director of THE BLACK PHONE
I’ve known Scott Derrickson a long time–indeed, an eternity in Internet years. He grew up in Westminster, Colorado, just down the road from where I live now, in a “cone of death” where the plutonium from the now-closed Rocky Flats nuclear plant–through a series of fires, meltdowns, and misadventures–was lost into the air in particles a magnitude smaller than pollen. The site is among the most contaminated places on Earth still, though judged to be clean enough to house a “wildlife preserve” and way too much new housing, the residents of which are not informed of the level of radioactivity they’re sitting on. To this day, dogs aren’t allowed at Standley Lake because dogs…dig. We grew up making jokes about the glow coming from the plant at night. Whenever I drove past it as a kid, I would hold my breath with the thought that maybe this would insulate me from irradiation and cancer. Maybe it did.
In Derrickson’s new film The Black Phone, co-written with frequent collaborator C. Robert Cargill and based on the short story by Joe Hill, the abusive, alcoholic father played by Jeremy Davies works at Rocky Flats, and the Denver audience I saw it with gave a collective snort once we figured it out. He survives the picture, but Scott’s given him a death sentence. I liked that. I was also levelled by a scene where a young, bullied kid’s protector is disappeared and in the next moment we see said kid running for his life from the trio of thugs who had only been held at bay by his missing friend. The sensation of losing, one by one, the people in your life who know you and back your play is a part of growing older. Your extended family of mentors and friends shrinks the longer you survive. One terrible cost of failing to die young.
As with every interview I conduct, especially nowadays, I wanted to avoid asking the same four questions the subject is inevitably asked. With Derrickson doing more press on this film than I think he even did on Doctor Strange, I wondered if our time wouldn’t be better spent just shooting the shit the way friends do. Then we started talking about horror:
SCOTT DERRICKSON: Oh, that’s a subject very important to me, you know. I grew up in a family that didn’t watch much horror, my mom disliked it actively. My dad liked some horror, but we didn’t go to horror movies as a family. If I saw any horror it would be on television. I saw The Legend of Hell House on television and it was one of the scariest movies I saw as a kid. And I saw it on TV, you know? So I didn’t have much exposure to it, but I was drawn to it from the time I was very young. I used to build haunted houses in my basements, you know?
FILM FREAK CENTRAL: You what?
I used to build haunted houses in my basement and bring the neighbourhood kids through. There was something cathartic in my experience about going into these very scary, taboo things and playing around with them, you know? As a kid who was surrounded by a lot of bullying and a lot of violence, both in my home and in the neighbourhood I lived in, it’s almost as though the experience of horror was a defanging experience, you know, that you need to have. And the older I got, the more I experienced horror in my life or in the movies or fiction, the more I came to rely on it as a way to make the things that were scary in real life less scary somehow. I think the experience I’ve had as a horror-film fan is not that different from my experience as a horror filmmaker. It’s more potent when you’re making it, though, because it’s more specifically personal. The things you make, they become personal exorcisms.
Is that the purpose of horror?
When you watch a really scary movie or read a scary story, you know, something that really scares you, it’s tapping into something you’re afraid of that you might not even know what it is. And when it’s over maybe you know yourself a little better and, along the way, you’ve released some of that fear. I don’t think these things are ever external. When you feel fear, some of that fear was already inside you. It already existed. It was already buried away somewhere. If you do it right, there’s something about a shared horror experience that allows some of your fear to be released. And in that vacuum left after the fear has gone, elation can enter it–courage, strength. You say, “I’m strong enough for this. I got this.” Wes Craven talked about the inoculating power of horror. I love the idea of horror as live inoculation, like the old live inoculations they would do for polio where they injected with a little bit of the live virus, just enough to build your system up enough so it could fight it. Just enough for your body to build the antibodies until you’re impervious to it. You take these little draughts of fear until you’re strong enough to handle it.
I think there are two reasons young people love horror so much. First is just the adrenaline rush of fear. Young people like rollercoasters and old people don’t because for young people that rush feels good but the older you get the more rollercoasters are just painful. But the other part of it is how there’s something about feeling a little fear that feels good. Not the moment of fear, but the release that follows. It’s why so often people come out of a really scary movie laughing. And the scarier the movie, the more they’re laughing. People are smiling. People are like, oh my God, that was so scary. And they don’t come out feeling darker usually or feeling worse than when they went in, they come out feeling lighter. That’s always been my relationship with the genre. Making a movie, you get the privilege of taking something big and deeply-rooted and releasing that from yourself. Every film I’ve made has been a process of excavating a chunk of the anxiety and fear that I carry.
