Hollywood’s Hottest Horror Director Has His Own Demons to Exorcise

Across his 25-year career, filmmaker Scott Derrickson has frightened audiences by facing down his own fears, typically through horror films that contemplate not only the existence of evil, but the catharsis we seek to find in confronting it.

The Exorcism of Emily Rose put faith on trial, questioning the limits of rationalism and religion in explaining supernatural phenomena. In Sinister, a true-crime novelist’s fear-driven ambition blinded him to the peril in which he placed his family. The Black Phone conjured manifestations of abuse and resilience in its story of traumatized children summoning the strength to survive their tormentors.

“I feel really grateful that I’ve been able to exorcise a lot of my own demons through creativity,” Derrickson tells The Daily Beast’s Obsessed. “It’s like therapy, to make a good horror film, if you’re diving into it and getting into things that you yourself are scared of. There’s something about it that’s left on the field, when it’s over, that you don’t have to feel again.”

What, then, so scared him about The Gorge? The thriller, now streaming on Apple TV+, stars Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy as elite snipers stationed in towers on either side of a dangerous ravine, tasked with preventing what lies within from emerging. Derrickson’s latest—written by Zach Dean—is by twists and turns an action, sci-fi, and horror film, but it’s most surprisingly a romance.

After Levi (Teller) and Drasa (Taylor-Joy), highly trained operatives from different countries, make contact with one another in violation of rules established by the private military contractors that recruited them, their mutual curiosity grows into a long-distance flirtation—then more, as their shared desire to close the gap between them threatens to expose the terrible reality of what it is they’re guarding.

The Gorge is unusually gory Valentine’s Day viewing, but it’s also the tenderest film of Derrickson’s career. What gives? “In the months that I was making The Black Phone, and in the years before receiving the script for The Gorge, I fell in love and got married,” he beams. “That was all really speaking to me: the meaning that I was feeling, and the impact it was having on my life.”

From its characters’ literal leap into the unknown, to a mid-film dance scene set to Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Spitting Off the Edge of the World,” and the film’s overriding belief in the power of love to free us from fear and bring truth to light, The Gorge struck Derrickson as an impossible romance he could believe in.

“These are two people who have to work, struggle, and fight to end up coming together at all,” he says. “I like the idea, which is easy to miss, that—given who they are as characters—they probably never would have connected at all were it not for the distance. There was a safety in the distance that allowed them to let their guard down and get to know each other, in a way that they wouldn’t have done had they had easy access to each other. Through that slow-burning process, they become very fond of each other and moved by each other, to the point that they have to see each other. They have to be together in person. That alone is so romantic.”

Derrickson’s films often feature moments of unexpected connection, often through the lens of the supernatural, and they’re sensitive to the struggles we face in reaching one another. This time around, making the gulf between his characters physical, Derrickson taps into a sentiment that’s at once timeless and contemporary: You have to overcome all kinds of distance to know somebody else, but it’s only through other people that we get closer to knowing ourselves.

“Love allows Levi to reckon with himself: the secrets that he’s buried, what he’s kept hidden inside, the state he’s let himself fall into as a person not living a fully wide-awake, meaningful life in the world,” he says. “It usually takes love or trauma, or in this case both, to shake somebody out of that.”

As in The Gorge, Derrickson’s characters often gaze into the proverbial abyss until something materializes out of it; usually, what they discover is horrific. As far back as he can remember, Derrickson says, he’s been reckoning with the unknown. A Christian, he studied theology alongside literature, philosophy and film in college, and horror appealed to him as a way to wrestle with existential questions of good and evil.

“Horror films inoculate you against the evils of the world, somehow,” says Derrickson. “They bolster your ability to face, understand, and reckon with the real horrors in life. They give you strength by working out that fear muscle and pounding it down to where it’s not so reactive, where you’re not so afraid.”

Looking back 20 years later on his first studio feature, The Exorcism of Emily Rose, about a priest on trial for negligent homicide after performing an exorcism on a woman who believed herself possessed, Derrickson is still pleasantly disturbed, particularly by Jennifer Carpenter’s horrifically contortive lead turn.

“I have only love in my heart for that movie, and that’s not true always for the movies that you make,” he says. “There was a raw quality to the terror in that movie. I don’t think I could do it the same way now. You have to be younger, more haunted, more possessed yourself to look for that volatile human experience and put it on film.”

Based on a true story, the film was a box-office hit. The climactic scene where Emily receives stigmata after staggering through a foggy landscape to a leafless tree on a hill became its most iconic moment—and almost never happened. “I was actually threatened at one point with cutting the whole vision of the Virgin Mary you see in the fog,” he reveals. “The studio head had actually not read the last 12 pages of the script when they greenlit it, and when they read it, they were like, ‘You can’t do this.’ They threatened to not make the movie.”

