‘The Black Phone’ Film Review: Stephen King–Flavored Retro Horror Delivers Solid Chills
thewrap.com“The Black Phone” take full advantage of the movie’s basic setup: a suburban teen gets abducted and then struggles to escape his captor’s sound-proof basement.
That scenario, co-adapted from a Joe Hill (“NOS4A2”) short story by director Scott Derrickson (“Doctor Strange”) and co-writer C.
Robert Cargill, folds neatly into the mini-trend of quasi-nostalgic horror-adventures that both “Stranger Things” and the 2017 “It” adaptation brought back into vogue.Derrickson and Cargill successfully tailor their focused and mostly compelling narrative to a Steven Spielberg/Amblin Entertainment–esque bit of Stephen King–sploitation. (King, as it happens, is author Hill’s dad.) There’s nothing in “The Black Phone” that you can’t also get in more inventive recent King adaptations (like “Doctor Sleep”) or King-like homages.
But Derrickson and Cargil’s first post-MCU movie still mostly thrills, thanks partly to its strong ensemble cast and some uniform below-the-line excellence from the teams behind production designer Patti Podesta (“American Gods”) and sound designers Aidin Ashoori and D.
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