Who’s on the phone right now? What can they see, what are they planning? Phone conversations—be they text or voice based—have been commonplace for so long that thriller and horror villains take advantage of their familiarity to panic unsuspecting victims, or to trick them into getting in harm’s way. Characters try to rationalize the fear of invasive, manipulative callers all the time: Surely someone just dialed the wrong number. Surely this person is who they say they are. Surely the person on the other end of the line, holding a phone as ordinary and innocuous as mine, doesn’t want to hurt me.
Phone conversations are direct, but they only reveal so much, and this clash of clarity and ambiguity gives artists a sturdy set of mechanics to mine tension from in phone thrillers. With each evolution of the telephone—moving from manual to automatic connections, from heavy receivers to palm-sized portable units—users quickly learn the modified rules and limitations that pertain to the new generation of technology. If screenwriters don’t show a similar dexterity, then a phone thriller comes across as woefully ill-designed.
But a certain cultural clunkiness is a feature rather than a bug in Drop, which endorses the silliness of a killer who airdrops his evil scheme with “Advice Animal” memes in its efforts to show the absurdity of our phone holding us hostage. The film stars Meghann Fahy as a widow going on a rare date—only for her to receive a flurry of threatening, anonymous messages telling her to kill her date or else. Drop may be knowingly unserious, but it’s only the latest suspense film to understand that our relationship between safety and interconnectivity can be exploited for paranoid, anxious drama. The tradition dates back long before internet messaging, cell phones, or even automated telephone exchanges were commonplace in America. To understand how phones amassed their life-saving and dread-inducing power in genre cinema, here’s a chronological breakdown of films where its characters wished the phone hadn’t started to ring.
1948: Eavesdropping a murder plan in Sorry, Wrong Number
In Anatole Litvak’s noir, a bedbound woman trying to contact her husband overhears two men plotting a murder. Back when you had to ask someone to plug a wire into the right receptor to call somebody, phone conversations were susceptible to “crosstalk,” where any private or salacious audio rendezvous could theoretically leak into your receiver. Even though the number of telephones in American homes in 1948 had not peaked (in 1945, around half American households had a phone; by 1970, the figure was 90%), they were ubiquitous enough at home and work for screenwriters to ask the question every dramatist has posed around contemporary technology: What if this were used to access illicit, dangerous corners of society? Sorry, Wrong Number plays on the inherent tension to eavesdropping—there is startling clarity around some elements of a secret, and a frustrating ambiguity around the rest, when transmitting only one sense’s worth of information to the intruder.
1954: Cueing a killer with a call in Dial M For Murder
In Alfred Hitchcock’s adaptation of the London-set stage play, an emasculated husband (Ray Milland) has planned the perfect murder, which boils down to a hired killer hiding behind living-room curtains and attacking his wife (Grace Kelly) when she gets up to answer his call from a party across town. Here, the phone’s shrill, aggressive ring is like a starting pistol that turns suspense into action, a completely innocuous occurrence for a sleepy wife that the audience reacts to with visceral distress. It’s a perfect symbol for the nasty dramatic devices that are commonplace in Hitchcock thrillers, where domestic relationships and spaces can contain hardened, stewing cruelty, primed to go off at any moment.
1957: Operating a switchboard in The Vast Of Night
For a switchboard operator, life is a series of signals and phone plugs. Before automated systems, switchboard operators handled nearly every request to connect to another phone, which means they knew a thing or two about signals that weren’t supposed to be there. In Andrew Patterson’s ingenious ‘50s-set sci-fi, young switchboard operator Fay (Sierra McCormick) is disturbed by a strange noise picked up on their smalltown New Mexico airwaves. A flurry of calls to friends confirms it wasn’t caused by any ordinary defects, and she and local radio host Everett (Jake Horowitz) deduce that it’s a clandestine Cold War signal. Patterson’s camera stays fixed on Fay’s face for 10 straight minutes, making viewers feel the weight of every analog, mechanical equipment modification—a sense of procedure combing through the chaos of unidentified frequencies.