Can you relate this to your faith? To the therapeutic journey I know you’ve been on?
My family wasn’t religious when I was little, so I wasn’t raised in a Christian home, and when I converted, I converted to a Christianity that was very rigid, very strict and fundamentalist. I switched to this Christian high school of my own choice and we went to Bob Jones University for a speech and debate tournament, so I’ve been to like the most fundamentalist places in the country and that brand of Christianity is so about fear. Fear of the world, fear of sexuality, fear of ideas, and it sort of compresses and compacts the fear down inside of you now as a kid who grew up feeling scared all the time, exposed to all this violence as a kid, and it gives you a means through which to not deal with it, but to tamp it all down. I think that was my attraction to fundamentalism: it gives you a safeguard. It makes the world very, very small. And if the world is small enough, then you don’t feel afraid when you’re inside of it. It compresses all the fear down and puts a shell over it and then you’re fine and you feel very free of it.
Why would you fear? You have Jesus!
Totally. I think of those years in fundamentalism as some of the happiest years of my life. I was really happy, had a really wonderful community I felt a part of. I loved it, you know? But then I went to college and started reading philosophy and started getting exposed to the world and exposed to ideas. Then the shell over your fear cracks and you start to see the truth of things. Everybody I know who comes from that conservative evangelical or fundamentalist background, when they break out it’s a big bang. The blast is so violent that one of two things happen: either they spin off into real self-destruction and addiction or it becomes a genuine spiritual and intellectual searching. I did one and then the other (laughs), my whole life now I’m trying to expand my understanding and my point of view and my knowledge. The energy for that comes from the big-bang moment created by a crisis of faith.
Not a lot of mechanisms in place for working without a safety net all of a sudden.
When I started rejecting fundamentalism, all the things that I had been taught–really, all the things that were keeping me safe, I thought, and unafraid, I was now rejecting. Those first couple years were devastating. I mean, I was… I was lost. I felt like I was going insane. I started having nervous breakdowns. It was the darkest period of my life, those first couple years in school, in college. Incredible emptiness. Then, slowly, I started to develop my own point of view, and I found some comfort in how my own experience, not just within fundamentalism, but prior to that, as a kid, had been leading me to a place of mysticism and spirituality from the time I was born. Maybe that’s my nature, I thought: how even some of my earliest memories are of being in a room and thinking, “Well, I’m sitting on this chair and this table is here and there’s the TV, but that’s not the main thing here. Whatever’s most important is not what I’m looking at here.” I always felt–wanted desperately, but also felt–that there’s more to all this than what we can see. I always felt that way about the world. I can’t not experience it as anything but a mystical place. It’s a belief system compatible with the idea of there being God, and, you know, also demons and ghosts. That stuff is all innately compatible with my understanding of the world.
Would you call it “faith”?
I think “faith” is an interesting word because it’s very different from rationality, but for me it was more about what made sense to me. Some things in fundamentalism required a leap of faith or something extra-rational or even irrational. But believing there’s something bigger than you in the world? That seems immensely rational. But that brings us back to the question of horror. I went from a kid who was building haunted houses as a kid to those years of fundamentalism with no horror, didn’t watch scary movies at all, didn’t participate much in it–scared is not compatible with that world. And then after I went through my crisis of faith and just brutal period of reconstructing what I really believed to be true about the world, I found I didn’t reject some basic things I believed about God, even about Christianity. Some of those things endured. Most of any kind of literal reading of the Bible I rejected, you know, but the foundation of it as a book of sometimes very beautiful literature and mythology is incredibly useful to the point of empowering, inspiring even. But so much of what’s in the Bible is really dark, too, while still being beautiful and wonderful, and oftentimes the antithesis of what I’ve been taught in those fundamentalist spaces. You do that, too. I mean, you’re really good about calling people out, especially when it comes to the gospels. I’ve seen you basically say you idiots don’t understand Jesus at all. Have you even read this fucking book? Would you call yourself an atheist? A skeptic?
Both of those things in the literal sense, I guess. I treat the Bible like I do the Odyssey or Romance of the Three Kingdoms, The Song of Roland. This is our shared culture. I don’t know how you can fully participate in it without all of these stories.
