The Black Phone 2 director says the horror sequel is more intense because "the teenagers who grew up really loving" the first movie are now "the kids who paid to see Terrifier"

The Black Phone 2 is bringing back both Mason Thames's Finney and Ethan Hawke's terrifying Grabber – even though the Grabber died in the first film.

This time, though, the stakes are higher than ever, and, as director Scott Derrickson explains, that's thanks to the audience growing with the series.

"The reason I wanted to do a high school movie was that it has more interesting emotional stakes," Derrickson says in the new issue of SFX magazine, which features It: Welcome to Derry on the cover and hits newsstands on Wednesday, October 8.

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"It requires a different tone than a middle school coming-of-age supernatural movie. You just invariably are going to need to be more violent and more aggressive and maybe more shocking, to escalate aspects of the movie beyond what the first movie did, because a good portion of the audience, the teenagers who grew up really loving The Black Phone, they're older now. They're the kids who paid to see Terrifier. So there's certainly more intensity and more gore. We were rated R, and one of the things we were rated R for was gore. There's no gore in the first movie at all.

"The change that you go through between Middle School and High School may be one of the biggest, most dramatic changes you go through in your lifetime, and I was really interested in who these characters have become, having gone through something so extraordinary," he continues. "I didn't want to intensify the violence and horror to be more edgy. I was interested in being more mature, going deeper into the emotions of these characters and trying to make a movie that worked as a pair."

Along with Thames and Hawke, the movie stars Madeleine McGraw, Demián Bichir, Miguel Mora, and Jeremy Davies.

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The Black Phone 2 is released in theaters this October 17. Read more in the latest issue of SFX magazine, which will be available from Wednesday, October 8. Here's the It: Welcome to Derry cover you need to be looking out for on newsstands below...

You can also check out our guide to all the most exciting upcoming movies of the year.