Scott Derrickson’s The Black Phone has no shortage of unsettling imagery. The Grabber (Ethan Hawke)’s mask and M.O. spark all kinds of “stranger danger” fears; dead kids pop up in well-timed jump scares, and a basement with stained walls implies all sorts of grotesque violence. Yet, the most terrifying scene in The Black Phone for me came early on when a man beats his child and doesn’t relent, even as the child pleads for her father to stop.
The terror is unending for kids like Finney and Gwen (Mason Thames and Madeleine McGraw). They’re in middle school, a horror movie all on its own. They and the rest of the kids at school have a bogeyman to fear. Haddonfield had Michael Myers, Elm Street had Freddy Krueger, Derry had Pennywise, and this Denver suburb has a child abductor and killer named The Grabber. Four boys have been taken so far, never to be seen again. There will soon be a fifth.
The Grabber could lurk around any corner, preying on you during your stroll across town. The missing child posters lining the fences are like grim calling cards, each picture hitting closer and closer to home. One of those kids was a paperboy, another a local bully who hung around the same convenience store as Finney, and the next one will be Finney’s closest friend. Like any urban legend, the Grabber comes with his own superstition: say his name and you’re next. Better to stay home where it’s safe, except home is hardly a haven for Finney and Gwen. The Grabber might be on the neighborhood prowl, but the two siblings already have a villain in their lives – their abusive and alcoholic father, Terrence (Jeremy Davies).
We meet Terrence long before we meet The Grabber. In a scene early on, Finney is eating breakfast and already he’s doing something wrong. Terrence scowls behind a newspaper, hissing at his son for slurping his cereal too loud. When Gwen comes into the kitchen, she startles everybody by accidentally pulling a cover loose. In a house where no one is allowed to speak more than a whisper, the sudden noise goes off like a grenade. Both siblings freeze for a moment in fear of what their father might do. Gwen quickly apologizes – a trained instinct. Terrence fumes momentarily, then lets the offense go. The siblings look at each other in relief. Gwen quietly makes a face at her brother as if she just won a game.
When Finney is kidnapped by the Grabber on his way home from school, he’s locked in a soundproofed basement, dwarfed by concrete walls stained with cracks and bruises – a mural of unspeakable violence. (Or like one Sinister poster.) He’s stuck with a mattress, a toilet, a masked captor who comes and goes, and the title rotary black phone. “It doesn’t work, not since I was a kid,” the Grabber tells him. It dawns on Finney that the missing kids were in this very position, and he may join their fate.
Finney soon discovers that they’re in the room with him. One by one, each of the dead kids come ringing on the disconnected rotary. They are trapped, perhaps in the phone or in the Grabber’s basement with unfinished business. Finney is right to be scared of the disembodied voices on the other end who speak in cryptic circles like broken records. They might startle him, but they’re not here to break his spirit. The thing is, these dead kids are far from the only ghosts in his life.
We learn that Finney and Gwen’s mother committed suicide. She was a psychic; she heard voices and saw visions, which drove her to madness. Terrence drinks himself to oblivion in the wake of her suicide, or to cope with raising two kids on his own – a role he has long since neglected in favor of daily vodka and six-packs. This is his routine now, while Finney’s is cleaning up after him. A son takes care of a father and two siblings take care of each other. We never see a picture of their mother, but her absence is felt everywhere. Her memory lingers in the empty beer bottles, in the coldness of terse conversations amounting to “yes, daddy” or “no, daddy,” and in the forced silence of a broken home.
We are told of the Grabber’s frightening legend in the news, but with Terrence we are shown. In the film’s most upsetting scene, Terrence beats his daughter with a belt over a minor inconvenience. Gwen is showing signs of her mother’s abilities, dreaming of specific details regarding the kidnappings, which gets the attention of the police. Her clairvoyance will come in handy when Finney becomes the next victim. Terrence, however, only cares that the cops showed up at his workplace. The film focuses less on the violence of the beating and more on the character’s faces – of a daughter under siege as the belt comes reigning down, a father who’s become a stranger in the house, and a son paralyzed by the horror.