Yes. I love the Bible as a work of literature. I think the Book of Ecclesiastes is among the greatest pieces of writing in the world. It’s really beautiful. It’s so beautiful. It’s so wise. It gives me the release to allow for the experience of the meaninglessness of the universe. Something which we all experience, I think–the futility of nothing really making sense in the end if you’re honest, you know? When I hit rock bottom in college, I knew I wanted to be a filmmaker, but I wasn’t thinking at all it was going to be in the horror genre. Then I saw Dario Argento’s Suspiria.
A chorus of angels.
(laughs) You watch Susperia and something really expansive happens to you if you’re wired right. I was like, “Wait a minute, you can do this with horror? You can, you can make a slasher movie, a bloody, violent, stalking slasher movie, but it’s high art? Why haven’t I seen this before?” And of course it had been going on for a while in international cinema and I was just ignorant or sheltered or some combination of the two[.] I knew there were some examples of classic, arty horror in American cinema–The Innocents and Robert Wise’s The Haunting, the original Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein–but as great as those are, they didn’t speak to me the way Suspira did. It felt progressive to me, even though I didn’t see it until the Nineties and it was already twenty years old. It felt like a glimpse of the divine. I thought, “I haven’t seen anything like this before.” So a part of me started to feel like, I need to contribute to this genre. I want to engage in this as a filmmaker. Suspiria spoke to the faith part of me.
What were you reading then?
Well, it was right around that time somebody had given me C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters to read. A lot of people at film school were passing that book around, which was the strangest thing. And I hadn’t read it. I had read a bunch of C.S. Lewis during my crisis of faith–I read I think all of his nonfiction stuff.
I like Mere Christianity.
Mere Christianity is a good book. The Abolition of Man‘s a good book. A lot of his stuff is, like, really not that great, though, you know? And I think the “Chronicles of Narnia” is fucking terrible (laughs). But I read The Screwtape Letters and I was blown away. What a book, really an incredible achievement, but I was struck by how Gothic it was, how ably it inverted morality, how skillfully it turned everything upside-down. Here’s one of the most moralizing books anyone’s ever written but he did it by giving voice to these demons, and that was where I started to find my own voice. This approach has fed everything I’m interested in as a person. It’s defined me as a person who does believe in God, a person obsessed with moral behaviour for all my imperfections and struggles with morality, with the nature of the world, with aspiring towards truth, all of these spiritual things. I thought to myself, horror… I don’t think there’s another genre where I’m gonna be more free to explore these things, the only things, that really matter to me. I chose then to make a thesis film that was kind of a riff on The Screwtape Letters, that were these two demons, invisible but present at a shooting in a Los Angeles gas station. I was trying to deal with the racial tensions in L.A. because it was right after the L.A. Riots and everything that’s come apart now felt like…the fall was accelerating then, and that’s how it started, you know? And I’ve continued to go in that direction because my faith…
Your Christian faith?
Before I would call myself a Christian, I would call myself, maybe, a “mystic,” because Christian is a word that means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, especially now. If I say I’m a mystic, people might realize, okay, he’s just not 100% into the material world. And, you know, as I started to tell stories and started to write scripts, I was like, oh man, I’ve got so much fear in me to confront still. I realized making this stuff was a way of doing that. My whole adult life. When I think of the narrative of my adult life, it’s been a long journey of confronting the things I’m afraid of and running toward the things I’m afraid of no matter how terrified I am. To live by that Emerson line, you know: “Do the thing you fear, and the death of fear is certain.” I hope so. So my whole adult experience has been running toward the thing that I’m afraid of. Oftentimes just doing it in order to stop being afraid and sometimes not realizing how self-destructive some of that behaviour might have been.
I’m reminded of Pascal Laugier’s Martyrs, by this notion of nothingness in place of revelation at the end of pain.
Oh my God, I’ve got my list of my top-ten horror films and that is in my top-ten horror films of all time. I don’t recommend it to anybody, of course (laughs).
You can’t. I love it so fucking much and I have recommended it to no one. I’ve warned people away.
They’ll come back and they’ll hunt you down, you know, for making them watch that thing. What do you think she whispers in the woman’s ear? My theory is what she said to her is, “What you want to know is incommunicable. It can never be expressed to you through somebody’s words. So what you’re trying to do is futile.” That’s why she kills herself, right? Because at the end of all of this horror, there’s nothing. I love the idea that the girl was willing to tell her, but she can’t, because it’s impossible and no one will be able to. I think that movie is about as spiritually rich a film as I’ve ever seen, and it is the most violent horror film ever made. At least in my experience, I know there’s gorier maybe, though it’s really fucking gory. But it’s just…
It’s intimately invasive. It’s almost confrontationally, physically violent.
