Scott Derrickson confirms VHS segment connection to The Black Phone and Sinister
Oct. 4, 2023Exclusive: Scott Derrickson’s new VHS short was majorly influenced by his past movies
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In an exclusive interview with GamesRadar+ ahead of the release of VHS85, director Scott Derrickson shared that the biggest inspiration behind his VHS segment Dreamkill was his past movies, “I didn’t draw inspiration from any other films except forSinisterand The Black Phone.” TheDoctor Strangedirector explained that he used Super 8 footage to add a layer of evocative erieness to the piece just as he had done in Sinister, but in terms of the storyline, Derrickson was majorly influenced by his latest feature film The Black Phone.
Ahead of the release of VHS85, Derrickson revealed that when he was first approached by theVHSteam he took a step back, but when he realized he could incorporate themes he had explored in his past movies in a found footage short, he jumped in feet first. His addition to the latest VHS movie follows a teenage boy named Gunther, played by his son Dashiell Derrickson, as he begins to have, as the title suggests, violent dreams of murders that record themselves onto VHS tapes and then later come true. Sound familiar? That’s because the same thing happens in his latest feature movie The Black Phone starring Ethan Hawke, as a masked child murderer out to kidnap and imprison little boys.
Later in the interview, Derickson divulged that he chose to use a Super 8 effect on the VHS dream tapes just as he had done to the haunted tapes that encapsulate the vicious murders in Sinister, to add a sense of retro eerieness and fit in with the overall ’80s theme. This can be seen throughout the whole VHS85 movie from other filmmakers in the franchise’s latest anthology, following tales from the gruesome underbelly of the mid-’80s.
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