The second trailer of Scott Derrickson‘s The Black Phone is out now. Universal Pictures dropped the first trailer of the movie almost six months ago. It was scheduled to hit the theatres on January 28th this year. Then, it got delayed to February 4th. But it faced another release postponement and received a new release date of June 24th. The upcoming Blumhouse project is based on Joe Hill’s novel of the same name with Hollywood star Ethan Hawke in the lead. Here is what we have from The Black Phone Trailer 2!
The latest trailer of The Black Phone delves deep into Ethan Hawke‘s spooky persona of The Grabber. He is a serial killer who abducts children by luring them into showing some magic tricks. Plus, he wears a creepy devil-shaped mask with horns and carries a bunch of black balloons. During the late 1970s, he kidnapped five children from a small Colorado town and killed them in heinous ways. Sometime later, he kidnaps Finney Shaw and locks him inside a soundproof basement. There, Finney discovers an old and disconnected phone. Soon, he finds out the phone’s potential to transmit the voices of The Grabber’s previous victims. At first, he gets scared by those voices. Later, he figures out that those voices are trying to help him escape from that miserable place. On the other hand, Finney’s sister starts having visions of those dead children that may aid her in finding her lost brother.
Apart from his helming duties, Derrickson also served as the film’s screenwriter along with C. Robert Cargill. Best known for The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005) and Deliver Us From Evil (2014), the horror maestro marks his second collaboration with Hawke with this one. The prominent actor-director duo has previously worked together in Sinister (2012).
The Black Phone premiered at Fantastic Fest in September last year. It received strongly positive reviews with Ethan Hawke’s performance earning critical acclaim. Furthermore, Derrickson’s direction and faithfulness to the source material were also praised. Although, its repetitious format and overreliance on jump scare received some criticism. The film will release theatrically on June 24th.