Yes, the totality of it has more of a graphic impact than any movie I have ever seen. I mean, it’s intimately unwatchable in the best way, and because it was willing to go as far as it did, I felt like it was as serious a film as anyone has ever made on the subject of suffering. It touches on the spiritual meaning of suffering, that’s where it spoke to me. It’s interesting to me that you like that film so much, because there are some films that my love for them, above and beyond their greatness, is connected so deeply to my faith and to my belief in God, to my belief that there is some cohesive meaning to be pulled from the universe. I’m an existentialist, I’m a Christian existentialist if that’s a thing, and Martyrs is a key text. Breaking the Waves is another, [films] that speak so deeply to the faith part of me as any films ever have. What do they say to you, as a person who identifies as an atheist?
If anything, I think I’d call myself a Jungian. I have the greatest of hostility and suspicion for organized religions–especially Christian sects, but fundamentalist anything is fucked up, vile bullshit designed for control and oppression. But I do believe we’re all connected through a collective well of images. I wouldn’t do what I do, or have studied what I’ve studied, if I didn’t believe that.
That’s right. I knew that about you. I actually think that’s the one aspect of spirituality that’s demonstrable. I think if you’re somebody who is intellectually honest, these Jungian concepts are so, what’s the word, evidenced? Almost in a scientifically empirical way, and they are repeatedly evidenced. I think it’s irrational to reject the theory of a collective unconscious, or the phenomena of synchronicities, the idea of the shadow, dreamscapes, like all those Jungian principles. I think, by the way, that that’s as good a description of mysticism as any. They were a lifeline for me when I lost my faith in college. It was theories like Jung’s where I was like, that shit is true, man. Like, you just can’t dispute it if you’re being honest, that shit’s just true. It’s just part of human experience.
“People are vicious when they’re hiding behind their social masks. Vicious. If you ever meet some of these guys in person, they’re respectful and they’re courteous, you know? And if they’ve been rude to you, they apologize.”
When we talk about persistent archetypes, I think of masks in regards to horror films. You call back to the Noh tradition in Japan, to other cultural traditions where people dance in masks to express seasons, or the hunt, or fertility–gods and demons and the animals you’re hunting or that are hunting you.
The “warrior” masks to scare the enemy and for protection, too. Masquerade masks.
Superhero masks to hide identities but also to reveal identities. Carry that over to horror-movie monsters and their masks.
I think that, you know, I think the answer is truly paradoxical, that the paradox of mask-wearing is that it both conceals and reveals identity. You wear a mask and it creates an otherness for the person wearing it. That makes him scary. I don’t know what’s behind that mask. I can’t see that person’s face, therefore I can’t read the usual signs people read from expressions, just in the course of normal interactions. I’m scared because I don’t know who this is, or what he intends, or if it’s a “he,” even. I don’t know what’s behind there. That’s one universally applicable truth to the whole tradition of mask-wearing in various cultures through human history–the obvious one, right? That you conceal who you are and that can be frightening for others. The other side of the paradox though is the wearing of a mask allows the person beneath it to speak and behave more truthfully, more honestly. Bob Dylan in Scorsese’s Rolling Thunder Review, I guess he went to a KISS concert and was like, oh, there’s something powerful to this wearing of face paint, so he painted his face white for the Rolling Thunder tour. And there’s a point in that documentary where he says, “People lie all the time.” I think he’s quoting Voltaire, but of course doesn’t give him credit cause he never gives anyone credit (laughs), and he says, “People lie all the time, but put them in a mask and that person’s gonna tell the truth.” And so there’s this weird paradox of when you lie about what you look like, you tell the truth of who you are. The hiding and the otherness and the intimidation and the fear that goes along with seeing the person in the mask, but there’s this freedom to be honest, to tell the truth to create a kind of purity, like, why, why would anyone lie if they’re wearing a mask?
You’d have to be nuts.
You’d have to be! You wouldn’t, there’s no need. Realities and raw truths and honest perspectives can come out of a person wearing a mask, whether it’s in their words or if it’s like the Grabber, through their behaviour.
I’m thinking of the Internet now, and social media, as a mask.
People are vicious when they’re hiding behind their social masks. Vicious. If you ever meet some of these guys in person, they’re respectful and they’re courteous, you know? And if they’ve been rude to you, they apologize.
