From the movie-opening shot of a can of Coors being cracked open to the well-timed use of period-piece pop hits to backyard toy rocket launchers to the convenience stores with pinball machines to the two-tone raglan baseball T-shirts worn by the kids to the brown-and-gold color schemes in the working-class suburban homes, “The Black Phone” has such a great 1978 vibe — and yet it’s almost as if we’re watching a visualization of someone in present day telling the story of that long-ago time when a serial killer known as “The Grabber” was snatching boys off the street.
After all, in the same year the Grabber was hiding behind his masks while was terrorizing a North Denver neighborhood, one Michael Myers had escaped a sanitarium, donned a white mask and begun a killing spree in the town of Haddonfield, Illinois, and we were just a couple years away from a masked murderer named Jason Voorhees slicing and dicing his way through Camp Crystal Lake in New Jersey. It was a bloody golden era for masked killers across America. Yeesh!
