DIALLING IT UP
FOR HIS NEW HORROR THE BLACK PHONE, DIRECTOR SCOTT DERRICKSON DUG DEEP INTO HIS OWN CHILDHOOD TO MAKE HIS MOST PERSONAL FILM YET
WORDS AL HORNER
THE BLACK PHONE
24 JUNE IN CINEMAS
Alamy
“IT WAS THE hardest decision of my career to step off Doctor Strange 2. Who does that? Who willingly walks off a Marvel movie?” The maker of one of the year’s most personal and powerful horrors, that’s who.
It’s a sunny Thursday morning in Los Angeles, and Scott Derrickson is discussing his latest film — and the MCU sequel he left in order to make it happen. The Black Phone is the director’s first outing since quitting Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness in January 2020. The story of an abducted teen in 1970s Colorado who communes with the dead using a mysterious telephone, it’s an adaptation of a tale by acclaimed horror author Joe Hill that “fuses my own childhood memories with the narrative of that short story,” the filmmaker reveals. The result? A pulse-racing supernatural thriller set in a North Denver suburbia identical to the one Derrickson once called home, with plenty of texture — not to mention needle-drops and inventive swear words — from his own adolescence.