Is the movie "Black Phone" based on real events? Ethan Hawke's scary horror film is now streaming on Amazon Prime, but is it based on a true story?
Directed by Scott Derrickson and co-written by C. Robert Cargill, Black Telephone was one of the best horror films of 2021, up there with Malignant, Fear Street and Night House.
Adapted from a short story by Joe Hill, Stephen King's son, the film tells the story of a 1970s suburb where a series of child abductions by "The Grabber" (Ethan Hawke) take place, and the boy (Mason Thames) who gets caught in his web and must find a way defeat him.
As people rewatch the film and discover it for the first time, you may be wondering: Is Telephone Black based on a true story? Well, we have the answer.
Is the movie "Black Phone" based on real events?
Here's what's really scary: Although the movie Black Phone is not based on a true story, it is inspired by real events.
In an interview with Vanity Fair, Hill explained that his story was not based on any one case, but was inspired by people like John Wayne Gacy - while he moonlighted as a clown, Grabber masqueraded as a magician.
When I wrote The Black Telephone, it had been 20 years since I read [it], 15 years since I saw the TV movie, and I wasn't thinking about it at all. It never crossed my mind,” he said.
“I was thinking about the most famous child killers in American history. And the first one that comes to mind, the one who is inevitable, is John Wayne Gacy - he was a part-time clown."
The film mostly stays true to the original source, but Derrickson used his own childhood to create the Finney character and his backstory with an abusive father.
“I grew up in the North Denver area, which was quite violent, a lot of bullying, a lot of fighting, a lot of kids were bleeding all the time,” the director told news.com.au.
“This was right after Ted Bundy drove through Colorado killing people. And the Manson murders had just happened... there was a lot of domestic violence, even in my own home and in the homes of a lot of these kids that I knew.”
“The parents punished the children much more aggressively, and so it was a very violent, scary place to grow up in many ways. And I tried to realistically convey this setting in the film."
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