Derrickson was attracted to the Joe Hill short story, which was published in 2004, for its compassion and distinctiveness. “From the first time I read it, something that I thought was deceptive about the story is that it combined a serial killer story with a ghost story,” he said. “I hadn’t seen that done before and certainly not in any kind of an effective way. And Joe did it seemingly effortlessly. There’s so much empathy toward Finney and it was all told with a point of view of love and felt very hopeful and even inspiring.”
He brought the story to Cargill in 2011 and together they worked to brainstorm ideas on how to adapt it for the screen.
“It’s 10 pages, we meet the character right as he gets thrown in the basem*nt, there’s no other real characters,” said Cargill of the immediate challenges they faced. “But it’s just such a great idea: a kid is spending the night in a basem*nt with a disconnected phone and then the phone rings.”
“What we’ve changed is additive rather than subtractive,” he continued. “Because every element of that short story was perfect for a film.”
They collaborated on the story, with Derrickson writing by day and Cargill writing by night. “So he’ll edit my pages, write new pages and then pass it to me,” said Cargill, who would then do the same. The process continued five days a week for about a month and a half. “Then we have what we call the ‘Wife Read,’ where we hand the script to our wives and get their initial feedback,” before soliciting further notes from creative partners and representatives.
Many of the changes made served to flesh out of the experiences of the young characters, informed by Derrickson’s own turbulent childhood. “Scott brought the idea of making the film about his childhood and how traumatic it was and sharing all these actual memories [from back then],” said Cargill. “That’s where I was like, ‘That’s a script I want to write.’”
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From left, The Grabber (Ethan Hawke) and Finney Shaw (Mason Thames) in a scene from Universal Pictures’ “The Black Phone.”
(Universal Pictures)
“All of the ghost kids are like real kids that I knew,” said Derrickson. “The Robin Arellano character especially. That’s a kid who I was friends with. And some of the things he says in the movie are verbatim things that I remember him saying to me after watching him pulverize this kid’s face behind the Safeway across from our middle school. I felt like I had a good understanding of the various children that could flesh out this movie.”
At the time, he was in pre-production for the “Doctor Strange” sequel (he’d eventually step away from the project due to creative differences with Marvel) and also on his third year of therapy “really dealing almost exclusively with the violence in my childhood and some of the more traumatic events from my earliest memories through high school.”
“I feel like I unearthed so much and had a fresh perspective on that time and place in my life that I thought maybe I could make something like Truffaut’s ‘400 Blows,’” said Derrickson. “And then the eureka moment was ‘Wait a minute, what if we combine this with “The Black Phone?”’ So it kind of came in that order.”
Other changes, like switching The Grabber’s occupation from clown to magician, came directly from Hill himself. With his father’s classic “It” back in the forefront of pop culture with the recent blockbuster two-part movie adaptation, Hill felt the clown look, originally inspired by the serial killer John Wayne Gacy, would now be viewed as a rip-off. “
As the filmmakers struggled to imagine a new profession for their killer, “[Hill] said, ‘I really love the old aesthetic of the 1930s, 1940s magician show where the magician would have two different outfits—one a magician and one the devil—and he would perform supernatural-style tricks as the devil and others as the magician who would, as part of the story, be playing against one another,’” said Cargill. “And we’re like ‘Well, that’s rad, I love that.’ And that’s where Scott started playing around with the concept of the devil mask.”
“I had added the masks—there were no masks in Joe’s story—because I felt that was going to add an extra complexity to how he likes to present himself,” said Derrickson. “There’s something about The Grabber’s theatricality as a performer, as a magician, as a guy who has to wear a mask to present himself, that is so unnerving and fascinating at the same time.”
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