More, it’s almost like they’re as shocked as you are! They’re possessed in the moment. They say something really horrendous to you online from behind their mask, and as soon as you unmask them, they’re actually kind of horrified by what the mask said.
(laughs) That’s exactly right. I think that’s really true. And I think the whole thing has turned ugly. Twitter has turned into such a cess for that reason, you know? When I got on social media, I was all in on the honesty. Good or bad, I’m gonna be myself. Hello, world! I was naive. I’m gonna say the things I thought, I’m gonna say the things I’m thinking about, just be who I am, no filters. I’m gonna be honest with my opinions. You can’t do that. Social media has rules, and it has no kindness for the unguarded. There are just packs of people on there looking for a reason to make you the star for the day. It’s more and more acerbic. I just was, like, this cost is too high. I remember reaching out to you a while back when you closed your account. Do you remember what I told you? I said, it’s not real. You can become addicted to it, so that it feels real. Social media’s best interest is for you to think it’s more real than reality. But it’s not real and you can’t let something that’s not real take that kind of mental toll on you. So in the last year, I’ve really tried to stop engaging. But every once in a while, I’m an idiot. I accidentally say something honest, and then I’m like, “Oh, God, that was a mistake.” Anymore, I try to use it more for branding purposes than anything. It’s still good for that.
I thought the Grabber was interesting because he’s a monster who is essentially just a child who hasn’t grown. He’s a victim of nostalgia.
This is obviously a really important subject. If you’re gonna talk about entertainment in the world right now… [I]t’s not lost on me, the significance of you broaching this conversation in light of me being a Marvel director. Look, I love comics and I love the MCU and all of that, but the criticism that we hear increasingly from the intelligentsia is that maybe it’s all arrested, our entertainment now, and maybe a steady diet of one thing is not good for anyone. I think it’s reductive to say “all” or “every,” but it’s not that they don’t have a point. The Black Phone is childhood trauma, my childhood trauma, a lot of it. Even the monster, the Grabber, he lived in this house. He says the phone hasn’t worked since he was a kid, so we know he’s got his own memories and stories about this basement. We don’t know what they are, and that’s by design. I felt like that was enough. If you’re bright enough, or hurt enough, you’re gonna be able to infer some really significant things from that, or at least theorize some…some important things from that. It is definitely my experience that, you know, childhood trauma has an arresting effect, unless you are willing to reckon with it.
I’ve read that about addiction, too, how your emotional development freezes at the moment of your addiction.
I really have come to believe in the power of therapy, of having a good therapist and a willingness to go back and walk through the traumas of your own childhood, the traumas of your experience that have made you what you are: your fucked-up experiences and reactions that you think are normal because they’re yours and you don’t know better. I think marriage can be therapy. I think anybody who’s in a marriage where they really share the truth about themselves with a partner you love and trust and is invested in your development like you are in theirs, you share all those truths about your history, and in the sharing of it you force each other to reckon with it. The people who never do that are by definition arrested. Trauma locks you into a box, files that shit away, and it festers in there until you break it back open, or it breaks itself out, to find there’s never been any growth in those areas that you’re never gonna get to.
I’ve thought for years, decades, that the loss of critical capacity is the single greatest catalyst for our fall.
The one thing I’ll add to that is I think the right-wing and specifically the evangelical influence and the Christian fascist nationalism we see now, loss of critical capacity is what it has bred over the last thirty, forty years. Because, man, in that culture, you gotta be happy. You gotta be happy and everything’s positive because that’s the result of loving Jesus. That’s proof. You wanna hear the Good News? Everything’s great. You know, He saved me. Never mind the horrible and obvious shit I have pressed down into my gut, my life is wonderful. Everything is great. The idea of delving into darkness is in the Catholic tradition, but boy, it sure as shit is not in the Evangelical one. That’s not healthy. It has no relationship with reality. There’s kind of a no darkness allowed rule when it comes to that brand of American Christianity.
I think The Black Phone is about you. You expressing hope at the end of a dark period–for you and for the child in you. The Grabber has a ritualistic repetition–like trauma can–that you’re breaking him free of. You’re performing an exorcism on yourself.
