A Brief Taxonomy of Phone Calls in Horror Movies

Characters in horror movies often find themselves in situations involving the urgent need to make or receive phone calls—a simple enough task that’s inevitably complicated by the monster that’s after them. This trope especially thrives in media set during the age of land lines, but it’s followed the genre into the smart-phone era, too. Let’s examine the different types of phone-call horrors in movies.

The Scary Call (Non-Supernatural)

You’re home alone. The phone rings and there’s a stranger on the other end. It could be a wrong number. It could be someone asking if you’ve checked on the children lately. Or it could be a guy who wants to know what your favorite scary movie is… and what your insides look like.  

The scary (but all-too-human) call goes back to the very earliest slasher films, with both When a Stranger Calls (1979) and Black Christmas (1974) exploiting the urban legend of the killer who’s dialing from inside the house. Black Christmas’ eerie perversion of the obscene phone caller—who shrieks, moans, threatens, babbles, and sometimes sounds like he’s speaking in multiple voices at once—remains one of horror’s most haunting auditory creations. 

Two decades after Black Christmas, Scream leaned into the now-familiar idea of the killer caller; Ghostface has an irrepressible urge to taunt his victims before eviscerating them, and Scream winks at the obvious cliché by making him a fan of scary movies, too.

The Scary Call (Supernatural)

The idea for this taxonomy actually came about because 1988’s 976-EVIL, directed by Robert “Freddy Krueger” Englund, arrives on Shudder this month. It’s about kids who dial a psychic hotline that’s actually a direct link to Satan, who cleverly figures anyone gullible enough to seek guidance from a pay-by-the-minute fortune-teller might not have a very tight grip on their soul. 

But the supernatural phone call is a widely used plot device—one recent example is The Black Phone, in which a teen being held captive by a serial killer uses the titular object to converse with the fiend’s deceased victims. The dead calling the living is favorite horror story riff—the 1961 Twilight Zone episode “Long Distance Call” offers a poignant early template.

A particularly searing use of the supernatural call came in The Ring films; watch the forbidden video tape and you can expect an entity to reach out and touch you with a confirmation that you have just seven days left to live. Supernatural phone calls can also span more than just the realm of life and death, as in One Missed Call’s time-traveling voice mails.

To bring it back to Freddy Krueger, there’s also the scenario in which you think you’re having a normal conversation—before realizing you’re actually in a nightmare (on Elm Street), and your phone receiver has transformed into a hideously waggling tongue.

Tangential and now involving technology as outdated as a land line, but still worth mentioning: when your dial-up connection somehow links you to an ominous other dimension. Released in 2001, Pulse preyed on turn-of-the-millennium technology fears, but it still remains the absolute creepiest ghost movie about the internet.

Plus, of course, scary texts are also very much a thing. Most people prefer texting to talking anyway—and sometimes they can’t talk, like when a text comes from beyond the grave (one example: Mr. Harrigan’s Phone).

The Weaponized Device

Slasher fans already know where this is going: Michael Myers is awfully stab-happy in 1978’s Halloween, but he’s also a maniac who knows how to think on his feet. High-schooler Lynda is strangled with a phone cord while she’s talking to her friend Laurie, a gruesome mirroring of a far more playful previous scene that illustrates the next category on this list.

The Misdirect

Earlier in Halloween, Laurie is on edge after spotting a certain hulking figure around Haddonfield—she doesn’t know Michael’s about to go on a splattery rampage, but she can sense he’s a bad omen of some sort. When her adventures-in-babysitting pal Annie calls, Laurie’s briefly terrified by the random smacking that’s on the other end of the line… until she realizes who’s actually making the sound: Annie, with her mouth full of food.

We’ll also toss in the frequently used device of having a phone ring, buzz, or otherwise make a sound unexpectedly, a reliable tactic whenever a jump scare is required to further heighten the mood.

NO SERVICE

It doesn’t matter what year your movie takes place in; chances are, if you’re a horror character in desperate need of a phone—to frantically call for help, send a life-or-death warning, tap into a smart-phone’s GPS capabilities, whatever the case may be—the thing isn’t going to work. 

For land-line users, the cord might be cut, or the jack might be smashed and ripped out of the wall. This brings an additional element of terror into the story because it means whoever wants to do you harm has already been in that room—and has taken preventative measures to keep you from saving yourself. 

The lack of a phone has also caused many horror characters to go poking around where they have no business being, letting their desire to call for a tow truck or other assistance overshadow common sense. The backwoods folks you meet in a Wrong Turn-type film do not require a connection to the outside world! In fact, they’re actively cultivating a lifestyle in the opposite direction!

But the most recent development in the realm of horror-movie phones is definitely the “no service” dilemma, which almost instantly became a genre cliché to explain a new modern vulnerability as soon as cell phones became ubiquitous. What good is having a computer in your pocket if it can’t connect to the internet? It’s no good. And have fun trying to use your iPhone as a defensive shield—at least an old-school receiver could land a decent blow or two in a hand-to-hand situation.

What are your favorite horror-movie phone moments, other than Black Christmas of course? Share your “call of fame” scenes from this very prolific genre trope in the comments below. 976-EVIL arrives on Shudder March 15.

Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.