THE BLACK PHONE

THE BLACK PHONE is a scary supernatural horror thriller about a young teenage boy who gets kidnapped by a scary man kidnapping boys in his neighborhood, but who gets help from the ghosts of the dead boys the man has killed and from his sister, who prays to Jesus for help in finding and rescuing her brother. THE BLACK PHONE is a suspenseful, well-crafted movie, with a good ending, but it has a mixed pagan worldview with a strong occult premise, positive references to Jesus and the New Testament, lots of strong obscenities and profanities, and some extreme, bloody violence.

The movie opens at a Little League baseball game. The pitcher, a young teenage boy named Finney with a great fastball, is in trouble in the bottom of the seventh. With men on base, he faces the other team’s best hitter, an Asian boy named Bruce. Finney blows two strikes past Bruce. However, on the third pitch, Bruce hits a home run and his team wins. “You almost had me,” Bruce cheerfully tells Finney while praising his pitching. Finney smiles.

After the game, Bruce walks home and passes two girls on the corner. A mysterious black van follows Bruce around the corner. Cut to several days later, and posters with Bruce’s picture on them in Finney’s neighborhood announce that Bruce is missing.

Back home, Finney and his younger sister, Gwen, walk on eggshells around their beer-guzzling widowed father, who seems to be upset about everything. He’s especially upset about the prescient dreams that Gwen sometimes has. Later, the father tells his children that their late mother also had prescient visions, but the voices in her head led her to commit suicide.

At school one day, three bullies follow Finney into a boy’s restroom, where it looks like they’re going to beat him up. However, a young tough named Robin intervenes. Later, the boys try to attack Finney again, but Robin beats up the leader, punching his face multiple times until it’s very bloody. Later, Robin tells Finney that he had to send a message to the bullies. He also tells Finney he’s going to have to learn how to fight and stand up for himself one day.

That same day, after school, Robin approaches the mysterious black van which is sitting in an isolated parking lot, and he becomes the next victim of the neighborhood villain called “the Grabber.”

Meanwhile, Gwen tells Finney she’s been having dreams of a black van with a mysterious driver, who has black balloons with him. The police hear the story, and two detectives interview Gwen at school. They tell her black balloons have been found near the places where they think the boys were kidnapped, but they haven’t told anyone. Gwen swears she’s only been seeing the visions of back balloons in her dreams.

That night, her father spanks Gwen repeatedly with his belt. He says the police visited him at his work. He angrily commands Gwen to stop talking about her dreams. “They aren’t real,” he yells.

Finney comforts his sister. He asks her to make an effort to have more dreams about the mysterious kidnapper and his balloons. Gwen says she’s tried but eventually agrees and goes upstairs to her room. There, she gets out a New Testament, a crucifix, and a rosary with a crucifix and prays to Jesus for help.

Of course, with Robin gone, there’s no one to defend Finney from the three bullies. So, one day while going to school, they gang up on him, knocking him to the ground and then kicking him. Gwen grabs a rock and hits one boy on the head with it. However, one of the other boys manages to kick her in the face.

Walking home from school, Finney accidentally runs into the man with the black van. The man had dropped a sack, and Finney helps him. The man has a top hat and says he’s a magician. He asks if Finney would like to see a magic act. Finney smiles and says yes, but the man suddenly grabs Finney and shoves him into the van while knocking out Finney with some kind of gas from one of those small tanks that people use to blow up balloons.

The next thing he knows, Finney wakes up in a basement that’s totally empty except for a thin mattress on top of a thin box spring mattress, several rugs rolled up in a corner and an old-fashioned black phone on the wall nearby the mattresses. The man with the top hat is there, but he’s also wearing a scary mask. He assures Finney he’s not going to hurt him. He then leaves to go upstairs, locking the door behind him. Finney examines the phone, but he realizes the wire has been cut.

Shortly thereafter, Finney starts receiving calls on the disconnected phone from the kidnapper’s previous victims, who are all dead. They give Finney advice on how to escape.

Meanwhile, Finney’s sister keeps praying to Jesus and having hard-to-decipher dreams about the kidnapper and the kidnapped boys. Will she and the police find out where the kidnapper is hiding Finney before he tires of Finney and kills him?

THE BLACK PHONE is a suspenseful, well-crafted movie. The performances are very good, and the ending is satisfying, though very intense.

However, the movie has a mixed pagan worldview. Sadly, it’s the advice that the young hero gets from the dead boys that saves the day. So, the movie has a strong occult premise. That said, the sister’s prayers to Jesus are also effective in the end, though to a lesser extent. In addition, she loses but regains her faith in Jesus at one point. THE BLACK PHONE also has some extreme, bloody violence as well as more than a dozen “f” words and two strong profanities.

The Bible strongly and overtly instructs Jews and Christians to avoid necromancy, or communicating with dead people. The dead boys in THE BLACK PHONE are the ones who start calling Finney on the phone, but Finney eventually values their advice and puts it into practice. So, THE BLACK PHONE is too occult.