Director Scott Derrickson’s much anticipated supernatural horror The Black Phone released a chilling new featurette. In a one and a half minute-long clip, Ethan Hawke gives fans ‘a look inside’ his terrifying new character, the Grabber.
After recently playing the antagonist Arthur Harrow on the Disney+ series Moon Knight, Hawke takes another turn at villainy. This time, he is going into serial killer mode as the Grabber, a sadistic part-time magician who abducts and traps a 13-year-old Finney Shaw (Mason Thames) in a soundproof basement. The boy finds a ray of hope when a disconnected phone on the wall begins to ring. “He’s not a good person, some part of his soul is so eroded that he can justify things most of us can’t think about,” Hawke explains. Further, comparing the movie to Derrickson’s other horror franchise he said, “It’s like a sibling movie to Sinister that’s going to a deeper strange place.”
Before delving into the superhero genre with Marvel Studios’ Doctor Strange Derrickson made a name for directing horror movies such as both Sinister films, Deliver Us From Evil, and The Exorcism of Emily Rose. His first movie after stepping away from Doctor Strange sequel, The Black Phone is based on the award-winning short story collection 20th Century Ghosts by Joe Hill. “I always like to picture a group of friends going to a movie theater at midnight because being scared out of your mind is what this movie is about,” Hawke says in the clip.
Derrickson co-wrote The Black Phone with his long-time collaborator Robert Cargill who worked with him on both Doctor Strange and the Sinister franchise. The film is produced by Derrickson & Cargill’s Crooked Highway and presented by Universal and Blumhouse.
Along with Oscar-nominated Hawke and relatively newcomer Thames (For All Mankind), The Black Phone casts Madeleine McGraw (The Mitchells vs the Machines), Jeremy Davies (Lost), and James Ransone (It: Chapter Two).
The Black Phone hits theaters on June 24 check out the new featurette below.
Here’s the synopsis of the movie:
Finney Shaw is a shy but clever 13-year-old boy who’s being held in a soundproof basement by a sadistic, masked killer. When a disconnected phone on the wall starts to ring, he soon discovers that he can hear the voices of the murderer’s previous victims — and they are dead set on making sure that what happened to them doesn’t happen to Finney.
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