Why It's Time to Embrace Horror Movies like 'The Black Phone'
#183: "The Black Phone," "Love and Gelato," "Bicycle Thieves," "Ferris Bueller's Day Off"
Edition 183:
Hey movie lovers!
As always, you can find a podcast version of this newsletter on Apple or Spotify. Thank you so much for listening and spreading the word!
In this week’s newsletter: Why we should all be embracing horror movies, whether we love them or not. Plus, a pair of movies on the opposite end of the Italian cultural spectrum, and a plea for movies as a communal experience. In this week’s “Trailer Watch,” we got our first trailer for a movie I’m sure will be nominated for Best Picture next year.
The Black Phone
One of the things you learn, after sending out a movie recommendations newsletter as long as I have (four years as of this month…crazy), is that the importance of genre cannot be overstated.
Most people are not psychos like myself, who watch every movie trailer, memorize the movie release calendar and can tell you every new movie that’s coming out next month. They don’t evaluate each and every one on its own merits (who has the time!). Instead, they make their moviegoing decisions based on “that new Marvel movie” or “that new Tom Cruise movie” or whatever, which they may have seen an ad for while scrolling through social media or watching cable TV.
In the case of The Black Phone, a late-70s set child abduction movie starring Ethan Hawke as “The Grabber,” a portion of people are going to be excited to go out to the theater to see “the new horror movie” — especially one from Blumhouse, a horror-centric indie production company with a fantastic track record — and a much larger portion of people are going to tune out immediately because, quite simply, they don’t watch horror movies.
(These people have likely already stopped reading this review, for the same reason.)
But ladies and gentlemen, it’s time to embrace the horror genre. Or more accurately it’s time to admit you already have embraced horror. Because I suspect “you,” the general viewing public, have and you just don’t know it yet…or are unwilling to accept it.
Don’t believe me? Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness currently sits a hair under $1 billion in worldwide box office receipts, and Netflix says season four of “Stranger Things” set the all-time record for U.S. streaming in a single week. Both are, if not outright horror movies/shows, then certainly chalk-full of horror movie elements. And both are far scarier than The Black Phone, full-stop.
In truth, this specific movie isn’t a hill I want to die defending. But horror movies actually might be, especially because coming later this month is Nope from Jordan Peele (Get Out, Us), a bonafide horror movie that cannot be dismissed simply because of its genre label. It’s a must-see for everyone.
Production companies like Blumhouse (for The Black Phone) and studios like Universal (for Nope) are willing to take chances investing in original stories for adults — the kinds of movies we love in this newsletter — for horror projects, where they wouldn’t otherwise. This isn’t sentimental, it’s because there’s gold in them there horror hills.
Horror movies generally require limited locations, and because suspense is the main selling point they don’t really need big name actors, both factors which keep budgets low and profits sky high if you get a hit, of which there have been many in recent years.
This ability to experiment is a big reason why almost all of our best directors got their first opportunity within the genre. Here’s a short list of all-timers who started with horror: James Cameron, Steven Spielberg, The Coen Brothers, Ridley Scott, Francis Ford Coppola, Brian De Palma, Oliver Stone, Guillermo Del Toro, Peter Jackson … and to a lesser extent J.J. Abrams, James Gunn, Sam Raimi, and Zack Snyder.
One could reasonably say that without horror there may have been no The Godfather, no Titanic, no Indiana Jones, and so on.
The crazy thing is, it’s not like horror movies are some charity case that must be protected in spite of itself. Weirdly, horror movies might be on the most secure footing of any non-comic book genre in the entire industry. The stakes are lower, but these things do good business, including even The Black Phone, already clocking $53 million domestically and $80 million worldwide against a reported budget of $16-18 million.
It’s a surprising result for what is essentially a 1980s coming of age movie. The small town it’s set in gives off major Stephen King vibes, which makes a lot of sense when you consider its source material is a short story written by…Stephen King’s son, Joe Hill. Our hero is a 13-year-old kid who needs to learn how to stand up for himself, a theme stretched to its logical extreme when he’s kidnapped by the town’s ominous “grabber” and locked in a basement. Through a disconnected black phone on the wall he’s able to magically speak with the grabber’s former victims (another King-esque trope) and away we go on our adventure.
Like I said, the movie is not particularly scary (aside from two very effective jump scares, which really only work because they are in such contrast to the rest of the piece). The imagery of the grabber’s masks are creepy in theory but muted in practice, as Ethan Hawke lends considerable prestige to the role but chooses to inhabit it with a surprising vulnerability.
