Logline: “After being abducted by a child killer and locked in a soundproof basement, a 13-year-old boy starts receiving calls on a disconnected phone from the killer’s previous victims.”

Joe Hill’s 2004 high-concept horror story, “The Black Phone” shows a powerful imagination at work. The 2022 screenplay of the same name has a small but significant word change: the villain is a part-time magician. Hill told Vanity Fair, “It would be a mistake to let the bad guy be a clown…America has had its fill of evil clowns.”

Read the full story in the digital magazine above.