The Black Phone

• Shot in Wilmington, North Carolina in early 2021 (under the working title 'Static') for a reported $16-18 million, partly covered by a $4.7 million North Carolina film tax credit.
• Ethan Hawke had never played a straight villain before this — director Scott Derrickson said he genuinely expected Hawke to pass on the script because the character is a masked child predator. Hawke's answer came as a voicemail left in the Grabber's creepy voice, delivering a line straight from the screenplay.
• The screenplay, co-written by Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill, adapts Joe Hill's short story of the same name — first published in the British magazine The Third Alternative in 2004, then collected in Hill's 2005 anthology '20th Century Ghosts.'
• Mason Thames, cast as Finney, had only a handful of credits before this — a 2017 short film ('After Omelas') and a recurring guest arc on Apple TV+'s 'For All Mankind' — making Black Phone his breakout lead role.
• The Grabber's mask was designed and built by horror effects legend Tom Savini alongside Jason Baker at their Pittsburgh studio, Callosum Studios, which produced roughly 30 versions of it for stunts, gags, and pandemic-era doubling.
• Derrickson grew up in the Denver area (Shaw Heights, near Westminster) in the 1970s and has said the film's neighborhood draws directly on his own childhood streets.

The Grabber's mask isn't disguise—it's fragmentation. Each bottom piece represents a different self he's trying to keep compartmentalized, and the phone calls threaten to collapse those walls. When Finney knocks it off in the final struggle, the Grabber doesn't fight harder to survive—he scrambles to cover his face first. That's not vanity. It's the last personality losing its shell.

The black phone is never supernatural—it's Finney's unconscious mind generating the survival information he already possesses. The 'ghosts' speak in details only someone who'd been in that basement could know, and Finney's brain feeds them back as external voices because he can't yet accept that the solution to his own murder is already inside him.

The film reads as Derrickson processing his own fear-filled childhood in that same North Denver neighborhood, not any specific religious upbringing—the basement is isolation and powerlessness, the phone is the voice you wish some adult had given you, and the dead boys are solidarity among kids failed by every grown-up around them. Finney doesn't win by out-fighting the Grabber. He wins because the others gave him what the adults never did.

Denver, 1978. A suburban wasteland where kids vanish into a black van and nobody in authority seems to care. Finney Blake, a quiet kid who can throw a fastball but can't throw a punch, becomes the latest grab for The Grabber—a masked sadist in a soundproof basement. Down there, a disconnected black phone rings. It shouldn't work. It does. On the other end: the Grabber's previous victims, each dead boy passing along one piece of the puzzle that might get Finney out alive. Survival becomes a séance, and the dead don't dial collect—they dial for blood.