Sinister and Doctor Strange duo Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill return to horror with their brand new Blumhouse horror movie The Black Phone, an adaptation of Joe Hill‘s short story. The Black Phone features Ethan Hawke as a killer who wears a mask designed by Tom Savini and his team, and it’s now coming to theaters on June 24, 2022.
Chatting with Entertainment Weekly, Hawke digs into his role in Derrickson’s latest horror movie, while touching upon what it is about villain roles that he’s now attracted to. Hawke, we should note here, is also playing the villain in Marvel’s upcoming “Moon Knight” series.
Hawke explains, “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. 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,” he notes.
Speaking specifically about his role in The Black Phone, “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. 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.”
Hawke continues, “That was on top of my brain; the scariest thing about [the Grabber] is that he doesn’t want you to see him.”
In The Black Phone…
“Finney Shaw, a shy but clever 13-year-old boy, is abducted by a sadistic killer and trapped in a soundproof basement where screaming is of little 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.”
Out of the film’s premiere at Fantastic Fest, Meagan wrote in her review for BD, “Derrickson and Cargill revive the same traits and structure of Sinister to transform Hill’s short into a feature-length nightmare full of ghostly kids, violence, and a trio of unforgettable performances.” Ethan Hawke delivers one unforgettably creepy performance as “The Grabber.”
Ethan Hawke (Sinister) and James Ransone (Sinister, It: Chapter Two) lead the cast, which also includes Jeremy Davies (“Hannibal”), Mason Thames and Madeleine McGraw.
The film’s screenplay is by Derrickson & C. Robert Cargill (Doctor Strange, Sinister franchise), based on the award-winning short story by Joe Hill from his New York Times bestseller 20th Century Ghosts. The film is produced by Derrickson & Cargill’s Crooked Highway and presented by Universal and Blumhouse.
Jason Blum, Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill are producers on the film, which is executive produced by Ryan Turek and Christopher H. Warner.
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