It’s a wholly competent and straightforward movie, only slightly disappointing because it was marketed as something darker and more menacing. That proved to be a smart strategy, especially because of my personal theory that the only factor which matters for success of horror and comedy movies is how scary/funny people perceive them to be.
I’d recommend it to any fans of the genre, and while this particular one may not be worth stretching for if you’re horror-hesitant, I would urge everyone to reconsider their phobias for phobia going forward. You’ll be glad you did.
Something New
Love and Gelato (Netflix): My appetite for Italian content is pretty insatiable at the moment (as you’ll see more in the next section), but this young adult romance fantasy can hardly even be called “Italian,” other than its use of the beautiful vistas of Rome as the backdrop for a warm-hearted if entirely predictable story about a girl who travels to Italy after losing her mother. She’s given her mother’s journal (a CLASSIC rom-com trope) about a trip made when her mother was the same age, and what’d’ya know the events of her life start mirroring her mother’s.
There’s a love triangle that’s trying to be Jane Austen but ends up closer to “Gossip Girl,” framing up a movie that’s perfect mindless entertainment for those who just got done binging “The Summer I Turned Pretty” (looking at you, Roommate Josh) or other young adult melodrama. Its view of Italy is decidedly western — it’s all bumpy streets and hand gestures, hot buns and cold gelato. Dolce far niente. No one would mistake it for authentic, but that’s certainly no expectation for all the “Emily in Paris” fanbase who will eat up this tasty little streaming delight.
Something Old
Bicycle Thieves / Ladri di biciclette (1948, HBO Max): I don’t get the sense that the majority of my newsletter readership is very…cinematically adventurous. So this recommendation is for the one or two brave souls out there who aren’t scared away by black-and-white or subtitles. For everyone else, check out season two of Aziz Ansari’s “Master of None,” which I’ve called one of the best rom-coms of 2010s, the first episode of which was directly inspired by Ladri di biciclette, an Italian classic.
If you need further convincing, I’d highly recommend checking out this 2020 essay “Why You Should Care About Bicycle Thieves” by A.O. Scott — quite possibly the best movie writer/reviewer on the planet right now — who says, “to care about a movie can be a way of caring about the world.” This movie is arguably the jewel of Italy’s neorealism movement, in which filmmakers started filming in real locations using non-actors after World War II, out of sheer necessity. The movie studios had been converted to refugee camps. The genre highlights the plight of the common man within a country that had been crippled by fascism and bombings.
If all that sounds too academic — try this for relatability: for main character Antonio, a young husband and father of two, the rent is too damn high. He can’t find a job, until finally he gets one that requires a bike. Then the bike gets stolen. How desperate would you get to retrieve the bike, if it means feeding your family?
Something to Stream
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (Paramount+): My July 4th plans? Watching this American classic on the lawn of a cemetery — the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, to be exact — followed by a fireworks show. Picnic, burgers, beer, fireworks. It was awesome.
Los Angeles has a vibrant movie-going culture, and as I’ve spoken about many times, it’s unclear to me whether this is a chicken-or-the-egg sort of thing. The city is full of specialty screenings on rooftops, in costumes and in cemeteries. There are Q&As, introductions and tributes. All of these things make going out to see a movie feel like an event, the way many would think about going to a sporting event or live theater (and like those things, these events can charge more money).
As I argued in full a few weeks ago, the thing we call “television” is now an intensely personal experience, not shared with friends or even the members of one’s own household. The corner seemingly available for movies to reclaim, especially recently with the dominance of Top Gun: Maverick and, though I hate to say it, Minions: The Rise of Gru, is the large communal experiences we all crave. And as I learned this week laughing along with thousands of others to a movie that came out 36 years ago, it doesn’t even necessarily need to be the latest and greatest blockbuster. I hope cities around the country start to offer fun specialty screenings like this one, on July 4th and throughout the year.
Trailer Watch: Amsterdam
Ladies and gentlemen, we officially have our first trailer for the 2022 Oscar season. I’ll be shocked if this movie isn’t nominated for Best Picture, coming from awards darling writer/director David O. Russell (Three Kings, Silver Linings Playbook, American Hustle) and sporting a cast list so long and distinguished I’m just going to shut up now and list them:
Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, John David Washington, Robert Di Nero, Rami Malek, Chris Rock, Anya Taylor-Joy, Zoe Saldaña, Mike Myers, Michael Shannon, Timothy Olyphant, and … Taylor Swift (??).
Admittedly, Russell is not among my favorite filmmakers. But getting the first looks at this year’s prestige movie slate still manages to get me fired up. Let’s go!