Blumhouse’s ‘The Black Phone’ Trailer Features Ethan Hawke Playing Masked Kidnapper Posing as Magician

In the debut trailer for Blumhouse’s latest horror film The Black Phone, Ethan Hawke stars as a masked kidnapper, posing as a magician as he lures children into his grasp.

As reported by Variety, the flick—for which Universal dropped the first trailer on Wednesday—follows one of the boys abducted by Hawke’s murderous character. The boy is lured into the back of a black van after he offers to help a disgruntled and pale-faced Hawke clean up his spilled groceries. After the boy, played by Mason Thames, is kidnapped, he awakes in a dark, blood-stained cellar, and has nothing in the room but a black telephone with a disconnected cord. While Hawke’s character says the phone doesn’t work, it proceeds to ring at night with calls from all of his previous victims. The dead children then all band together to help the boy escape.

Adapted from a short story by novelist/comics writer Joe Hill (who, incidentally, is Stephen King’s extremely successful son), Hawke recalled in a pre-taped speech at CinemaCon in August that The Black Phone has become the “scariest movie” founder Jason Blum has “ever worked on,” taking the place of Blum’s previous film Sinister.

This isn’t the first malicious role Hawke has taken on recently either. It was revealed back in January that he would also star as the villain in Marvel’s upcoming Moon Knight series for Disney+. It remains unclear which character Hawke will play, but Moon Knight’s archnemesis in the comics is a character named Raoul Bushman, a fellow mercenary who eventually turns on the hero.

Check out the trailer for The Black Phone above.