MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

The Black Phone (2022) directed by Scott Derrickson is a horror film about a young boy named Finney Blake who is kidnapped by “The Grabber” (a serial kidnapper and killer) and is held in a basement. In the basement, there is a disconnected phone which mysteriously rings. Finney finds out that the callers are the ghosts of The Grabber’s previous victims whose aim is to help Finney escape.

The film’s aesthetic, sound, and details echoes to Indigenous scholar Eve Tuck and artist C. Ree’s (2013) notions of hauntings in which we “might experience seepage, to see the coordinates of the familiar change from underneath and overhead, to trouble the real into a space that momentarily houses ghosts and into a time and place that is unexplainably urgent” (Tuck & Ree, 2013, p. 647). The ghosts in this film seep throughout the movie, urging viewers to understand and be aware of what they want out of the living and what the living needs to know.

Throughout the film, I made connections between the characters and gender, race, and class issues as the film seems to trigger a sense of uneasy nostalgia. For example, I question how one of the female-identified characters, Gwen, is treated versus Finney’s female lab partner, or how the case of the one racialized boy was handled differently than those of the other boys.

This presentation will connect how the hauntings within the film and the uneasy sense of nostalgia connects to broader social justice issues surrounding race, gender, and class.