The Black Phone trailer is calling all horror fans
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The last time director Scott Derrickson, screenwriter C. Robert Cargill, and actor Ethan Hawke collaborated on a film the result was 2012's chilling Sinister. A decade on, and the trio have recombined for another horror movie, The Black Phone (out in theaters June 24), which looks similarly unsettling.
Based on a short story by Joe Hill, the movie concerns Finney Shaw, a shy but clever 13-year-old boy, who is abducted by a sadistic killer and trapped in a soundproof basement. When a disconnected phone on the wall begins to ring, Finney discovers that he can hear the voices of the killer's previous victims who are dead set on making sure that what happened to them doesn't happen to Finney.
Fred Norris/Universal 'The Black Phone' trailer is calling all horror fans
Hawke plays the Grabber, the film's villain, a part-time magician responsible for a string of child abductions in a suburban Colorado town.
"Scott wanted me to do a part in a mask for an entire film, and all of a sudden I feel like I'm doing Greek drama; he allowed me to give a performance in the middle of a horror movie," Hawke told EW. "There's a great Bob Dylan line in that Scorsese doc [Rolling Thunder Revue] where he says that if somebody's got a mask on, you know they're telling the truth — and if they don't have a mask on, you know they're lying. That was on top of my brain; the scariest thing about [the Grabber] is that he doesn't want you to see him."
"I've always had this theory that when you teach an audience how to see the demon inside you, they don't unsee it for the rest of your career," the actor continued. "Jack Nicholson can be playing an accountant and you're still waiting for him to explode like he did in The Shining. But I realized I'm on the other side of 50 and it's time to put a new tool in the tool kit. Villains might be my future."
The Black Phone costars Mason Thames, Madeleine McGraw, Jeremy Davies, and James Ransone. Watch the film's trailer below.
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