, which led to financial precarity and a need to sell the fancy house he can no longer afford. He prefers to dig deep into his projects, and moves his family to the town in which a grisly murder occurred.
The Stevensons, an entire family, were hanged with the exception of the youngest daughter. They were all strung up in a massive tree in the backyard and the little girl disappeared without a trace. What Ellison hasn’t told his family is that the house he purchased is the exact home where the Stevensons were killed, making it quite cheap. As he explores the attic he finds a box labeled “home movies” which turn out to contain a number of 8mm film reels. He sets up a projector and finds the reels depict not only the Stevenson murders but a number of others, all seemingly unconnected family murders committed in different states where the youngest child disappeared, and all shockingly violent and cruel. Ellison considers taking the films to the police, but decides not to, thinking instead of what a case this big could mean for his career, and by extension his bank account.
An interesting, and immediate, thing I noticed is how Ethan Hawke as Ellison looks almost exactly like Derrickson himself, giving the film a pointedly autobiographical angle. As Ellison discovers the reels of film we begin to understand Sinister is a film about film. It’s about what it’s like to feel the need to understand the world through the darkest parts of it. What it’s like to pore over that footage, night after night for hours at a time, away from your family. To make your life’s work something which doesn’t only take you away from your children, but something your kids can’t see. Furthermore, it’s about what it’s like to love this work so much, to see the carnage you wreak artistically as being your legacy every bit as much as your own flesh and blood. The film returns to the motif of screens again and again. Ellison watching things on a screen within a screen, the film moving into and out of the screens within the fiction of the film. You put your life on the screen and then people bring their own lives to the screen, relating to it, and it all becomes the recursive feedback loop of experiencing art. Derrickson might be considering what kind of movies his own kids should watch, but he almost certainly knows a lot of kids are going to see this movie and they’re going to love it. They’re gonna catch the horror bug thanks to him, just like he very likely did when he was their age.
As the film goes on, Ellison’s investigation leads him deeper into the occult and the demonic and he becomes part of the story in a way he could ever have imagined. Perhaps this speaks to the possibility that as you miss your children’s life to make your art, putting your own baggage up on screen, one day your kids will make you part of the art they make, and it may not be pretty. All this metaphorical animus drives Sinister, gives the film its heart. It’s far more interesting than the specific lore behind who commits the murders and why, and perhaps this is why this film is such a success where it’s sequel (which Derrickson did not direct) was not. Sinister is ultimately a deeply personal film rather than a franchise starter.
A theme which returns from Emily Rose is how capitalism essentially makes sellouts of us all. Derrickson approaches this theme in Sinister from the lens of how hard it is to try and make it as an artist in the wake of the 2008 housing crisis and the ensuing silent recovery, which saw the rise of the gig economy and temp work alongside the decline of traditional forms of media like print. Not only does financial hardship strike even if you’re the kind of artist who has had surefire hits, who’s made the TV rounds and earned the adoration of millions, you can also get stuck spending time on projects that don’t pan out or get stuck remaking classic films which didn’t need to be remade and feeling like you’ve lost your shine. You feel like you need to get it back so you keep grinding even if it means turning down steadier work like teaching in pursuit of something real, something fulfilling. This can put stress on your family because of the pressure baked into the time in which we live. As my friend Harry Henry observed, if Sinister was made today the concept of Ellison as a “true crime writer” would be wholly unbelievable. He would have to be a podcaster now, and even as of 2012 Derrickson is exploring how hard it was to support a family with a career like that in the United States.
On a formal level, Sinister is quite a marvel. It’s an oppressively dark film thematically and visually, with Ellison often moving around in near complete blackness. Every faint light which pierces the dim becomes lush. Something warm and inviting which we know can’t last in a story like this. The snuff films Ellison watches feel outright diseased, paired with excellent use of music, either from composer Christopher Young or music from acts such as Boards of Canada. Sinister is a truly unsettling and skin-crawling experience, and the darkest work Derrickson had yet produced.
Deliver Us From Evil (2014)
Derrickson followed Sinister with 2014’s Deliver Us From Evil, which was financially successful but poorly received. Deliver feels like a return to ground zero for Derrickson, revisiting the grungy mise-en-scene of Love in the Ruins and an examination of policing a la Hellraiser: Inferno. Deliver Us From Evil doesn’t explore an officer as corrupt as Joseph Thorne, but protagonist Ralph Sarchie (Eric Bana) is a reckless thrill-seeker who has on occasion taken the law into his own hands as opposed to someone honoring the duty of his uniform. Derrickson explores the concept of urban chaos and the stress it causes as something downstream from the massive amounts of money spent on disastrous American foreign policy. Deliver Us From Evil is beautifully shot with many evocative sequences, but also feels a bit like a movie outside time. A film about the latter stages of the Iraq war filtered through the kind of mid-90s cop movie you saw trailers for a million times on a million different VHS tapes before finally catching it on cable one day and coming away somewhere between entertained and disappointed. Deliver isn’t an awful film by any means, but could be considered a relative misfire by Derrickson’s standards.
