Mark Korven

Borderline Sonics and Dimensional Demarcation

published in The Wire No.514, 2026, London

Excerpt

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Korven’s music surfaces early in The Black Phone as if sensing something evil: from out of focus glimpses of the black van prior to ‘The Grabber’ snatching another kid, to overhead shots of crime scenes following their disappearance. These moments aren’t cues: they’re proximity alarms. Things shift into The Grabber’s dark world once Finney is abducted. In a bare and sordid soundproofed basement, dissonant drones hang like decaying wallpaper. High violins sizzle, pulse-width modulation waveforms growl, and Korven’s friction mallets rub various surfaces to produce organic howls. The Grabber’s voice is emitted through his Noh-like demon mask: a chilling, melodious performance by Ethan Hawke, whose vocality sounds like a sweaty ogre on the other end of a phone line. Finney’s world becomes a new realm of oppressive silence, both in his isolation and the crackling nothingness of those whose inability to talk leave desperate gaps on the basement’s necromantic phone line. The film’s mix consistently conducts these aural energies — score, voices, silences — to great effect, suggesting a conceptual confluence of Korven and Derrickson’s thematic concerns. The interdimensional locus of the film is not the angsty space of mental affliction, but the immaterial domain of the departed children, communicating not telepathically but telephonically. Korven’s ‘creepscapes’ map this intersection with dread-inducing fidelity.

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Text © Philip Brophy 2026. Image © Blumhouse.