Finney and Gwen scurry to bed the moment they hear something in the hallway or when a light comes on. But it’s not a poltergeist, it’s their father. Terrence is the danger they can’t escape, the monster they have to tip-toe around and obey. If they don’t, there’s the belt and the phantom pain of the last beating. When Terrence checks on Gwen’s room before bed – days after he beat her – he mumbles, “love you.” Gwen, still wincing, says “love you too, daddy.” Their father is just another thing they have to survive in the crucible of growing up.
It’s no surprise that both Finney and Gwen look upward for help or escape. Finney plays with model rockets and keeps a rocket pen on him at all times. He dreams of getting far away from here, while Gwen finds purpose in her visions. She asks for clarity in these dreams in her nightly prayers to God, pleas akin to honest conversations with a friend. There’s a Carrie component to her arc, as well as one Danny Torrance. She’s a budding psychic, abilities inherited from her mother, but also something amplified by the trauma of an abusive parent. As Joe Hill’s short story hints at, this sixth sense is shared in both sister and brother. Gwen sees dead kids, and Finney hears dead kids.
Each of the Grabber’s victims were fighters of some kind. Some of them stood up to bullies or were bullies themselves. Aside from Bruce Yamada (Tristan Pravong), we aren’t shown the interiority of their lives at home. We only see what life is like for Finney and Gwen. Finney’s soul is pummeled into submission by his father’s abuse, whereas Gwen is starting to fight back. There’s a sense that the kids who brawl at school had learned to do so from their parents like their parents before them, and so on. They survive the violence at home or the violence at school only to end up in the Grabber’s basement. Lacking any reliable adults in their lives, the only hope these kids have is each other, alive or dead.
“He’s waiting with that belt,” Billy (Jacob Moran), one of the dead kids, tells Finney. Unbeknownst to him, the Grabber has tasked him to play a game called “naughty boy.” “If you don’t play, the Grabber can’t beat you.” The Grabber teases Finney by leaving the basement door unlocked, making him believe he has a chance. His captor waits in the kitchen, shirt off and belt in his hands like a parent prepared to dole out punishment.
There’s a chilling Halloween moment when Finney briefly manages to escape, and he calls for help as he runs down the street. The lights of nearby houses flicker on, but nobody comes outside to his aid. And the Grabber drags him back to the basement once more. The specters of neglect go beyond Finney’s home, pervade in the surrounding suburb, dooming him all the same.
It’s implied that the Grabber was abused by his own father – locked away in a similar basement, screaming for help in the dark and taunted by a phone that doesn’t work. One of the ghosts tells Finney that the Grabber hears the phone too. “I was down here once when it rang,” the Grabber says. “Creepiest damn thing.” His motives and reasoning are left to nightmarish interpretation, but the labyrinth he’s set up is one that recalls Finney’s routine at home. When the Grabber opens the basement door, Finney darts to the bed and pretends to be asleep as if he’s been caught after lights out.
This could very well be the Grabber’s childhood home in which he’s doing his own reenactment of the trauma he endured. His behavior is regressive; his voice and demeanor are child-like, and he holds onto the identity of his mask like a kid dressed up for Halloween. There are traits, too, of a split personality. When Finney asks if he killed the other kids, the Grabber tells him, “That wasn’t me. That was someone else.”
The Grabber is the kid who never escaped the shadow of his father’s abuse. He puts other children in his position, imprisoning them in a similar maze and standoff against him to escape this place for good. Crucially, none of the boys have made it out, just like he never did. He’s forever haunted by what happened to him in his youth, and so is doomed to relive and repeat it.
Whether Finney realizes it or not, the game he’s playing with the Grabber is the same one he’s been inadvertently playing with his father. In classic haunted house fashion, the ghosts drive Finney–motivate him to get the hell out. He can’t call for help, but help comes calling. The dead kids are his literal lifeline in the dark, the tales of their own harrowing experiences passed on in a life or death game of telephone, bread crumbs that will lead to his escape.
Finney, in the end, escapes one horror movie, but he faces going back home to another. Reunited with his sister, the two sit bundled up in the back of an ambulance, both of them victims, survivors. When Terrence arrives at the scene, he falls to his knees and begs his children for forgiveness. Whether he deserves it is up to the viewer. Maybe their father will change, and maybe their household will repair and finally be exorcized of its ghosts. One thing is certain: Finney and Gwen have each other.
