The Black Phone (2022)

★★★½
It didn't take long for Blumhouse Productions to redeem itself after the awful Firestarter. That was a cash grab, though its underwhelming box office performance showed that it failed as a cash grab as much as it failed as a horror movie. The Black Phone is serious horror. It's scary and original. It's based on a short story by Joe Hill, whose works I've never read, but if this movie is any indication, his imagination is just as rich as his father Stephen King. It's a ghost story and features a character with psychic powers, but it's largely about a child kidnapper with no supernatural powers but is still frightening just for his voice and personality. He's like a human Pennywise by feeding his need to terrorize children.

The movie takes place in North Denver in 1972. I liked the choice of year as well as the suburban location. It isn't just the pop culture references ("Did you see The Texas Chainsaw Massacre?"), but rather the long-ago visual of children without cell phones that goes with the time period. We're watching the younger end of the Baby Boomer spectrum, before the first Generation X babies were born, but these lines of distinction are fuzzy anyway. Though this was not yet the era of the latchkey child (that was in the '80s), there was definitely generational overlap, and I recognized a lot here. The Saturday morning cartoons, the language, the self-sufficiency—kids from this era found amusement in an unorganized setting. This go-it-alone reality will come into play later.

Finney (Mason Thames) and his sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) live with an abusive widowed father. It's not an ideal environment, but luckily school is in session, which provides at least a reprieve from their home life. Children have been going missing in the community, and the police have few leads. One of them is Gwen, who possesses clairvoyant abilities, which the police are eager to tap to get any information that could help. She told a friend that she had dreams of one of the recent victims, and it turned out to be true. That the police would immediately question her and take her seriously is remarkable, but with so little evidence, they'll listen to anyone at this point. The suspect, dubbed the Grabber, has been active for some time.

The Grabber follows a script and selects his victims carefully. He eventually abducts Finney and locks him in a basement. The only thing in the basement is a dirty mattress, something that passes for a bathroom and a broken phone on the wall. The Grabber (Ethan Hawke) delivers food, but his immediate plans are not clear. As the trailers reveal, past victims start calling Finney on the broken phone. One of them is Robin (Miguel Cazarez Mora), a nice kid who unfortunately found himself in that same basement not long before Finney's arrival. He, along with everyone else the Grabber took, offers a piece of the puzzle to aid Finney in his escape. Elsewhere, the police search ramps up as Gwen tries to use her abilities to track down her brother.

Ethan Hawke is appropriately creepy as the Grabber. It's a role unlike anything he's played. Mentally disturbed and contemptible in every way, he projects a quietly menacing façade not unlike Paul Dano's Riddler in The Batman while quickly conjuring up a viscous mean streak when the situation calls for it. I can't emphasize it enough—the Grabber is one ghastly fiend. In most of his onscreen appearances, he wears a mask, yet even behind the mask Hawke gives the Grabber a frightening personality. Using his voice and body to make up for his hidden facial features, he creates a villain that fit in perfectly with the movie's mood.

Like many horror movies, there are jump scares accompanied with stinger music. These are not hard to do, because anyone can jump out at someone who isn't paying attention and catch him off guard. Overreliance can make the audience anticipate them, making the scares less impactful or not impactful at all. What separates The Black Phone from other movies that employ this technique comes down to timing and editing. Director Scott Derrickson stages the scares perfectly, shoots at the right angle, uses shadows to tease the audience and effectively builds up the urgency in the story to ensure his efforts work. There were a few moments that genuinely took me by surprise.

The lasting impression for me was how the kids possessed the wherewithal to try different things to escape. Finney gets several phone calls and tries to duplicate the efforts of his callers. His methods have little in common, yet a point in the story arrives during which his hard work merges. He is truly a product of his era. Maybe that's why some recent films of the same genre look to the past and feature a young cast. It's not just for a nostalgia kick. It: Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 benefitted from Stephen King's established timeline in his book to set the childhood scenes in the '80s. Netflix's Stranger Things takes place during the decade. For a blast from the past, check out 1991's The People Under the Stairs, which featured a young teen who outwitted two demented siblings in a labyrinthine mansion.

I read several articles that proclaimed Generation X as the one best equipped to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns. Our experience with fending for ourselves served us well. The Black Phone's kids are technically not Gen X, but are of an age to have similar experiences. That's not the only reason this movie resonated with me. It's also an effective horror movie. That would have been enough, but this tip of the hat to a bygone era was a nice touch.

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