Derrickson wouldn’t budge; besides it representing key themes of faith, judgment, and fortitude, the scene was drawn from actual court testimony. “It was her experience; it was real,” he says. “I’m proud of the fact I did stand my ground at a time when I had a lot to lose.” Ironically, that image became the film’s poster.

He looks back less happily on what came next. The Day the Earth Stood Still, a 2008 remake of Robert Wise’s sci-fi classic, was the most difficult experience of his career; filming amid the 2007-2008 Writers’ Guild of America strike, it wasn’t ultimately the movie he wanted to make, and it disappointed commercially.

Derrickson felt he’d lost his way. The fear and anxiety—around his career, his finances, even his creativity—was intense. “It was the defining experience of my career,” he says. Derrickson now feels the ordeal set him on a better path. Aware he couldn’t compromise like that again, he went back to horror, partnering with Blumhouse on Sinister; it was a personal exorcism and a creative resurrection.

“I mean this sincerely: if I could trade out the experience of any of my films, the last film I would trade out would be The Day the Earth Stood Still, because I learned more from that experience than all my other films combined,” he says. “Never find yourself at the end of somebody else’s movie. No matter what, you can’t do that. If you’re going to die on somebody’s sword, it’s got to be your sword.”

What else did he learn? “Don’t think strategically about your career,” he says. It was tempting to see himself as alternating between big-budget studio films and smaller, more personal projects. The Day the Earth Stood Still cost over $80 million; he made Sinister for $3 million. But nothing’s promised: “Make every movie like it’s the last movie you’ll ever get to make, because one day it will be, and you don’t know when that’s going to be.”

With this latest one, he’s similarly scaling back up after another Blumhouse production, The Black Phone, which cost $18 million and made nine times that (a “more violent, graphic, and intense” sequel, following the characters through high school, is due this fall). Afforded more resources on The Gorge, Derrickson spent them on fantastical sets, intense action, and more muck and gore than anyone imagined. “I’d use the word viscera,” he says of designing a carnivorous plant that snapped shut like a bloodied rib cage. “I was always like, ‘No, guys—it needs more viscera.’”

That The Gorge would feature a mixture of practical and CG environments was always clear; Derrickson made use of a Cyclops Augmented Reality system on set to visualize CG elements in real time. Mostly, he welcomes new technology he can benefit from, though his views on generative artificial intelligence—-a third rail in Hollywood as fears it’ll threaten industry workers’ livelihoods escalate alongside its material use in production processes—are more complex.

Derrickson doesn’t think AI will ever make art, but “the role it will play in power struggles and class differentiation is greater than we estimate,” he says. “What’s overestimated about AI is what it can do to add to human creativity. It can clean things up. It can make things efficient. It will certainly, eventually—and this is not necessarily a good thing, because of job displacement for visual-effects workers—become an extremely important tool on the quality and expense of big-budget visual effects. It will revolutionize that world, I think. But, again, that’s all technical execution. That’s not creativity.”

The individual always matters more to the creative process than the tools they’re using, he adds: “It was the guy behind the computer screen who gave me a shot [in Doctor Strange] where a building turned sideways as Mads Mikkelsen was running on it. I was like, ‘Oh, God, I hadn’t thought about doing it that way. It’s beautiful, perfect. Tell that guy thank you; we’re going to use this shot.’ AI is not going to do that. It’s not going to have the sensitivity to a story, or a visual sense of the movie, to give you the best creative choice. That’s your job as director to find that choice, and it’s the work of your creative team.”

Beyond “technical efficiency, clarity, speed, making everything faster and cheaper,” Derrickson adds, “the underestimation of it is how it’s going to be used to empower the already powerful and disempower the already powerless. It is a class-warfare tool. Ultimately, it’s in the power of a few people. It will be utilized and structured to continue both information and misinformation in manipulative ways, to put the lesser down and bolster the few. The haves will use it to become richer, and the have-nots will become poorer. That’s what I think about.”

Derrickson’s distrust of the rich and unaccountable also made its way into The Gorge, an Apple TV+ production. In his screenplay, he expanded out Levi and Drasa’s background as military contractors to reflect “private corporate money, secretly manipulating and utilizing government to its own ends” as the evil they must ultimately expose.

“We’ve gotten into a world—and it’s been this way for a while—where the private corporate sector, and the way it’s involved in our defense spending, is very much worth putting in your sights,” he says. “This is a movie about secrets, about how truth that’s hidden is angry truth. It wants to come out; if it’s not let out, it will force its way out in some really ugly, violent ways.”

In that sense, The Gorge is as much of an exorcism as many of his previous films. “I still have my demons that I have to purge,” Derrickson promises. But he’s also excited for audiences to experience a more effortless release through the film. “You’re going to watch some characters fall in love, you’ll care about them, s---’s gonna hit the fan, hijinks ensue, and you see some wacky stuff that you won’t see in other movies,” he promises. “I love that there’s a fun, fast, driving quality to what the movie is as well.”