Derrickson followed Deliver Us From Evil up with the wildly successful 2016 Marvel Comics film Doctor Strange, then went silent for a few years before returning to short film with 2021’s Shadowprowler.
Shadowprowler was shot during the COVID-19 pandemic with his sons Atticus and Dashiell. It’s a fun short, showcasing Derrickson’s eye for beautiful imagery and color even with limited means. It tells the story of a teenage boy ensnared in a game of cat-and-mouse with an intruder in his house, ultimately becoming a comment on the potential emerging moral calculus of children growing up in a world with limited options for third spaces and true face-to-face human contact.
The Black Phone (2021)
Derrickson returned to feature filmmaking with The Black Phone, screened at Fantastic Fest in 2021 and released widely in 2022. He would ultimately make a trilogy of successful and well-received films set in that world, two features and one short. The first film in the series tells the story of Finney (Mason Thames), a kid growing up in Denver, Colorado in the late 1970s. He lives under a cloud of stress and fear, bullied at school, abused at home by his father Terrence (Jeremy Davies), a man lost to alcoholism after their mother’s suicide, and constantly on guard due to a serial murderer known as the Grabber (Ethan Hawke), actively hunting children in the city. His little sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) also lives under a great deal of stress. She’s fierce and combative, refusing to be bullied, but is similarly abused and has also inherited psychic abilities from their late mother. She dreams about the Grabber, and the children he’s killed, and wrestles with God over the nature of her gift. Finney finds himself the Grabber’s next victim, stashed in a dank cellar as the killer works his way through an internal psychodrama clearly rooted in his own abuse, meant to culminate with him killing Finney as a way to exercise some level of control over his demons. Finney frantically begins plotting his escape with the help of the Grabber’s previous victims, who call him from the beyond on the titular black phone, a seemingly broken phone hanging in the basement. Meanwhile, Gwen beseeches God for clarity in her visions so she may save her brother.
Whereas Deliver Us From Evil felt like a film out of time, The Black Phone is truly rooted in the past. Derrickson moves away from the outright malevolence of Sinister and back toward the more clinical approach of The Exorcism of Emily Rose. The horror here is secondary to his thematic pursuit. In this case, Derrickson explores the low-level omnipresent cruelty of mid-century America. The Grabber hides his face around children, wearing a series of hand-crafted theater masks which express different emotions, and the film is about the masks the abused at-large build to hide themselves. The Grabber is ultimately a broken man, a coward afraid to show himself, trapped in a cycle he didn’t create yet chooses to escalate, going from abuse to murder and all directed toward children, the only people he feels he can truly exercise power over. Finney and Gwen are in the process of creating their own masks as well. Hiding the abject misery of their home and school lives, smiling and pretending that everything is okay. You can see the anger starting to build within them, the anger that, if not properly dealt with, can explode in adulthood in unpredictable ways, resulting in people like the Grabber in worst-case scenarios.
Derrickson revisits his theme of the American obsession with punishment through Terrence, who practices regular and harsh corporal punishment toward his children, taking a belt to them when they’re in fact very good, smart, sensitive kids. Through the Grabber, Derrickson explores how the behavioral issues this kind of child-rearing causes in adults is in part why we are where we are now. While The Black Phone is the first of his films not to pointedly feature any demons, it still includes the concept of an afterlife, from which the other kids communicate with Finney. The spirit world continues to exist for him, and its existence, and existence of psychic ability, fits right alongside his Christian perspective on how to try and understand the world.
As noted, The Black Phone is less overtly scary than Sinister, but Derrickson’s formal precision is still present, with great attention to detail in recreating the look and feel of the time. Terrence even works at the infamous Rocky Flats nuclear plant, a facility so unsafe the owners eventually plead guilty to criminal violations of environmental law. Derrickson himself grew up in Denver during this time, and much like Ellison in Sinister you get the sense Finney is another avenue through which Derrickson can explore his life.
Black Phone 2 (2025)
Derrickson followed The Black Phone up with 2023’s “Dreamkill”, a short which was collected in the anthology film V/H/S/85, an installment in the popular horror series with all the films in this case taking place in that year. Where most of the shorts in the film have a strictly SOV aesthetic, Derrickson switches back and forth between forensic and security tape feeds to the 8mm snuff aesthetic he began developing in Sinister. “Dreamkill” tells the story of a Detective named Wayne (Freddy Rodriguez) and his partner Bobby (James Ransone), a forensic videographer, as they work to solve a burgeoning series of murders, with the department receiving mysterious tapes of the killer’s crimes. Bobby is in fact Gwen’s uncle, and his own son Gunther (Dashiell Derrickson) has an ability very similar to hers, which Bobby finds as distressing as Terrence in the previous film.
