The Black Phone Trailer: Answer The Call For Scott Derrickson's New Horror Movie

It's time to get scared about Ethan Hawke again. The second trailer for the upcoming horror film "The Black Phone" — in which Hawke plays a terrifying villain who abducts children and wears an unsettling mask — has arrived, and it continues to frame this terrifying new story as a mental battle of epic proportions.

In this latest trailer, we are introduced to a young boy who is kidnapped in broad daylight by a man with a black van and a cheery yet unsettling disposition. Once in captivity, he begins to take interest in a disconnected and ominous phone in the room. The official synopsis of the film from Universal Pictures reads:

Finney Shaw, a shy but clever 13-year-old boy, is abducted by a sadistic killer and trapped in a soundproof basement where screaming is of little use. When a disconnected phone on the wall begins to ring, Finney discovers that he can hear the voices of the killer's previous victims. And they are dead set on making sure that what happened to them doesn't happen to Finney.

"The Black Phone" was directed by Scott Derrickson, who also wrote the script alongside C. Robert Cargill, adapted from a short story written by well-known horror writer Joe Hill. According to early reviews of the film after it premiered at Fantastic Fest in 2021, the movie is very faithful to the source material, which seems to prove that some of the best horror in the world is actually within the untapped literary space. And when a film adaptation can hit the same marks as the original work, it's nothing short of magic. 

There's a lot more footage in this preview of our central victim connecting with the past victims of The Grabber, Hawke's kidnapper character. I was really intrigued by what we see in this expanded trailer, because a concept like that can be hokey, but it really comes off powerful here, especially in the way that it seems to both use horror tactics at times and at others subdue them with hope and bravery.

As for Hawke's character, there has been a lot of praise, but the footage we've seen so far doesn't have me entirely convinced about his performance just yet. That said, I'm open to having my mind changed, and honestly, I hope he knocks it out of the park. Either way, Mason Thames, who plays Finney, is definitely going to have a lot of film offers after this one goes wide. It's clear just from the two-minute trailer that he gives this movie his all.

"The Black Phone" is set to premiere in theaters on June 24, 2022.