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Aiden Leahy

The Black Phone: Best Horror Movie this Year?

Updated: Oct 21, 2022

Out of all the horror movies that were recently released, The Black Phone left me shaking in my seat at the theater.

The movie is based on a short story written by Joe Hill, Stephen King’s son. If you are trying to find a movie that will have you gripping your seat, this is the one. The movie follows a young boy by the name of Finny Shaw, a clever 13-year-old who is captured by a sadistic masked killer.


The acting was the best of the best with Ethan Hawke playing the sadistic killer, Manson Thames playing Finny, and Madeleine McGraw as Gwen Finny’s younger sister. The brother and sisterly love in the movie is the best with the actors playing perpetually siblings. Hawke playing the sadistic killer known as the grabber was one of his best performances in my opinion.


The director, Scott Derrickson, was attracted to the Joe Hill short story, which was published in 2004, for its tenderness and specialty. “From the first time I read it, something that I thought was deceptive about the story is that it combined a serial killer story with a ghost story,” he said, “I hadn’t seen that done before and certainly not in any kind of an effective way. And Joe did it seemingly effortlessly. There’s so much empathy toward Finney and it was all told with a point of view of love and felt very hopeful and even inspiring.”


Many changes were made to the movie with the young characters and director Derrickson used his own turbulent childhood. “Scott brought the idea of making the film about his childhood and how traumatic it was and sharing all these actual memories,” said Cargill. “That’s where I was like, that’s a script I want to write.” Hearing this about the movie makes me wonder about Derrickson’s childhood and what happened to him when he was a young child.


If I give this movie a rating, I would give it a 10 out of 10. The cinematography was perfect, matching each scene perfectly and building suspense. The writing was perfect, never leaving us, the audience, wondering what was going on and the director Scott Derrickson did absolutely wonderful with his image of Joe Hill’s short story and I would definitely see another movie by him.



Photo by Quino Al on Unsplash

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