The King family of horror writers is looking to have a good 2022 regarding movies about phones. Horror master Stephen King’s Mr. Harrigan’s Phone from his collection If It Bleeds will be joining his son, Joe Hill’s, 2022 smash, The Black Phone, in the burgeoning micro-genre of phones making deadly calls from beyond the grave.
Netflix has just released a string of images of the upcoming adaptation via their Twitter account to whet fans’ appetites regarding the upcoming horror thriller starring Donald Sutherland (himself no stranger to the world of Stephen King as he was in the 2004 miniseries of Salems Lot and furthering the father-son connection, Kiefer Sutherland was in Stand By Me).
This isn’t the first time Stephen King’s written a horror story involving phones making seemingly impossible calls—one, Sorry, Right Number, was written up and adapted as an episode of the old 1980s horror anthology series, Tales From The Darkside, about a woman who gets a mysterious phone call with an ominous message—a message she later tragically realizes was a future version of herself calling on a time-loop to warn her about her husband’s upcoming demise. Another King spooker was his dubiously received novel, Cell, where a strange signal sends everyone who listened to their phones at a specific moment into a zombie-like rage and leaves them forever changed afterward. It was made into an equally ill-received movie starring John Cusack and Samuel L. Jackson, probably in an attempt to regain some 1408 magic.
Mr. Harrigan’s Phone, however, is much like Joe Hill’s The Black Phone, in which the titular phones in question can communicate from beyond the grave, bringing messages of terror and hope to those receiving them. Unlike The Black Phone, however, the central relationship in Mr. Harrigan’s Phone isn’t quite so sinister—the young man in question, Craig (Jaeden Martell, aka It’s Bill Denbrough) and Mr. Harrigan have a far different time from Finney and the Grabber. Craig becomes the ailing Mr. Harrigan’s friend, teaching the old man how to use a phone to access the world he now finds so hard to get out into. When Harrigan dies, Craig slips the phone back into the old man’s pocket at the funeral. Texting it one day, he’s surprised when he gets a response.
Venting to Harrigan’s voicemail—long after the battery in the old man’s phone should’ve run out—he mentions a bully that’s been troubling him at school. When his bully later dies, Craig is left wondering if the call really woke up his old friend to help him out from beyond the grave or if it was just one of life’s dark coincidences. It’s when he realizes the only way to know for sure is to make another call that things really get interesting. When Mr. Harrigan’s Phone hits Netflix October 5th, 2022, those in the mood for some chills and thrills will find out just what kind of special plan the phone is on.