How IT’s Pennywise Affected The Black Phone Explained By Author

[Helas]

Exclusive: Joe Hill talks about how Scott Derrickson’s adaptation of The Black Phone switched up The Grabber’s story in the wake of IT’s success.

 

According to The Black Phone author Joe Hill, some aspects of the story had to be changed for the film adaptation due to IT's Pennywise. Hill's story was adapted by Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill, the writing team behind Sinister and Doctor Strange, with Derrickson also serving as director. Stephen King is the reigning champion of having his work adapted; one of his magnum opuses, It, having been adapted twice successfully. First as a four-hour 1990 TV miniseries with an iconic Tim Curry performance as Pennywise, then in 2017 and 2019 with IT and IT Chapter Two. The Andy Muschietti-directed films together grossed over $1 billion worldwide and brought an equally chilling but distinct performance from Bill Skarsgard as Pennywise.

 

Both actors' versions of Pennywise, an ancient form of supernatural evil who mainly manifests as a circus clown, have captured audiences' imaginations and become horror icons. The Black Phone's source of terror, The Grabber, having only debuted this summer, has arrived on the scene to stake his own claim as a truly memorable force. Hill, who is King's son, first introduced the world to the villain when his thirty-page short story The Black Phone was published in 2007, although The Grabber's film incarnation played by Ethan Hawke differs greatly from how the character's written on the page. In the film, the villain is a part-time magician who kidnaps young boys in his creepy van, keeping them in his basement, testing how good or bad they are while terrorizing them with an ever-changing devil's mask.

 

While speaking exclusively with Screen Rant, Hill explains why the changes to The Grabber from page to screen were necessary. Ultimately, it came down to timing. With The Black Phone's script in the early stages around the same time as Muschietti's IT was freshly in the public's minds, Hill didn't want the comparison between his work and his father's to be drawn so sharply. See what Hill has to say below:

 

"I had one big creative contribution, which is — I don't know if we want to get down in the weeds. I had one big creative contribution, which was when I read the first draft, it was very, very faithful to the story and, in the short story, when Finney is kidnapped by The Grabber, the guy introduces himself as a part-time clown. He still was a part-time clown in the film, in the screenplay, which was kind of a natural evolution, because the character somewhat echoes the crimes of John Wayne Gacy. But I read the script and, I can't remember if IT had come out at that point or was just about to come out, and I said, "Guys, I don't think he can be a part-time clown, not with Pennywise about to explode on the American consciousness. I just think there's room for only one deadly clown. So what if we made him a part-time magician instead?" I sort of had some stuff to share with them about a whole bunch of magician acts in the 1920s and '30s that featured the magician fighting the devil, and the magician would actually play both parts. He would come out wearing a devil mask and do evil sorcery and then he'd come out as the heroic magician to fight back. I said, "We could do something based on that and what a devil could, if we've got some devil imagery that could be pretty scary, as scary as a frightening clown." That said, I couldn't have, in my wildest dreams, anticipated how iconic Tom Savini and Jason Baker's mask for The Grabber would be. That is a really extraordinary image and I think is a big part of why the film was such an instant hit. People look at that mask and it's iconic the way Freddy Krueger's glove is iconic, the way that Michael Myers' mask is iconic. That thing was crafted to haunt your sleep at 2 a.m."

 

Clowns have been ubiquitous in the horror genre, thanks in large part to King and Pennywise. While evil performers of magic such as wizards and warlocks have certainly appeared in horror films or horror-adjacent movies such as the very Evil Dead-esque MCU sequel Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, creepy magicians are a surprising rarity. Especially magicians who don't have any actual magical capabilities. There's Herschell Gordon Lewis's Montag the Magnificent from his 1970 splatter flick The Wizard of Gore and its 2007 remake, but that's about it. One might be able to count the murderous hypnotist from the silent classic of German Expressionism, The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari as a magician, but even still, creepy magicians are a relatively untapped well in modern film and TV.

 

Hill's call was definitely the right one as audiences crave novelty, and if the adaptation had stayed as faithful to the source material as its first draft, audiences might not have flocked to The Black Phone out of scary clown fatigue. Plus, taking away that aspect paved the way for The Grabber's unsettling mask, which allowed Derrickson and Hawke room to visualize the character's morphing psychological state, as well as show the different levels of his "ritual." This gave him both a sense of novelty while not skimping on the creep factor. In a way, Pennywise's popularity helped The Black Phone gain its own popularity by forcing the filmmakers to take their own path with The Grabber.

[Silent Watcher]

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