Entertainment
Creepy Netflix Thriller Brought Us The Scariest New Movie Monster In Decades
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
For a long time, Hollywood was missing one of its big-screen mainstays: the iconic horror villain. That is slowly changing with the addition of characters like Art the Clown, but it can be tough to take this Terrifier villain’s particular brand of mystic-flavored gore porn very seriously. A few years ago, though, an entirely different scary movie introduced us to a foe who was much more down-to-earth and that much scarier for it.
That movie is The Black Phone (2021), which seizes on one of our most heart-stopping modern-day fears: that powerful forces are hurting children, and there’s nothing we can do about it. It does so while wrapping those fears in the cloak of a new horror villain, one who is even more viscerally disturbing than Art the Clown. To experience the most potent cinematic terror in years, all you have to do is stream The Black Phone on Netflix today.
Time To Pick Up The Phone
The premise of The Black Phone is that in the late ‘70s, the streets of suburban Colorado are stalked by a creepy child snatcher known only as The Grabber. We follow the misadventures of a group of kids, one of whom is abducted. When the police have trouble turning up leads, it’s up to the abducted boy’s sister to use her psychic dreams to lead a rescue, but one wrong move may get these youngsters killed (or worse).
Fittingly enough, the cast of The Black Phone is primarily filled with rising stars like Mason Thames (best known outside this movie for the show For All Mankind) and Madeleine McGraw (best known outside this movie for the show Outcast), who play the dynamic duo at the heart of this bleak drama. Speaking of bleak, veteran performer Jeremy Davies (best known for Saving Private Ryan) does an excellent job as an alcoholic father who doesn’t believe his children’s warnings about the local child murderer. That character is played to chilling perfection by Ethan Hawke (best known for Training Day), and his performance effortlessly elevates what might have
A Horrific Hit With Critics And Audiences
When The Black Phone came out, it earned $161.4 million against a budget of only about $17 million. That’s the kind of horror movie that studios love to see: one that earns nearly 10 times its budget while becoming a breakout pop culture hit. Because of this, a sequel quickly got the green light, and The Black Phone 2 slashed its way into theaters in 2025.
While horror movies often fail to impress critics, The Black Phone was the exception: on Rotten Tomatoes, the movie has an 81 percent, with reviewers praising it for being as frighteningly well-acted as it is bone-chillingly scary. They also commended the movie for being an effective adaptation of a short story written by Joe Hill over two decades ago. Notably, The Black Phone has an 88 percent audience score, proving that audiences hungry for fresh horror love this iconic thriller even more than the critics do.
Horror Has A New Face
If you’re a fan of the horror genre, there is plenty to like about The Black Phone, starting with Ethan Hawke’s hypnotically creepy performance as The Grabber: while his fearsome mask and gruesome proclivities help make him frightening, he elicits a very different fear from villains like Jason Voorhees or Freddie Krueger. He’s not some dream demon or resurrected zombie out to cause as much mayhem as possible. Rather, he’s a very human threat, and a cancerous community presence that targets children specifically because they are so vulnerable.
Speaking of which, a big part of what makes The Black Phone work so well is that it constantly emphasizes the vulnerability of our young protagonists. You know that skin-crawling feeling you get when a killer (say, Art the Clown in Terrifier 3) is attacking someone in the shower? That feeling comes from knowing the characters are helpless in the face of something almost unstoppably malevolent. That malevolence permeates The Black Phone like a shroud, creating an atmosphere of menacing suspense that is sure to leave you on the edge of your seat.
The Scary Movie You’ve Been Looking For
Finally, The Black Phone is great because the film never glosses over the grit and grime of its period setting. Everything looks palpably dirty, which helps give the film its gritty texture while serving as an extension of The Grabber’s malign influence. This is a town where nothing ever looks or feels clean, and why should it? After all, the dirtiest thing of all, a child predator, hides in plain sight among his victims.
Will you agree that The Black Phone is a creepy thriller from beginning to end, or is this one horror movie you’d rather hang up on? The only way to find out is to stream it on Netflix today. Just do yourself a favor and don’t watch it too close to bedtime; otherwise, I won’t be held responsible for the weird nightmares you end up having!
