What a wonderful surprise Scott Derickson’s “The Black Phone” is. It takes pretty standard horror film beats and make them feel fresh and surprisingly scary without resorting to gore. He gives us a time and place that feel already distressed, kids who feel real in it and environment they need to survive every day, topped off by a memorably twisted villain.
It is set in the late 70’s in a depressed part of a small Colorado town. It feels like a community that is already suffering before being plagued with a rash of child abductions. The story is centered around a brother and sister named Finny and Gwen (played by Mason Thames and Madeline McGraw) The kids aren’t only dealing with the disappearance of their friends, but trying to survive an abusive alcoholic father and really rough neighborhood. There are two brutal beatings from kids to kids, and a painful extensive spanking scene with the kid’s father savagely spanking Gwen with his belt. All the while kids are disappearing around the town.
Gwen is clairvoyant and can see what those abducted kids have experienced. She calls the kidnapper “The grabber”. When Finn’s best friend, and toughest kid in the school, disappears, she can see the outcome in her dreams and it will not end well. Soon Finn runs into a mysterious black van, with man dressed in black with white face paint. He has the look of a demented clown. He spills some things and as Finn goes to help black balloons escape from the van which the Grabber uses to camouflage. Within a flash Finn is overwhelmed and chloroformed. When he slowly awakens he finds himself in a dank, stripped down basement with nothing more than a bare mattress on the floor and a disconnected black phone hanging on the cement wall.
The Grabber makes his way into the room wearing a frightening white mask that has two parts. The bottom is a burned on all teeth smile, reminiscent of the Joker. And the upper half has Satanic horns. Ethan Hawk is great as the villain. He gives him a whiney/needy/negotiating voice. While he is not empathic, you understand that the same domestic circumstances the kids in this neighborhood survive in are what created him. He reasons with Finn that he will not harm him unless he is a “bad boy”. Finn begins getting mysterious calls on the phone with instructions of how to possibly escape “The grabber” while Gwen has visions of the house and rides around town on her bike to try and find it.
The film is shot in a stripped down 70’s grind house film stock which gives the film the perfect ominous tone. All of it is dark and gloomy. The performances are all spot on. Hawk is particularly memorable. A lot of actors in parts like this “have fun with the part” but Hawk digs deeper and gets to the sad depths of his psychotic depravity. Jeremy Davies is perfect as the alcoholic abusive widower/father who loves his children but is struggling with his own demons and like everybody else in this universe, takes it out those weaker than him. Add in two believable child performances by Thames and McGraw and you get a realistic family that while not ideal is definitely recognizable.
Derrickson builds up some real tension and “The Black Phone” surprisingly gave me a couple of jump scares. That doesn’t happen very often. He has created a horror film with surprising depth. While he is scaring you, he is also commenting on the communities that create a monster like “The Grabber”. Satisfying and scary. If you are a fan of horror films this is a must watch.