1962: Calls cut short in Experiment In Terror
In the opening scene of Blake Edwards’ Experiment In Terror, a female bank teller (Lee Remick) is assaulted by a shadowy, asthmatic man inside her own garage and coerced into stealing money for him. Within the first 10 minutes, she’s tried to call the FBI—but the agent (Glenn Ford) doesn’t get much before the call abruptly cuts out. The film cuts back to the wide-eyed victim’s face pressed into her carpet; the killer yanks the phone away from her mouth and presses his black shoe down on her neck. Throughout the film, phone calls are charged with sinister sounds—the dial tone of a too-soon hang up, labored breathing substituting for insight into the killer’s wicked thoughts. Experiment In Terror turns the heavy plastic receiver into both a weapon and a lifeline, and its slick noir pleasures are only complicated by the fact that stories of the FBI thwarting phone harassment in the 1960s were overt copaganda.
1972: Harassing a babysitter in When A Stranger Calls
Okay, we found out where the call is coming from, and you’re not going to like it. In the 1970s, stories of unsupervised young adults being preyed on made shockwaves in the horror scene, with the trifecta of Black Christmas, Halloween, and When A Stranger Calls capitalizing on modern America’s lingering anxiety about leaving your kids alone with a babysitter or far away on a college campus. The opening sequence of When A Stranger Calls takes place seven years before the narrative proper: Jill (Carol Kane) is babysitting two children when she starts to receive intimidating calls, sometimes chillingly asking her “Have you checked the children?” The caller understands perfectly that the phone line amplifies the deep, breathy intensity of the human voice, and the telephone’s fixed position in the shadowy house is like an ominous anchor that stops Jill from wandering too far into the dark corners—or discovering the murders already committed upstairs.
1974: Commemorating kills from inside the house in Black Christmas
Throughout the sorority-set Black Christmas, a deranged caller phones a chapter house to whine like an animal and say obscene, misogynistic things to the female residents. But it’s not just a prank caller—it’s a murderer who commemorates his kills by calling the sorority girls. While When A Stranger Calls boasts a striking opening act that boils down the terror of phone harassment horror to an economic and expressive sequence, and Wes Craven’s Scream would later take the same plot beats to operatic, dizzying volumes in the maximalist ’90s, Black Christmas’ use of phone horror is prolonged, targeted, and a symptom of women’s unaddressed vulnerability on campus. This is also the most satisfying “call coming from inside the house” reveal in cinema, drawn out in shots of a technician tracing the call by roving through a library of whirring, clicking telephone exchanges. There’s a sense of contrasting geography: a laborious search through thousands of terminals to discover that danger is lingering in the very next room.
1978: A supernatural landline in The Black Phone
After departing the compromised Marvel sequel Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness, Scott Derrickson went back to his roots by making a horror flick inspired by dark memories of the suburban midwest. The Black Phone remembers that the millennial American childhood was not an airbrushed, Reaganific barrage of neon, malls, and marketable action figures, but more likely a gray-tinged, grief and paranoia-stricken horror story. When young Finney (Mason Thames) is kidnapped by the serial child killer “The Grabber” (Ethan Hawke), he discovers a black rotary phone that will be a very real lifeline, connecting him to the Grabber’s past victims who aid his escape from beyond the grave. The antiquated phone stands out to modern viewers just as it does to a child in a soundproof cell, but here it’s almost genre revisionism, mixed with the logic of a puzzle video game: Through the phone, clues seep in from people who are past the point of being saved, using frayed, scratchy wires to push their omniscience into the real world.
