I Just happened to red 20TH CENTURY GHOST for the first time shortly before this movie came out, and i was curious how they could adapt the short story THE BLACK PHONE into a full movie. The original story is real short with not to many characters, so the director really had to add some meat to these bones to get this to be a full length. the director of course being Scott Derrickson, the man behind Hellraiser: Inferno, Deliver Us from Evil, Sinister 1+2, Doctor Strange, and he even did some uncredited rewrites to SCREAM 4. The man knows how to make good movies (and also a Hellraiser), and this movie was slated to be one of his best yet.
The Black Phone is a 2021 American supernatural horror film directed by Scott Derrickson and written by Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill, who both produced with Jason Blum. It is an adaptation of the 2004 short story of the same name by Joe Hill.
Finney Shaw is a shy but clever 13-year-old boy who is abducted by a sadistic killer and trapped in a soundproof basement where screaming is of no use. When a disconnected phone on the wall begins to ring, Finney discovers that he can hear the voices of the killer's previous victims. And they are dead-set on making sure that what happened to them doesn't happen to Finney.
The marketing campaign from Universal Pictures for The Black Phone began with the release of a trailer on August 25, 2021, at CinemaCon. Variety said the film looked "scarier than the COVID-19 delta variant" and called it "the next possible franchise for Universal and Blumhouse." The marketing for this movie really made you think it was going to be one of the most intense movie of the genre so far, and it simply wasn't. The biggest issue with this movie is it really doesn't do anything new. Its packed full of great acting and has a lot of small scenes that work really well, but this movie works better as a comedy than a horror movie. the way the added meat to the small short story bones is by pilling on clichés and scenes that feel unnecessary.
Perhaps if you somehow avoided all of the advertising for this movie=, perhaps you had no expectations going in that this movie doesn't live up to. i think this movie will be best remembered as the B tier horror movie that started several child actors career.
5/10
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