Here is a supernatural shocker that amounts to a queasy, nasty and perfectly serviceable horror-homage to Stephen King; it is in fact based on a 2004 short story by the author’s son, Joe Hill. The setting is north Denver, in the double-denim world of the late 70s, and a small town is in fear of a serial abductor nicknamed “the Grabber”, played in a gruesome mask by Ethan Hawke. He is targeting teenage boys, reportedly driving around in clown gear with black balloons in his van. Tatty, yellowing “missing” posters are accumulating on walls and gateposts and the community is normalising and internalising its fear.
Finney Shaw (Mason Thames) is a shy child, good at mathematics and baseball whose widower dad (Jeremy Davies) is a depressive alcoholic and whose smart kid sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) appears to have inherited her late mother’s gift of second sight. When the Grabber takes Finney, he holds him prisoner in a scuzzy basement room with a weird wall-mounted black dialler phone which is apparently disconnected. But this phone eerily rings when the Grabber isn’t there, with ghosts of his previous victims on the line; meanwhile Gwen has dreams about the Grabber that the police are taking very seriously.
