Black Phone. The best of the year?

Oct 4, 2022

Surely many viewers of Black Phone will feel that this film is closer to the universe of Stephen King. When it comes to cultural phenomena, genetics matter, or at least that's implied from the script's original source: a story by Joe Hill, son of the author of It and Carrie. By the way, whoever wants to read that story can find it in the anthology Ghosts under the title "The Black Telephone."

Unlike other recent horror films, Scott Derrickson's film has a dramatic consistency and fluidity that seem from another era. The latter, in fact, is related to the date on which the plot is set: 1978.

The protagonist is a withdrawn and intelligent boy, Finney Shaw (Mason Thames), the son of a widowed father (Jeremy Davies) who drowns his sorrows in alcohol and becomes violent. In reality, Finney's guardian angel is his little sister, Gwen (the extraordinary Madeleine McGraw), a charming girl who possesses the gift of clairvoyance. In fact, when the boy is kidnapped by a sinister serial killer (Ethan Hawke), it is little Gwen who tries to get clues through her visions. But there is something else: in the basement where Finney is locked up, an old telephone begins to ring insistently... despite having the cable cut.

Apart from the music and the costumes, the film uses a thousand details to make us travel back in time. Black Phone doesn't just take place in the seventies. In a subtle way, it also feels like a movie from those years. Above all, because it avoids digital sensationalism and focuses on well-constructed characters. Finney and Gwen endear themselves, in contrast to the ruthless kidnapper, whom Ethan Hawke endows with a twisted personality. And that the actor almost always appears on the screen covered with a hideous mask, similar to the effigy of a Japanese demon. That this mask is made with interchangeable parts allows it to convey various emotions, or even the absence of them.

Derrickson has calculated his style well, inspired here by films like Halloween (1978) or The Silence of the Lambs (1991). With a small but well-used budget, the director achieves his goal: to narrate an initiation story, starring a boy who must face evil in its purest form.

It is no exaggeration to say that this little film paints a portrait of an era while offering a scary story that is as obsessive and disturbing as it is endearing.

Synopsis

The phone doesn't work, but it's ringing.

A sadistic killer kidnaps shy and intelligent 13-year-old Finney Shaw and locks him in a soundproof basement where screaming is useless. When an offline phone starts ringing, Finney discovers that he can hear the voices of the previous victims, and they are all determined to prevent the same thing from happening to Finney as to them.

Starring Ethan Hawke – nominated for four Oscars – in a terrifying role, and Mason Thames, in his first on the big screen. Rounding out the cast are Madeleine Mcgraw (Ant-Man and the Wasp) in the role of Gwen, Finney's little sister; Jeremy Davies (An Almost Funny Story) as Finney and Gwen's father, and James Ransone (Sinister).

In 2012, filmmakers Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill teamed up with producer Jason Blum and actor Ethan Hawke to make Sinister, widely regarded as the scariest movie of the 21st century to date. They all wanted to work together again, and it so happened that Scott Derrickson reread the story "The Black Telephone" by Joe Hill, son of legendary horror author Stephen King. The story is part of the Ghosts collection, published in the United States in 2005 [2008 in Spain]. "I went into a bookstore when the book had just been published," says the director. “At the time I had no idea who Joe Hill was, let alone that he was the son of Stephen King. I stood in the store reading the story and thought, 'This guy is great. It was about twenty pages tops, but I thought the concept was fantastic for a movie. I never forgot. From time to time he would talk about the story and I kept thinking about bringing it to the screen, but the moment never came. Finally, about a year and a half ago, I knew the time had come. My co-writer, C. Robert Cargill, and I bought the rights to the book from Joe and got to work."

Cargill was also in love with the Joe Hill story: “Scott passed me the story. I liked it so much that I bought the book right away and read it straight through. There is everything, and it is exactly what is required of a collection of horror stories.”