I realize I didn’t even address your comment about nostalgia because I think what nostalgia is, is when you look back at the past with rose-coloured glasses. It’s arrested, because if everything is fine, there’s no necessity to grow or improve, to do the hard work of evolving. If a person looks back and doesn’t want to include the dark truths or the dark experiences of one’s childhood… And childhood is traumatic for everybody, man, terrifying for everybody in some way. You don’t have to have been beaten and bullied the way I was as a kid. I don’t care where you grew up, being a child is traumatic, and I think nostalgia–whether it’s looking back on childhood or any form of the past–is a denial of the shadow, the other half of your experience. Bob Dylan said, “Nostalgia is death.” I really agree with that. I think the value of looking back nostalgically is zero. I used to do that, but what am I, what am I not admitting when I don’t look at the entire picture? Why am I not looking at my experience? What am I in denial about with my own experience here? What am I ashamed of? The work is unearthing it, so I can see the whole of it clearly. There is great value to seeing the whole of you. It’s liberating. I think the only way you can be free is to address the parts of you that maybe you would rather not address. I feel like doing that is the only thing that allows you to be joyful and free with the people who love and depend on you–not in the past, that’s gone, in the present. Nostalgia is something that might grant you temporary happiness: it’s fleeting and momentary and fundamentally untrue.
It’s just gratifying the child instead of encouraging the child to grow. If all you do is feed the child, the child gets spoiled and entitled, and mean as shit.
Exactly, you keep feeding the child and you see all these childish behaviours as a consequence.
There’s a scene in The Black Phone that took my breath away, when Robin vanishes and you realize all of Finney’s bullies are now free to beat him again. That felt fucking terrible. I have a friend, Sam, who killed himself almost exactly three years ago and I had the same feeling then: that here was someone who protected me who isn’t there to do it anymore, and there aren’t a lot of those people in the world.
Yeah. That’s what your community is, you know, your community ultimately are the people who have each other’s backs, and it’s terrible that that community is constantly shrinking. Our friendship is a deep one–we’ve been friends for a pretty long time now, but from the beginning, our friendship very quickly became one where it was like, well, I got your back. And then over years and years, we’ve proven to each other time and time again, you got my back and you know I got yours and that’s, that’s hard to find in the world, you know? It’s hard to find especially in this business, people who will just sort of do what’s not comfortable sometimes and just say my friendship means more to me than this deal or whatever. Life is short.
The best parts of your work are the ones where you notice the little interactions that speak to connection: love and loyalty. After a fight–or, in this film, the hand holding after the whipping. I think you’re at your best when you’re making a family drama.
It’s really what I’m interested in. Cargill and I talk all the time about how we know a screenplay is gonna work–and we applied this to Sinister and Doctor Strange and now The Black Phone–is, What is the script if you take out all the genre elements? If you take out all the scary scenes and you take out all the action scenes and, you know, maybe all the fantastical sequences and all the magic, do you still have a film? Does the movie work as a movie by itself without anything else–just as time spent with people who are real and who you care about? And if the answer is “no,” you not only don’t have a good genre film, you don’t have a film at all. That’s all I want to get better at doing, you know, just making sure the core character story is the motor driving the movie.
What brought you to a place where you finally felt like you deserved a happy ending?
Nobody’s asked me that. I haven’t made any movies with happy endings. They’re always really bleak. You know, no, one’s asked me that… I’ve just gone through so much in the last five, six years, you know, my house burned down in a wildfire and my wife and I of many years separated and divorced very shortly after that. It was really hard, so hard, and I had already begun the therapy process, but I really invested myself in that process during this time. One thing after another. Life things. Seismic things. Those were those couple years, 2018, 2019. Really most of 2020 was fucking hard, man. It was like, that was a dark time for me. But then I met someone new, a friend who became more than that in the aftermath and recovery, and I had a partner now to help me get better, to be better. We got married last month. And I got sober. I really needed to. I needed to make amends. It was work, and it wasn’t always pretty and I wasn’t perfect. I had bad moments, weak moments. But now, really the last two years, it’s just been one of steadily increasing joy, progress I can mark, peace in the process that’s ongoing. I think The Black Phone is both a reckoning with some of the darkest things and some of the darkest sources of pain that I have carried as a person all this time, that have infected my world and my relationships–that I have allowed to do that, I know that. And so it just made sense, the happy ending–that ending was Joe’s [Hill] and I read that story 16, 17 years ago. So why did I write it only two years ago? And why did I make it last year instead of Dr Strange 2? Was it because I finally had that kind of ending in me? Because maybe I felt like at the end of all this hurt, and all the hurt I had carried around with me, that maybe I deserved a happy ending? Maybe we all deserve one.
