‘The Black Phone’ CinemaCon Review: A Scary Ethan Hawke And Terrific Young Stars Make This Thriller A Blumhouse Best

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As Jim Orr, Universal’s distribution head said in introducing Tuesday night’s CinemaCon screening of their upcoming late June release, The Black Phone, studios don’t normally bring a movie like this to show in its entirety at a theatre owners convention two months ahead of opening unless they know they have the goods.With this one reuniting producer Jason Blum and  Blumhouse  with director Scott Derrickson and co-writer C.

Robert Cargill – all previously working together on 2010’s Sinister – Universal does have the goods, and then some. Being marketed apparently as a horror film, its poster dominated by a fully terrifyingly masked and horned Ethan Hawke, what this late 70’s-set movie really is about is the trauma of youth as they cross from childhood into teen years, more appropriately falling into the suspense thriller category than the kind of standard horror the marketing seems to indicate.

Hopefully audiences won’t be put off by that approach, because this is a truly effective movie that defies easy description but should appeal to a wider crowd.

It originally premiered at the 2021 Fantastic Fest last September, and was planned for a January release but Blum and the studio felt it needed to be seen in theatres, thus the smart move to a prime summer slot and exclusive theatrical run.Based on the 2014 Joe Hill short story comparisons to Stephen King, and particularly It will be inevitable but The Black Phone marches to its own beat as we are introduced to its protagonist, young teen Finney Shaw (Mason Thames) , an ace baseball pitcher who nevertheless finds himself subjected to constant harm by school bullies, as well as a single alcoholic father (Jeremy Davies) who is in over his head in raising Finney and his