Crafting an iconic horror mask
Director Scott Derrickson and Ethan Hawke on the story behind THE BLACK PHONE’S freaky face
MICHAEL MYERS. JASON Voorhees. Ghostface. If you want to create an iconic horror villain, it helps to have a mask that conjures fear in seconds — something simple, powerful, and just waiting to be worn by next year’s trick-or-treaters.
So when Scott Derrickson left the Doctor Strange sequel to plot horror comeback The Black Phone — an adaptation of Joe Hill’s novella, in which youngster Finney (Mason Thames) is kidnapped by serial killer ‘The Grabber’ (Ethan Hawke) and plots his escape with spiritual intervention from the ghosts of The Grabber’s previous victims — he knew he wanted a killer facial covering for this bleakest of baddies.
“There is no mask in the original story,” the director tells Empire. In Hill’s tale, the killer’s a clown daubed in make-up. Here, he’s an old-timey magician in a devilish disguise. “The idea of the mask hiding the true identity of the evil perpetrator, it’s just inherently scary,” says Derrickson. “There’s something about the mystery that they create when you’ve got a character who does unthinkably evil things, and you can never put a human face to them. It’s horrifying.”
The filmmaker went back to early horror films such as Eyes Without A Face and 1925’s The Phantom Of The Opera for inspiration — and got his final design from splatter legend Tom Savini. “Tom gave me a sketch he had done himself,” Derrickson recalls, “and as soon as I saw it, I was like, ‘Oh, well, this is what we’re doing.’ It was really amazing.” But turning that sketch into something physical was not easy. “We spent two solid months just rejecting the things that they were sending me. I kept going, ‘It needs to look exactly like Tom artwork.’ It was much more of a challenge than I was expecting.”
As per Derrickson’s request, Savini’s design features detachable mouths and eyes to showcase different areas of Hawke’s face, and comes in a variety of facial expressions — an exaggerated Man Who Laughs grin, a clownish frown (“It’s pretty harrowing in the movie when you first see it,” the filmmaker promises), and one with no mouth at all.
For Hawke, playing a masked character took him back to his youth studying Greek theatre. “With mask work, body language becomes incredible,” he says. “It dictates and narrates everything.” He trusted completely in Derrickson, having bonded on Sinister. “He’d have this idea — ‘I want to see your eyes in this one, but not your mouth’ — that would determine what the scene was doing. ‘You’re gonna have a mask on in this one, but be shirtless.’ Like, that’s interesting, because now you’re naked except for your face. What is that saying?” Instead of an object obstructing his performance, the masks became a way for Hawke to tap more deeply into the character. “It’s the first question you ask when somebody puts on a mask: ‘Why are you hiding?’” In Derrickson’s mind, the answer is both protection and intimidation. “He is a sadist, and he likes to scare his victims and break them down,” he says. “The masks are a part of that.” All that, and they make for unconventional décor too. “I actually have all of them in my house,” the director laughs. Trick or treat, anyone?
THE BLACK PHONE IS IN CINEMAS FROM 4 FEBRUARY