Dial H For Horror
THE BLACK PHONE’s writing duo, Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill, on turning a Joe Hill short story into the year’s best horror film
Director Scott Derrickson with Thames on set.
JOE HILL’S SHORT story The Black Phone is just that: short. Around 30 pages, depending on which format you’re using. So when it came time for the writing duo of director Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill to adapt it for the big screen, they had to generate quite a bit of material themselves. Here, they talk Empire through some of the principles that guided them.
FIND A PERSONAL CONNECTION
The Black Phone may be Derrickson’s most personal film as a director to date. Which isn’t to say that the experience of central character Finney (Mason Thames), a boy who is kidnapped and imprisoned by masked serial killer The Grabber (Ethan Hawke), echoes Derrickson’s life. But pretty much everything else in the movie does, from the violence of Finney’s upbringing to his love of cinema. “I had been in therapy for the last three years, dealing mostly with my own childhood and the violence from my childhood,” says Derrickson, who was the first of the pair to read Hill’s story when it was published in 2004. “I felt like I had all this ripe soil in my soul. Cargill and I started talking about, ‘What if we combine that with The Black Phone? I’ve got the setting, I’ve got the tone, I’ve got a whole bunch of child characters from memory.’” They wrote the script in just five weeks.