Even though it’s comfortably been deemed as one of the year’s best and most successful horror movies, enthusiasm for Scott Derrickson’s The Black Phone has tapered off quite a bit for a supernatural chiller that was only released in June.
Maybe it’s because we’re being inundated with top-tier scary content on what feels like a weekly basis, or perhaps it’s all just down to the general flash-in-the-pan nature of the genre itself, where any release finds it tough to continue dominating the discourse for more than a couple of weeks when a new pretender to the throne is lurking just around the corner.
An 82 percent Rotten Tomatoes score, 84 percent user rating, and a box office haul in excess of $160 million that saw The Black Phone recoup its production budget almost 10 times over from theaters underlines that we’re talking about a serious smash hit, but that’s not why the adaptation of Joe Hill’s short story has been trending hard all night.
Strangely enough, The Black Phone has been capturing the imagination all over again thanks to WWE – with returning wrestler Bray Wyatt making his long-awaited return to the company at last night’s Extreme Rules event, and it didn’t take long for fans of both grappling and ghouls to figure out where he got his inspirations.
The Wyatt character has always been heavily influenced by horror, having originally debuted as a sinister cult leader before evolving into a split-personality monster known as The Fiend, so it makes sense for the performer behind the act to continue on in that vein. It’s good news for The Black Phone, too, with WWE fans who may have been entirely unaware of its existence possibly enticed to check it out for themselves.