Scott Derrickson, the director who chose his own nightmares over someone else’s sequel

Scott Derrickson

Photo: Y! Música / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	July 16, 1966 Denver, Colorado
Occupation	Film Director
Known for	Doctor Strange, The Black Phone, The Gorge
Awards	Bram Stoker · Academy Award (nomination)

The call came in January 2020, and Scott Derrickson said no. Not to a dead-end offer or a bad script — he was already the director of record for Marvel’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, a sequel to a $677 million film he had made. He said no because the studio and he could not agree on what kind of film it should be. He wanted a genuine horror sequel. Marvel wanted something rated PG-13. He walked.

That decision, and its aftermath, is the most clarifying episode in a career that has consistently refused the kind of stability that Hollywood rewards. Derrickson grew up in Denver, Colorado, studied at Biola University — a small evangelical Christian institution that shaped both his theological instincts and his fascination with the collision between faith and evil — and went on to earn an MFA from USC’s School of Cinematic Arts. What film school gave him was craft. What Biola gave him was a preoccupation with the specific texture of evil, not as genre entertainment but as a question worth taking seriously.

His debut feature, Hellraiser: Inferno (2000), arrived direct to video — a starting point that would mortify most filmmakers and that Derrickson has discussed with characteristic bluntness. It got him through the door. From there, The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005) turned out to be a genuine argument disguised as a courtroom horror film: what does it mean to believe in possession in a culture that has decided such things are impossible? The film earned $144 million worldwide on a modest budget, and it announced a filmmaker whose horror instincts were theological rather than mechanical.

The career that followed was uneven in the way that interesting careers often are. The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008), a remake nobody had demanded, made money and earned almost no goodwill from either critics or Derrickson himself. Sinister (2012) was something else: a found-footage film with a genuine architecture of dread, powered by a mythology that reached beyond jump scares into something more uncomfortable. Deliver Us From Evil followed in 2014. Then came the call from Marvel.

Doctor Strange (2016) earned $677 million worldwide, an Academy Award nomination for Visual Effects, and the rare distinction of being a Marvel film that critics actually engaged with rather than merely processed. It also placed Derrickson in the strange position of having made the most expensive and least personal film of his career precisely when his commercial visibility was at its peak. When the sequel was announced, the gap between what he wanted to make and what the studio would permit became irreconcilable.

The two most contested chapters of his filmography form a consistent pattern: Derrickson’s best work happens when the studio’s vision and his own align, and his weakest when they diverge. The Day the Earth Stood Still remake was visibly constrained by executive intervention; Derrickson has said, with unusual directness, that making a film where the filmmaker and the producer are pulling against each other is how you make a really bad film. The Marvel exit applied that principle before the damage was done. Sam Raimi replaced him on Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and made a different film — not the horror sequel Derrickson had planned.

The film that came out of that departure was The Black Phone (2022). Based on a Joe Hill short story, it drew on three years of therapy about Derrickson’s own childhood experience and translated that material into a supernatural thriller set in 1978 Denver, his birth city. It earned the Bram Stoker Award for Best Screenplay, made over $160 million on an $18 million budget, and prompted critics to recalibrate what they had previously assumed about him. Ethan Hawke, as the serial killer known as The Grabber, gave one of the most unsettling performances of that year beneath a ceramic half-mask.

In 2025, Derrickson released two films in the same calendar year — something that almost never happens with directors of his profile, and that he managed without either project suffering for it. The Gorge, a science fiction thriller for Apple TV+ starring Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy with Sigourney Weaver, premiered on February 14 and became the platform’s most-watched film launch in its history. Black Phone 2, the sequel he and regular collaborator C. Robert Cargill constructed around a single narrative pivot that made the first film’s ending retroactively richer, opened in October and grossed over $130 million — delivering, per Derrickson’s own description, more intensity and more gore than the original.

His production company, Crooked Highway, holds a first-look deal with Sony’s Screen Gems. Next in development is Road of Bones, an adaptation of Christopher Golden’s novel set on Siberia’s Kolyma Highway — the route built by Stalin’s labor camps — where supernatural threats are indistinguishable from the terrain. It is, in other words, exactly the kind of subject that a filmmaker shaped by a theology minor and three years of childhood trauma therapy would find worth pursuing.

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Tags: Ethan Hawke, C. Robert Cargill, Doctor Strange, horror cinema, Scott Derrickson, Sinister

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