MASK of EVIL

As Ethan Hawke finds “his Shining moment” in Scott Derrickson’s coming-of-age horror THE BLACK PHONE, Total Film lifts the mask on next year’s most terrifying – and heartfelt – serial-killer thriller.

- PAUL BRADSHAW

The sight of them disturbed him in some way. No one wanted black balloons… He stared, briefly transfixed, thinking of poisoned grapes…”

The moment 12-year-old Finney Shaw is abducted in Joe Hill’s short story ‘The Black Phone’ hits frighteningly hard – a child stopping to help a stranger, violently pulled into a van and driven off to a concrete basement within a few short sentences.

Owing plenty to Hill’s dad, Stephen King, the story is full of childhood fears for clowns, masks and balloons – maybe more about Hill’s real past than his imagined nightmares. When Scott Derrickson first read the story (stood in an LA bookstore back in 2004), he instantly felt a connection.

“The primary feeling I had growing up was fear,” he tells Total Film, talking candidly about his childhood. “I grew up in North Denver and it was a violent place. People were fighting all the time, a lot of people were bleeding. At that time the Manson murders had just happened. Ted Bundy had just come through Colorado. I grew up hearing about kids getting abducted, seeing faces on milk cartons. When I was eight years old my friend knocked on my door and told me somebody had murdered his mom. She’d been abducted and raped and wrapped in a phone cord and thrown in the local lake. The air of danger was just something that I was really attuned to.”