The View From The Mountain

The Black Phone was a horror movie that was based on author Joe Hill’s short story about a boy held captive by a killer in his basement who receives messages from the killer’s deceased victims over an old, broken phone. I thought The Black Phone was very well done, having been smartly directed by Scott Derrickson ( Sinister , the first Doctor Strange ), but, seeing how TBP ended, I never figured a sequel would be on the horizon--at least until last year. I follow Derrickson’s writing collaborator, C. Robert Cargill, on social media, and it was from Cargill that I first learned about The Black Phone 2 being brought to life. The Black Phone 2 originally started as an idea from Joe Hill (who’s the son of Stephen King), and Derrickson and Cargill quickly turned it into a movie, with filming running from late 2024 into early 2025. Taking place in 1982, four years after the events of the first film, Mason Thames returns as Finney, who escaped the Grabber (Ethan Hawke) in t...

I first read The Long Walk back in the mid 1980s. Stephen King had the book published under Richard Bachman, his pseudonym (King would also publish The Running Man , Rage , and Roadwork under the Bachman name). I probably never would have bought The Long Walk if I hadn’t been tipped off by a bookstore clerk, who informed me in the store that it had really been King who wrote the book. It had also later been widely reported in the media at the time about King having written more books under the Bachman name. The Long Walk refers to a forced march that is made of a group of teenage boys in a dystopian United States. There is no finish line; the boys keep walking until they are shot to death by a military escort that travels with them--usually because they have fallen behind from exhaustion. The last boy remaining is the "winner." I liked the book well enough, but I can’t really say it was one of my all-time favorites. It’s been forty years since I’ve read ...