JP Nunez
Coming into 2022, The Black Phone was one of my most anticipated movies of the year. I’m a big fan of both director Scott Derickson and the short story the film is based on, so I couldn’t wait to see Derrickson’s take on this awesome source material. And if this new trailer is any indication, The Black Phone is not going to disappoint.
The movie is about a boy named Finney who’s abducted by a killer known locally as the Grabber, and the guy throws him into a soundproof basement where nobody can hear him scream. Unbeknownst to his kidnapper, Finney soon begins to talk to the Grabber’s previous victims through an old, disconnected phone, and he learns that his ghostly new friends are on a mission to make sure he doesn’t suffer the same fate they did.
That’s a really intriguing plot, and the trailer for The Black Phone promises that the film will execute it just about perfectly. Admittedly, there’s a lot of old footage here that we saw in the first trailer, but there’s also a whole bunch of new stuff too.
Most notably, it shows us several new Tom Savini-designed masks that Ethan Hawke’s villainous Grabber will be wearing throughout the movie. Up until now, most of the marketing has focused on just one of those masks (although we’ve gotten a few brief glimpses of some others), but this new trailer highlights the others much more than anything else we’ve seen so far.
In particular, there’s a brief mini-montage at about the one-minute mark that goes through a few of them in quick succession, and they’re awesome. Like all good horror villain masks, these add a really cool visual flare that makes the Grabber look more like a demonic force of nature than a normal human being, so I can’t wait to see even more of them.
And even though The Black Phone has been pushed back a few times, it looks like that wait is going to be over sooner rather than later. The film is scheduled to hit theaters on June 24, so unless something really unexpected happens, we should be seeing it in just a few short months.
