One clip that really upset viewers in 2022’s hit-thriller The Black Phone involved alcoholic father Terrence Blake, the father of main character Finney, whipping his daughter Gwen in his kitchen.
The scene was effectively going to be a fully-televised child beating, however director Scott Derrickson realized that might be too much to show on film, even for a horror movie.
“A good director always has an antenna up trying to hear what this movie really wants to be,” the filmmaker stated during an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. As such, he chose to make the scene less direct and aggressive, by turning it into a standoff instead.
“I thought, ‘I don’t want to see this kid actually getting hit.’ So the very first strike happens off-screen… And then her really emotional performance, most of that occurs when she stands back up and has this long faceoff with him. He’s got the belt raised, but he never actually hits her again.”
“I realized you could really go too far with a scene like that very easily, and an audience can turn on a movie. I wanted them to be disturbed and upset by it, but I didn’t want them to turn on it.”
Another last minute change was made to the film as well, although this one turned out much more difficult to go about.
Near the end of the movie one of the former victims of ‘The Grabber’ named Robin appears on screen as a ghost. This would’ve worked out just fine, except for the fact that Robin’s actor had already gone home as this was never part of the plan in the first place.
“In the script, Robin wasn’t in the room. It was just a phone call. A day or two before we shot that … it suddenly hit me out of nowhere,” Derrickson proceeds to explain. “I was like, ‘Oh, the audience wants to see that kid again. We got to see him again.'”
“I was like, ‘Where’s that kid?’ and they were like, ‘We just flew him home.’ I was like, ‘Get him back. You got to fly him back.’”
The clip, which Derrickson believes was single-handedly the best scene in the movie, was done all in one shot. It was all done in the moment, with Derrickson conjuring up the entire scene the morning it was supposed to be shot.
The film started its opening weekend with a massive $23 million in sales, slowly but surely catching up to the rate of growth competitor films Elvis and Top Gun: Maverick have or will be seeing in the coming few weeks.
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