Joe Hill Used Real Serial Killers as Inspiration In an interview with Vanity Fair, Hill explained that, although his story drew inspiration from real serial killers of the era, The Black Phone is not based on any actual case.
It is an adaptation of the 2004 short story of the same name by Joe Hill. The film stars Mason Thames, Madeleine McGraw, Jeremy Davies, James Ransone, and Ethan Hawke. In the film, an abducted teenager (Thames) uses a mysterious telephone to communicate with the previous victims of his deranged captor (Hawke).
The villain in Hill's original story was patterned after serial killer John Wayne Gacy, who raped, tortured, and murdered at least 33 young men and boys in the 1960s and '70s.
No, Stephen King's It is not based on a true story. King had the idea for It when looking at an old wooden walking bridge in 1978 near his home in Boulder, Colorado.
The Grabber targeted young children in their preteen years, his youngest victim was eleven years old. After the murder of Griffin Stagg, his victims were all at least thirteen years of age.
We never see The Grabber molest anyone, but we can infer that The Grabber's motives are at least partly sexual. All his victims are boys, and most are young teens. When Finney wakes up in his basement prison, he sees The Grabber staring at him.
For reasons unknown, the Grabber abducts young boys and imprisons them in his basement unbeknownst to his brother. He would eventually kill the boys and bury the bodies in a house across the street. He had killed a total of five children, with Finney Blake's friends Bruce and Robin being his latest victims.
Pennywise the Clown is not a clown at all. The Pennywise the clown origin story sees an ancient, evil being that is perhaps as old as the universe itself. In the novel, however, the entity IT/Pennywise has a real name — Bob Gray. Bob Gray isn't human, however, and shares the same origin as IT.
Literature. In the novel, It is a shapeshifting monster who usually takes the form of Pennywise the Dancing Clown, originating in a void containing and surrounding the Universe—a place referred to in the novel as the "Macroverse".
“It wasn't in the script that he was shirtless but I said 'You know, I think it would be really deranged if he didn't have a shirt on' and he said 'Great, I'll do it,'” said Derrickson. “And that's a big thing for actors, how comfortable they are showing more of their body.”
Instead, The Grabber employs the mask as a sort of theater — the different Grabber mask variations each represent characters in a show he's putting on for himself and his victims. A few scenes in The Black Phone suggest yet another motivation for his mask: he uses it to hide from himself out of shame for his actions.
He became traumatized and started to deny them. He kidnaps boys and plays the "Naughty boy game", because that's what his father did to him. He wants to release all that pent up rage and resentment he has towards his father, upon his victims. That's his origin story.
The time period was specifically inspired by the numerous real-life serial killers that were active in the 70s. One of these serial killers includes John Wayne Gacy, who ultimately became a major influence on The Grabber in The Black Phone.
The story follows the experiences of seven children as they are terrorized by an evil entity that exploits the fears of its victims to disguise itself while hunting its prey. "It" primarily appears in the form of Pennywise the Dancing Clown to attract its preferred prey of young children.
“The Black Phone” is set in North Denver, where Derrickson grew up. “It was a working-class, kind of blue-collar neighborhood, half-Mexican, half-white,” he said. “There was a lot of violence — everybody got whipped by their parents, there was fighting on the way to school, on the way home from school, at school.”
Stephen King's IT introduced readers to a one-of-a-kind creature that can take any form, the most common one being Pennywise the Dancing Clown, and as menacing as it is, this creature has one big enemy it's truly scared of: Maturin, the turtle.
Regardless, she's one nasty beast and not alone due to the egg sack she's carrying. Unfortunately, King's imagination ran a little wilder than alluded to in the movies or earlier in the books, and the consequence of that is a pregnant Pennywise.
It feasts on the flesh of humans simply because our fears are easy to manifest and they make us taste better. According to It, when humans got scared, "all the chemicals of fear flooded the body and salted the meat".
Kersh is Pennywise's daughter. Or at least the daughter of the man who originally had Pennywise's face. Additionally, the trailer offers a first glimpse of Bill (James McAvoy), Ben (Jay Ryan), Richie (Bill Hader), Eddie (James Ransone), and Mike (Isaiah Mustafa) back together.
IT (also commonly known as Pennywise) is an ancient alien/eldritch monster and the title character and the overall secondary antagonist of the Stephen King multiverse, serving as the titular main antagonist of the It Miniseries and it's two film adaptations IT and IT: Chapter Two.
The Black Phone ends with Finney brutally killing The Grabber and escaping his house, finding Gwen and the police waiting outside, before they reunite with their father.
As The Black Phone explained, when The Grabber's brother, Max (James Ransone), finally realizes that Finney is in the basement and The Grabber kills him to keep him quiet, his game with Finney is done.
The Black Phone's ending connects many dots but never explains why The Grabber can hear the ringing. This could mean that it is only a figment of his — and Finney's — imagination. Finney hears the phone ring and uses it as a coping mechanism to deal with his overbearing feelings of isolation and desperation.
