Joe Hill grew up in an old house in Bangor, Maine, the basement of which was home to a disconnected phone he found “creepy and unsettling.”
It served as the inspiration for Hill’s short story “The Black Phone.”
“It didn’t make sense for a phone to be in a basement with a dirt floor and crumbling concrete walls,” Hill says in the production notes for the stress-inducing big-screen adaptation of “The Black Phone.” “As a kid, the worst thing I could imagine was that phone ringing.”