1996: Voice changers and wireless handsets in Scream
Wes Craven’s Scream features a killer gimmick for the scenes of “Ghostface” taunting their victims over the phone: the unknown murderer uses a voice changer that makes them sound exactly like a Hollywood voice actor in a sound booth! Upon its release Scream was a hyper-contemporary horror, which is reflected in the aggression and fluidity of sequences where Ghostface taunts their victims with anonymous phone calls: amplified, bass-boosted ringtones that cut through tense silences; wireless handsets that let the young characters gingerly explore dread-inducing empty rooms and dark windows. The magician-like omniscience and agility of Ghostface is underlined by his venomous phone calls. He’s calling from a place of pure control and foresight, bound by none of the temporal or geographic restrictions that were once integral to phone calls from murderers. Scream’s use of the telephone didn’t break the mold, but it made modern conventions and anxieties unmissable to a broad audience.
1998: Dial-an-omen in Ring
Sadako’s curse in Hideo Nakata’s Ring depends on a contradictory connection between pieces of modern technology, each united by a paranormal curse. First, one watches the video tape, about 45 seconds of still images, floating text, and creepy movement. Then, the phone rings, and a demonic voice growls that you have seven days to live. The curse is live, the countdown has begun. What makes the curse so strange—not to mention easy to shrug off—is the impossibility of how it’s triggered. A video tape is meant to be a recording in a fixed state, it is not “live” when you watch it, wind it back, and replay it. A phone call, by contrast, is direct, targeted, and exists in real time. Was the videotape alive like a phone call is? Ring gets under one’s skin because the rules and boundaries of everyday technology are folded and blurred, taking on each other’s qualities in a ghost-infected modern malaise.
2002: The death of the public telephone booth in Phone Booth
By 2002, public telephone booths in cities as busy and modern as New York were transitioning from ubiquitous to obsolete. When certified piece-of-shit Stuart Shepard (Colin Farrell) uses a phone booth to call his mistress, he answers an incoming call—and is told he must confess all his misbehavior or he’ll be killed by a sniper bullet. The phone shackles Stuart to a very visible, vulnerable spot on the Manhattan sidewalk, forcing him to strategize out of street altercations with the caller’s voice—sinister, intimate, and omniscient—forcing him to exorcise his demons. The contradictions of privacy and publicness is what drives the nifty 80-minute thriller, the tension of which is painted across Farrell’s young, haggard, desperate face. In a particularly devilish stroke of urban cynicism from director Joel Schumacher and screenwriter Larry Cohen, a historic piece of public infrastructure (now seen as irrelevant but innocuous in the new cellphone-dominated millennium) reveals itself to be a landmine, primed and ready to explode should one step away.
2004: Police impersonation in Compliance
Compliance was released in 2012, but it’s based on a real criminal hoax from 2004. In Craig Zobel’s film, a fast food restaurant manager (Ann Dowd) receives a call from a supposed police officer (Pat Healy) who says a young, female employee (Dreama Walker) is suspected of stealing from a customer. Taking the caller at their word, the manager strip-searches the employee; later, the manager’s fiancé (Bill Camp) sexually assaults her on the scam caller’s instruction. Compliance is interested in the phone as a symbol and a modifier: The scammer is performing a role of power, disguising the holes in their performance with the inherent concealing effect of the phone, applying pressure to blue-collar workers who have more to lose from, and less reason to challenge, authority figures.
2006: Trapped with a BlackBerry in Buried
Mobile devices defined the dominant form of phone usage in low-to-mid-budget genre films from the 2000s onwards: A character is stuck in a single location, with only an active phone line to figure out how to escape or help whoever’s at the other end of the call. In Saw, Leigh Whannell and Cary Elwes discover a phone (that only receives calls) hidden in their escape-room bathroom prison; in the Danish thriller The Guilty, its American Netflix remake, and its schlocky predecessor The Call, an emergency dispatcher has to construct a narrative from fragmented audio calls from behind a desk. But perhaps the definitive version of this idea is Buried, where Ryan Reynolds’ truck driver is buried alive in Iraq with a BlackBerry to call for help. As the film is set in 2006, the choice of a BlackBerry is crucial: Paul (Reynolds) makes international calls and must record and send a ransom video from his cramped cell. His device is a capable, contemporary tool that allows the single-location thriller to imagine a world of drama, escalating stakes, and glimmers of escape. In these films, the phone becomes both dramatic tool and scene partner, and its limitations—a fundamentally remote tool, subject to communication imperfections—add to the drama.