“Dreamkill” is pitch-black, a grueling and gruesome piece of work, ultimately revealing itself to be a story about patriarchal masculinity at the height of the Reagan era, with the endless grace basically decent yet casually sexist men grant to dangerous and evil men, with no regard for the women left broken, it not outright murdered, in their wake, and the abuse handed down to children who don’t sufficiently model this mode of masculinity.
Derrickson delivered two films in 2025, an action film for Apple TV called The Gorge, and Black Phone 2. I don’t have Apple TV so I haven’t seen The Gorge, but I consider Black Phone 2 Derrickson’s masterpiece and my favorite film of 2025 alongside Louise Weard’s Castration Movie II: The Best of Both Worlds. It picks up in 1982, four years after the first film left off. Finney now lives with the lingering trauma of his ordeal, quaking with a rage he can’t express during nearly every waking moment. Terrence has turned his life around, he’s kicked the booze and committed to being a better father than before, but damage has still been done and he isn’t sure how to reach out to Finney. Gwen isn’t either, although she can see his struggle. She begins having dreams about a series of murders at a lake camp in 1957, receiving a phone call from her deceased mother in one of them. Yearning to learn more about her mom, she convinces Finney and her prospective boyfriend Ernesto (Miguel Mora) to enroll with her as camp counselors. They find themselves snowed in as they begin investigating the murders, discovering a connection between them and the Grabber, now a demon able to haunt the living from the beyond, using both sibling’s abilities, dreams and telephone communication, as the mediums through which he can strike.
It’s been in vogue for the last few years to describe art as being “about trauma,” especially horror films. Sometimes this is warranted, sometimes it gets pulled out in defense of the blandest movies you can possibly imagine. In any event, one of the best and most powerful ways to explore trauma through cinema is in the form of the horror sequel, and yet not too many sequels have truly done so. Often they’re busy trying to set up a franchise, a new cast of characters in a similar situation, Xeroxing further and further away from the original work, or becoming something winking and sly as the series continues on and the audience knows what to expect.
Black Phone 2 takes this concept very seriously, with Derrickson pairing his increasingly extreme exploration of murderous horror with searing personal drama, digging deep into the characters and letting Thames and McGraw do some really powerful work. Black Phone 2 reminds me of Rob Zombie’s sublime, underrated 2009 film Halloween II, the director’s cut of which being one of the most trenchant displays of trauma and empathy ever displayed in the horror genre. The consequences of the first film are taken deadly seriously. No quip can take away what happened, these wounds cannot heal within a short amount of time, being the Final Girl (or Boy in this case) doesn’t turn you into an action hero, it turns you into a wreck, and very likely no violence you should commit again will ever be righteous.
Gwen’s dreams bear the form of Derrickson’s snuff aesthetic, disgusting nightmares she’s drawn into and cannot wake from. The Grabber can stalk her here, and it’s here we begin to see Derrickson’s aesthetic converge with his autobiographical storytelling in a new and powerful way. Black Phone 2 is a film made in 2025, which calls back to Derrickson’s adolescence, growing up as a Christian teen in Denver in the 1980s, going to church camps while immersing himself in the horror films of the time. Black Phone 2 drops the definite article from the first film, just as Evil Dead 2 drops the definite article from The Evil Dead. It’s a supernatural horror film taking place during a Colorado winter just like The Shining. It takes place at a secluded lake camp like Friday the 13th. It features a killer who hunts the characters in their dreams like A Nightmare on Elm Street.
Black Phone 2 does much more than merely call back to ’80s horror, however; it also captures the bittersweet pain of adolescence, of beginning to learn the world is much bigger than we imagined, of beginning to notice the hypocrisy of the faithful around us, of beginning to experience first love and sexual awakening, of looking back and realizing it’s a time forever gone for better or worse. Black Phone 2 is largely shot on digital, with different aspects of Gwen’s dreams being shot on 16 and 8mm film, depending on which part of the past they took place respectively. The medium of film in Black Phone 2 itself becomes a comment on memory, not just personal memory, but collective memory, and how we shared those memories visually across time. This treatise on film as the embodiment of living memory and dream, as a dream which changes with us and with time, combines with beautiful imagery from Derrickson and cinematographer Par Ekberg. The wistful, elegant photography of the lake camp turns the film’s grisly search for truth in memory and history into a bizarre, welcome mashup of Freddy Krueger and Wild Strawberries.
Scott Derrickson’s career has been long and circuitous, making his way from horror sequel to the heights of the Marvel machine and back again, but his work has been resolutely earnest and thoughtful. His work is ever-curious, ever-growing, and seeing how his films transcend genre time and again to explore the structures of the world and find meaning within them, is ever interesting. His style has grown more heterogenous and dense as his career has gone on, always folding each new artistic impulse into that one core search for discovery. Next time I’ll be sure to check his work out in the theater, to envelop myself as fully as possible in his American Nightmare.
