The Horror Advocate — Ava’s Guest Review of “The Black Phone”

Welcome to our 2nd Annual Birthday Bash as Divination Hollow Reviews!

We’ll be celebrating all month long with a series of posts by our team and esteemed colleagues and this year’s theme is “Going to the Movies!” Join us as we share themed content with special “tickets” for each category inspired by cinema.

Celebrate with us!

The Black Phone

I finally watched The Black Phone (2022), whew!! What an indictment of the lack of parental/family resources for 1970’s parenthood, latchkey kids, and the child abduction spike between 1970-1999, which happens to follow a trend of spatial naivety, technological advancement, and suburban delusion. I can see where many wouldn’t like it since it operates on such a mysterious level - an inversion of a “watched pot never boils”.

But the tension created in that basement was GRADE A HORROR WORK. The thin veil between worlds, the silence and how brutally it’s cut by the ringing phone, the masks, and the thin threads that allow someone to live side by side with a killer and never solve for x until it’s too late. Ethan Hawke was perfect. He played that character with such restraint and really captured the quiet storm that child abductors wage through their victims' lives, and of those who love them. I didn’t love the end, but I can accept the wrap-up in place of a desperate grab to “be different” just because. Stylistically it reminded me a lot of The Devil's Backbone, Sinister (same director), Haxan, and Super Dark times. I liked it

 #TheBlackPhone2022

Guest Post By Ava M Fields, The Horror Advocate
@AHorrorAdvocate on Twitter