2013: Hands-free Bluetooth car calling in Locke
Tom Hardy is driving from Birmingham to London, and has 36 phone calls to make during the two-hour drive. Thank goodness for Bluetooth, otherwise he would have broken British road laws three dozen times. As the only on-screen character in the film, Ivan Locke’s verbal sparring with his colleagues, family, and mistress feels like half-dialogue, half-soliloquy—the type of refined, committed theatricality that Britain used to produce with engrossing kitchen-sink monologues, backed with nothing less than public funds. The background of Locke is an amorphous, unplaceable stretch of highway and field, and it’s remarkable how making an actor always look straight ahead with their hands on a steering wheel opens them up to more tension and vulnerability than if they were holding a phone to their ear. These people on the other end of the line fill the cramped space with Locke; the phone is a digital hearing trumpet to an outside, real world.
2017: Always out of battery in Get Out
Since the invention of cellphones, horror films have been trying to make them useless to stop the instantaneous communication and far-reaching range from saving characters from the threats imposed by screenwriters. For his ingenuity in shaking up the racialized tropes of psychological thrillers and for delivering a smart, funny genre film about Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), a Black photographer staying with his wealthy white girlfriend’s family, Jordan Peele won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. One imagines that Peele’s choice to have someone unplug Chris’ phone whenever he left it charging tipped the Academy over the edge. Peele wasn’t the only emerging genre talent trying to shake up the usual solutions to cellphones—in Mike Flanagan’s Hush, the masked home invader (John Gallagher Jr.) steals his prey’s phone and uses it to send menacing, taunting pictures to her laptop.
2018: Screenlife detective work in Searching
Searching isn’t good because it’s a film seen entirely through screen capture; it’s good because it’s a story about a dad trying to use the internet to find his Gen Z daughter. Taking place on smartphone and computer screens, Searching follows single father David (John Cho) trawling through Tumblr posts, Venmo receipts, and TMZ photos to untangle the admittedly convoluted web between him and Margot (Michelle La). A major entry in the emerging “screenlife” genre (certainly the highest grossing), Searching posits that smartphone and social media usage don’t simply provide circumstantial clues to an investigation, but are a navigable landscape containing all the imprints needed to reconstruct the past. Searching argues that smartphones can no longer be substituted into a mystery plot to make it feel modern; they are so crucial that they must become the audience’s lens into the story.
2019: An app counts down to death in Countdown
This supernatural cellphone horror is a worthy reminder to not trust apps with your personal data. In the past decade, many horror films have tried to turn the modern phenomenon of “virality,” popularized by rapid, instantaneous internet popularity, into spooky gimmicks and fatalistic thrill rides—think the transmissible curses of It Follows and Smile, or the exciting, ultimately punishing games in Truth Or Dare and Talk To Me. Undoubtedly one of the stupidest examples is Countdown, which features an app that gives the user a personalized ticking clock counting down to their death. Despite the film’s lowly commercial ambitions, there’s a unique tension to the premise: for the internet generations willing to download anything onto their phones in pursuit of fleeting, amusing fads—who implicitly believe that everything on their phone is both safe and truth—the aggressive confrontation of a death clock is a manifestation of the invasive, imprisoning nature of technology we casually invite into our worlds. One doesn’t need a cursed app to discover this, any film that challenges technology’s promise of instant connection leads to the dark flipside of invasiveness. From switchboards to cellphones, the fragile dynamic of trust and fear has remained a constant in thriller fiction.
