20th July 2009.

It has fast become the most boring horror cliché of them all. Once it used to be car engines not starting while you were trying to escape from a crazed axe-man. Or indeed telephone wires being cut, or telegraph poles going down in storms. But now the modern day equivalent of the latter two yawn-makers is getting really tedious. You know it well.  Everyone’s mobile phones not being used to call for friends/police help because of low battery, the emergency services being constantly busy or no signal due to lack of coverage in the remote areas where the usual hapless victims have ended up. There always has to be an establishing scene of some tedious sort explaining why the phones will be ineffectual in plot terms. See IDENTITY, WRONG TURN, WOLF CREEK, P2 and the post 2000 rest. Let’s face it, if old school slasher movies taught an entire generation that promiscuous sex led to death by masked maniac, then today’s audience is being told not carrying around your cell charger means bloody oblivion too. The one good thing about this new development is at least it dissuades product placement. I mean, which mobile phone company is going to want to admit to their product not working in certain situations?  Director Ti West gets over the problem in our FrightFest premiere of THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL by setting his film in the early 1980s when such technology was still in its infancy. Others, especially in the Asian arena, have used mobiles not as possible saviours but as conduits for evil forces in the first place - e.g. PHONE, HELLPHONE and the ONE MISSED CALL movies. All this got me thinking about the older horrors where phones were central to the plot. Like William Castle’s I SAW WHAT YOU DID (1965) where two giggly girls make random prank calls, adding “And I know who you are’, to the wrong person. Someone who has just committed murder. Obviously the original WHEN A STRANGER CALLS (1979) is still a white-knuckle nightmare in the first 20 minutes when “Have you checked the children?” is uttered over the anonymous line. There’s the obscene phone-calls causing terror in BLACK CHRISTMAS (1974). And the criminally underrated LISA (1990) has an over-protected fourteen year-old Lolita cultivating a secret telephone relationship with a person turning out to be the infamous ‘Candlelight Killer’. Then there was the Italian genre known as ‘white telephone’ movies because every luxury suite had one. These melodramas quickly transformed into the offshoot of the ‘red telephone’ horrors of Mario Bava. Remember BLACK SABBATH/THREE FACES OF FEAR (1963) and the actual episode titled ‘The Telephone’? Going further back to Hitchcock’s DIAL M FOR MURDER (1954) and SORRY, WRONG NUMBER (1948), the former was the signal to kill Grace Kelly, the latter had Barbara Stanwyck listening into to a murder plot on a crossed line. The radio play on which SORRY, WRONG NUMBER was based proved so inspirational to young writer/director Larry Cohen (IT’S ALIVE, Q, GOD TOLD ME TO) he wrote PHONE BOOTH (2002) in homage. I wonder if the likes of CELLULAR (2004) – which Cohen also wrote – will spur the imaginations of future artists?

Until next time.

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