The 7 Best Telephone Scenes in Horror Movies

In the current age of spam risks and robo-callers, unwanted phone calls are scary enough as it is! The dread of picking up a call and not knowing who is on the other line — or the call not coming from who you think it does — is a perfect subject for horror films.

Of course, perhaps no movie has capitalized on this better than Scream, but it’s far from the only scary flick to make use of a creepy call to up the fright factor. After all, Black Phone 2 has just hopped onto the party line! Whether you’re on a modern cell or a classic landline, let’s dial up our list of the top 7 terrifying telephone calls in horror cinema.

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Scream — The Opening Scene

We’ll start this list with a famous one. In the chilling “cold open” of Scream, Drew Barrymore’s Casey Becker gets a phone quiz from an unknown caller that ends in the murder of her boyfriend and gets increasingly hostile despite attempts to hang up the phone. The use of a voice changer is what disguises the killer’s true identity and eventually caused a real world uptick in the use of Caller ID.

Thankfully, Casey’s phone is cordless so she’s able to run away from her masked Ghost Face® assailant. While she tries to call for help, her dying moans and grunts of pain can be heard by her parents just before the line goes dead, along with the girl. Phones have since become a staple of the Scream series, even as the methods of communication have modernized along with the films.

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American Psycho — Patrick’s Confession

As Patrick Bateman loses his grip on reality over the course of American Psycho, the audience grows increasingly uncomfortable with his murders and psychopathic behaviors. It seems as if it’s a life he’s content to lead until the incredible confession scene is reached. While it’s not as horrific abducting women from the city and trying to shove cats into ATMs, the phone call to Patrick’s lawyer gives the audience a sense of how much hurt the businessman is aware he’s caused.

He admits he’s a pretty sick guy and even confesses to eating some of his victims. When his lawyer laughs off the confession as being “impossible” due to an alibi, Patrick and the audience are thrown into further turmoil about just how much of these harrowing events were real and what was imagined.

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A Nightmare on Elm Street — Freddy’s Telephone Tongue

Freddy Krueger the Dream Demon can cross over to the waking world in lots of ways. We’ve seen plenty of creative kills and methods of tormenting the sleepless teens of Elm Street and beyond, but one of his earliest iconic moments (and most memorable quotes) is delivered when Nancy Thompson picks up her telephone. Freddy’s chilling voice is on the other end of the line, telling her, “I’m your boyfriend now, Nancy.”

As if that wasn’t creepy enough, in a surreal transformation, Krueger’s tongue emerges from her phone’s receiver and tries to get nasty with Nancy. She throws the phone and screams, as anyone would in this situation. While not nearly the most disgusting thing Freddy Krueger has ever done, it’s unsettling and violating all the same.

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The Ring — 7 Days

The Ring, the American remake of the Japanese supernatural thriller Ring, terrified viewers of the early 2000s and led to a rise in petrifying prank phone calls. The film involves a cursed video tape, which marks its viewers for death seven days after they view the footage unless they are able to copy the tape and get someone else to watch it in that timeframe.

Skeptical Rachel Keller watches the tape while investigating the mysterious death of a girl who watched it a week prior to her passing. After the footage is finished, Rachel receives a phone call from an unidentified caller who whispers, “Seven days.” This warning became a chilling and iconic part of Samara’s curse that far outlived the seven day time limit to become part of the pop culture lexicon.

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Halloween — Lynda’s Death

While phone calls are used to deliver ominous threats throughout horror film history, more rarely are they used as the killing weapon themselves. During his quiet killing spree in Halloween, Michael Myers uses the twisted cord of a landline phone to strangle Lynda Van Der Klok after he’s already stabbed her boyfriend Bob Simms in the downstairs kitchen.

But it’s not enough that he just used the telephone itself to kill the girl — Laurie Strode is on the other end of the line. Lynda called her friend to check in earlier, but as Laurie listens to her friend’s dying gasps, she mistakes it for a little Halloween hanky-panky with Lynda’s boyfriend. Our heroine is disgusted by her friend’s antics, unknowingly hearing her final breaths before Michael secures the kill.

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When a Stranger Calls — Coming from Inside the House

While this horrifying idea first appeared in 1974’s Black Christmas (which was later remade), the idea of “the call coming from inside the house” was the basis of 1979’s When a Stranger Calls (which was also later remade). When Jill Johnson is babysitting, she receives an ominous call asking if she’s checked on the children. She dismisses it as a prank until the calls become more frequent and violent, and eventually the police inform her that the calls are coming from a line inside the home. The intruder has killed the children, and is later caught and sent to a psychiatric facility.

Jill believes herself safe until a repeat of the stalking later in her life, when she’s married and has children of her own. Again, the terrifying phone calls ask if she’s checked the children and the chase with the killer begins anew. Not even a matter of changing her number after years apart is enough to protect her from the persistent stalker calling from inside the house.

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The Black Phone — The Black Phone

Based on a short story by the same name written by Joe Hill, the heir apparent to the horror writing genre, The Black Phone is about, well, a black phone. But it’s also about a serial killer named the Grabber, and how his latest prisoner can communicate with his past victims through a disconnected black rotary phone on the wall. It is the very object of horror in this story, as a boy named Finney is captured and the spirits try to help him escape.

Finney actually knows some of the previous victims, like Vance, whom he was scared of. Still, communicating through the black phone, the boy is able to get advice on how to escape, how to defend himself, and how to avoid his psychotic captor. Ultimately, he even uses the phone cord to snap the Grabber’s neck as the spirits taunt their killer in revenge. When he returns to freedom, Finney finds himself a bit more confident thanks to the survival skills he acquired during his time in the basement with the phone.

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So, who ya gonna call? Make sure you know who’s on the other end of the line otherwise you might be off the hook … permanently.

Which telephone scenes in horror cinema are your favorites? Join the conversation with other horror fans over at Sideshow Social Network or at side.show/geekgroup, and don’t forget to Let Your Geek Sideshow!

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