After Hellraiser 5: Inferno, The Exorcism of Emily Rose, Sinister and Deliver Us from Evil, director Scott Derrickson is once again back in horror cinema with Black Phone. Worn by Ethan Hawke and the young Mason Thames, Black Phone is a devilishly effective old-fashioned fantasy thriller. Series B impacting, the story tells the survival of a 13-year-old boy, kidnapped by a madman, who sequesters him in his cellar. His only resource is a phone, which is not plugged in, and yet rings regularly…
Adapted from a short story by Joe Hill
Black Phone is adapted from a short story by Joe Hill, Stephen King's son. The story is rooted in the late 1970s in a small town in Colorado. To build the character of the kidnapper, Joel Hill is inspired by a true story: that of John Wayne Gacy, known as "the killer clown", charged with the murder of 33 young men. 
If Scott Derrickson masters his subject so well, it is because he himself grew up in Colorado in the 1970s. He evolves in the middle of the Ted Bundy period, another famous serial killer.
Black Phone: an ultra-efficient B series
After making a detour to superheroes with Doctor Strange, Scott Derrickson is back in the cinema he masters to perfection: horror cinema. With Black Phone, he offers an unpretentious B series and yet mastered on the fingertips. The director skilfully mixes horror, thriller and fantasy. Thanks to the villain figure, embodied by an inhabited Ethan Hawke, he offers a universal and permanent threat. He rewrites the myth of the modern bogeyman, inking it in issues of ultra-contemporary identity search. Like these bipolar masks that dictate to the antagonist his character and desires. 
Thus, via a rather simplistic starting premise, Scott Derrickson mixes genres with a crazy mastery. Black Phone is both a sequestration film (which owes a lot to Room), a slasher-movie (difficult to avoid the comparison with Halloween), but also a film of spirits in which he sometimes summons the mastery of his colleague James Wan. It is also difficult not to refer to Andy Muschietti's Ça (yellow kway and young children are highlighted). But above all , Black Phone is a clever film. Scott Derrickson never falls into cliché. The figure of evil, embodied by Ethan Hawke is very modern. It is a mass of muscle without past, without present, almost out of time, whose sole purpose is to terrorize.
Intelligent staging
Via Black Phone, Scott Derrickson also reverses the concept of spirits. Often presented as demonic beings, they are here a source of help, support, which allows the filmmaker to advance an extremely relevant statement: the real danger is real, the real danger is the boogeyman, the real danger is the serial killer, the real danger is therefore the perverted society. Finally, the filmmaker proposes a staging in restraint. Even if a few jump scares punctuate the narrative, they are used with crazy intelligence, and are never arranged in a fortuitous and unnecessarily flashy way. With Black Phone, Scott Derrickson recalls the usefulness and effectiveness of jump scares, when they are thought upstream, and used wisely. 
Finally, the only downside of this story lies in the plot of the antagonist's brother. Strange secondary character, who seems added like a hair on the soup, and who brings nothing concrete to the story. This is the only real gray area of the feature film, because we still wonder how its existence is justified… Anyway, with Black Phone, Scott Derrickson proves once again that he is simply (with James Wan) the best craftsman of mainstream Hollywood horror cinema. What fucking fun!! https://youtu.be/3eGP6im8AZA