Both the story and the film revolve around a 13-year-old boy named Finney, who is kidnapped by a serial child killer and kidnapper known as The Captor from a north Denver neighborhood. Locked in the killer's basement, Finney discovers that he can hear the previous victims through an old black rotary phone on the wall that has been turned off. The inspiration for the story stems from a childhood memory of Joe Hill. "I grew up in Bangor, Maine, in a very old house," he says. “There was a phone in the basement that was not connected. It always bothered me a lot. It didn't make sense for there to be a phone in a basement with a dirt floor and cement walls. As a kid, the worst thing I could imagine was for that phone to start ringing.”

Scott Derrickson had always wanted to make a film that explored the emotional complexity and pain of childhood, as well as the ability of children to overcome tragedy. “In François Truffaut's Four Hundred Blows, there is one of the best child performances I've ever seen on screen,” he says. “It not only portrays the traumas that haunt a child, but also their resilience. I knew I wanted to do something in that direction, but I couldn't find a story with that feeling. Well, until I read 'The Black Telephone'. After reading it, Cargill and I began to study how to fit the story with the concept that was around us.”

The result is a film that goes beyond genre. "Scott and I are convinced that a good genre film is not limited to just one, you choose a genre that you really like to tell the story, but along the way it mixes with another," explains Cargill. "Here it was about writing a film of the transition from childhood to adolescence interrupted by a horror story."

In most movies in which a killer kidnaps children, the victim must be rescued by a brave and fearless detective or adult. In Black Phone, despite the fact that the adults have good intentions, they are really useless, while the children – Finney himself, the voices of the murdered boys that are heard on the phone and especially Gwen, Finney's little sister – they are the only ones who can stop The Captor from torturing and killing Finney. Aside from the bone-chilling terror of a good scary story, the film focuses on the strength of children, their ease in believing in unseen forces, and the power of love and family to help them endure the darkest of situations.

Writer Joe Hill was delighted with the adaptation. "The story was born wanting to be a novel, but I never found a way to lengthen it without taking it to places I didn't want to go," he says. "It was fascinating that Scott and Cargill put the puzzle together, and enriched the story with more characters, stories and lore."

For Joe Hill, recreating the era became personal. “I remember very well that, in 1978, things were like that, our parents behaved like that, and it is not usually something that you see a lot in the cinema,” he says. "Nostalgia is often described in a warm golden light to make everything more beautiful than it really was, erasing the roughness and ugliness."

For Generation X it was a time devoid of any initiative against bullying of any kind. Especially for boys, learning to defend themselves against bullies at school or in the neighborhood was considered part of learning. "My biggest memory until I went to high school is the violence that reigned in the neighborhood where we lived," says the director. “And the feeling I remember most as a child is fear. He was the smallest in a street full of thugs.”

It was also a time marked by fear in America due to a series of gruesome crimes and serial killers such as the Manson Family, the Hillside Strangler, the Zodiac Killer, Son of Sam, John Wayne Gacy and Ted Bundy, that were constantly in the news, reshaping American nightmares. “I remember when I was still in elementary school, at least in North Denver, serial killers were in the news,” adds the director. “In the mid-seventies, everyone had urban legends with the worst serial killers. And those horrors became real in people's minds."

As early as the 1980s, child murders began to make headlines. The first was in 1981, with the kidnapping and beheading of Adam Walsh, a six-year-old boy, in Florida. Without warning, overnight, childhood changed radically in the United States. “When Adam Walsh was murdered, there was not a single one of my colleagues who didn't know his name, how he had died and the horrible story of how his body had been found,” explains Cargill. "We had nightmares and it even led to a dialogue in the script: 'You go from being an unknown boy for years, and then everyone knows your name. I think it pretty much describes the era we grew up in.”

Perhaps surprisingly, the first seeds of Scott Derrickson's artistic future were planted then. "Growing up with so much fear as a child, I came to understand the feeling and that's where my passion for the horror genre was born," he acknowledges. “Both as a viewer and as a creator in the horror genre, I force myself to face something that scares me. I like to immerse myself in the genre. It is about looking into the eyes of something that is not talked about or that is so scary that it cannot be described. It has always seemed like a cathartic experience to me, as a spectator and as an artist”.

See you tomorrow!