The horror film The Black Phone takes place in 1978 and the choice of setting is very intentional. It’s an excuse for director Scott Derrickson to use the same kind of needle drops from the 70s, in this case, the nostalgic sounds of The Edgar Winter Group, Pink Floyd, Sweet and Chic, which have also been seen in the recent two by Warner Bros. partial adaptation of Stephen King’s It. It also gives realism to the rain of scenes in which children sit mercilessly and stick their snot to each other with no concerned adults in sight. This leads to the most effective product of the film’s vintage setting: a palpable sense of danger.
The late 1970s were not the peak era of serial killings in the United States. (This did not happen until the mid-1980s.) But during that time several high-profile cases erupted and, combined with the birth of television murder trials and an increase in overall crime rates, the stories they helped fuel paranoia. in the general public. However, attitudes about raising children had not yet been brought up to date with this anxiety. And with the “Stranger Danger” campaigns of the 1980s still a few years away, 1978 was the time of maximum audience for unsupervised children to be dragged into unmarked vans.
Based on a short story by Locke & Key and NOS4A2 author Joe Hill, The Black Phone exploits this fear from the start, with big plans for vans hiding behind groups of kids returning home from the school, along with close-ups of pamphlets on missing children in the community newsletter. tables. Brothers Finney (Mason Thames) and Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) are well aware of the rumors behind these disappearances, attributed to a local boogey man known as “The Grabber”.
Image: Universal Pictures
A common superstition says that anyone who says The Grabber’s name out loud will be next to be snatched away. Finney believes this myth, which opens him up to the mockery of little sister Gwen. But his fear is justified. First, his best and only friend, Robin (Miguel Cazarez Mora), a tough kid who likes horror movies, is the victim of The Grabber (Ethan Hawke, just out of a series of villains other than the MCU Moon Knight series). Finney himself is then kidnapped and wakes up on a dirty mattress in a concrete cell in the basement of an anonymous, shabby house in his low-income Denver neighborhood.
Most of the film takes place in The Grabber’s basement, like the entirety of Hill’s original story. Here, Finney communicates with the incorporeal voices of The Grabber’s five previous victims via the title’s black phone. (The cable has been cut, but the phone is still ringing. Creepy!) Each of these guys tried to escape from The Grabber in his own way, and each of them calls Finney for advice on how to survive wherever he goes. they could not. The key is not to resist; as one boy explains, “If you don’t play, you can’t win.”
All of these elements warm up the spine. And The Black Phone has a sad sense of helplessness, especially in slow-motion shots gliding over groups of adults with flashlights, looking for children the audience knows are already dead. Institutions fail children at all levels of this film: parents are alcoholics or absent, if not totally abusive. Detectives are so incompetent that all of their best clues come from Gwen’s prophetic dreams. (Joe Hill is Stephen King’s son. It’s not uncommon for a child with mental powers to mix.)
Outside of the feeling of morbid inevitability, however, The Black Phone is a disaster. The main problem is the performances, which range from baffling to creepy. Jeremy Davies is especially bad as Finney and Gwen’s drunken father, whose screams and screams are not recorded as genuinely pathetic or threatening. Hawke is also too ubiquitous to read it as credibly terrifying: when we first see The Grabber, his face is painted white and he speaks in a loud, affected voice reminiscent of Atlanta’s Teddy Perkins. Strange, isn’t it? What is it trying to mean and how does it fit into your psychosis? No matter: this is the first and last time the character’s detail will appear in the film.
Image: Universal Pictures
In later scenes, Hawke oscillates between childlike innocence and guttural growls, but without the commitment that makes similar performances so disturbing. (Think James McAvoy threw himself at his multiple personalities in Split, for example.) And with a mask covering at least half of his face at all times, an intense vocal performance would have really helped The Grabber and his twisted game of “naughty boy”. ”Provoke audience moans instead of laughter.
Outside the basement, The Black Phone’s tonal problems get even worse. There’s nothing as blatant in the film as the infamous “Angel of the Morning” sequence of vomiting and lepers in It: Chapter Two, but the film’s oscillations between comedy and horror are equally inefficient and ineffective. He adds jump scares that only add visual interest to Finney’s repetitive scenes by talking on the phone in an empty room, and The Black Phone manages to preserve everything that made Hill’s short story so creepy and undermine it. at the same time.
The Black Phone opens in theaters on June 24th.
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