Part of the ‘Welcome to the Blumhouse’ anthology of films released by Amazon Prime in October 2020, Emmanuel Osei-Kuffour Jr.’s Black Box is one of the standouts of the eight movies released to streaming.
Starring Mamoudou Athie (Nolan), Phylicia Rashad (Lillian), and Amanda Christine (Ava), the movie follows a man, Nolan, suffering from memory loss, undergoing experimental therapy, and becoming involved in a metaphysical nightmare. Black Box is a cleverly constructed horror movie with many great moments.
To celebrate one of the best from the Blumhouse, we look at the scariest moments in Black Box, ranked up to our number-one pick.
10 Ghost in the Machine
We are starting at the ending, with the final moments of the film offering up a ‘sting’ that does little to add much to Black Box. Still, the closing moments that tease the idea that Lilian may still be able to bring her son back offer up a modicum of unease despite Thomas 2.0 appearing to be a crude version of Wall-E, and his character already gave ample closure.
Ultimately, this moment feels like a tease for a film that will never happen, like the baby Godzilla hatching at the end of Godzilla (1998) or the final credits of the infamously bad Mac and Me opening with a still frame of, “We’ll Be Back.” That is not to say that Black Box is a bad film by any means, but it is best left as a one-off. The final scene squeezes onto our list under the idea of ‘what could be’ for Thomas (Donald Elise Watkins) and his mother, Lilian.
9 Dreams of Being Choked
Black Box cryptically sets the tone of Nolan’s inner struggles within the movie’s opening moments. In the intro, the viewer sees Nolan sitting on the couch in contemplation, only to be viciously choked from behind. As this happens, his daughter before him keeps calling his name, blending the real world with a dream-like state. For those who have ever struggled with sleep paralysis or know someone who has, the bizarre fugue state of being awake and asleep is utterly terrifying, and this sequence is a frightening depiction of that experience.
8 I Run My Mind, It Doesn’t Run Me… or Does It?
Those affirmations… yeah, they are not going to do the job. This moment is a mix of slight dark humor coupled with disturbing imagery that allows for a brief moment of horror as Nolan realizes that he does not, in fact, run his mind.
For Lillian to convince Nolan to go back into his mind and face the mysterious creature trapped within, he is told that reciting the simple lines of, “I run my mind, it doesn’t run me” will allow him to control events. Of course, this does not work, and the moment Nolan realizes it won’t make a difference comes with the terrifying realization that there is more to the monsters in his mind than being projections from his past.
7 Goodbye Thomas, It Is the Void For You
Thomas is a fascinating character who deserves more emphasis on exploring the movie’s morals. While he is the villain, and deservedly so, he leaves the film with a moment of clarity where he sees what he is doing as fundamentally wrong and that taking another man’s life to replace him is not worth it when considering his failures in life.
After facing Nolan, Thomas walks off into the void. What this means, or what the black space even represents, does not matter as much as the profundity of Thomas’s actions to give Nolan his life back. It is a powerful scene with a degree of terror in contemplating the unknowable state Thomas has decided to enter.
6 Dreams of Domestic Abuse
Before the reveal that Nolan is seeing a distortion of the memories of Thomas, he is confronted with the idea that perhaps the memories are his own and that he has a darkened past he is repressing. Of these, the most terrifying idea is that of being an abuser, frightening a woman he does not recognize and their child. This raises questions about his past and whether Nolan’s memory loss is a coping mechanism to hide the horrible person he once was
This is less a single incident, as disturbing as the images are of an abused woman cowering from a man. It extends to the mental toll it takes on Thomas, feeding into paranoia and uncertainty about the strong family man he believed himself to be.
5 Mom, What Did You Do?
Thomas’s re-entry into this world does not come without confusion, with the last memory being when he fell down the stairs. The horror of waking up in a new body is subtle, but what pushes this scene is the lingering question, “If Thomas is here, what happened to Nolan?!”
With this in mind, the audience is also trying to figure out what is happening simultaneously with Thomas. A wonderfully chilling scene as Lilian tries to calm her son while justifying the wiping of Nolan from existence.
4 I Don’t Think That Is Your Dad
After the body switch, Black Box exemplifies the horror of changing identities by keeping the audience in the know but keeping characters unaware of what has transpired. Throughout the film, Nolan’s relationship with his daughter Ava is exceptionally sentimental and inspiring, as the young girl takes on the caretaker role in certain instances to help with her father’s memory loss.
This makes the first scene of Ava with Thomas using her father’s body terrifying. There is uncertainty at this point, as Thomas is known to be an abuser, but he also has this cold indifference to Ava that makes the viewer fear for her safety. While nothing happens to hurt Ava physically, this scene is frightening enough to be worthy of mention.
3 I Deserve to Be Back
Thomas returning home to his family after his death in Nolan’s body makes for a highly discomforting scene that shows how Thomas died and why his family feared him. His initial return is not without its sentimentality, especially on his part, as he reminds his ex-wife about the good moments they shared.
However, the second he makes a bid to get back into their lives, and it is not embraced openly, Thomas’s violent nature emerges, and he begins to delve into mind games and violent rhetoric. Seeing his past wife, Miranda, revisit the abuse of the past is equally disturbing and infuriating, especially considering Thomas has swapped with the dedicated and loving family man in Nolan.
2 The Need to Kill to Live
A fair amount happens in the scene where Lilian tries to make her son the primary owner of Nolan’s body. Learning that Nolan has become the contorted monster, having Thomas tasked by his mother to murder it, Ava screaming for her father’s safety, and the actual fight that plays out between Thomas and Nolan.
If we had to pick one moment in this scene, though, Thomas standing over Nolan with a knife, contemplating if he can kill the man as he hears his daughter’s screams in the backdrop is the most chilling. It is a wonderfully intense moment, making it both memorable and scary.
1 Unexpected Wedding Guest
The monster in Black Box is left somewhat vague and open to interpretation, with Thomas and Nolan switching roles as playing the contorted mess that haunts their subconscious. This ambiguity works wonders for pushing the story forward without overly worrying about the pseudo-science that goes into crafting the bone-cracking contortionists.
These monsters are unsettling and terrifying, and the best instance of them is the wedding sequence in which Nolan finds himself trapped at different junctions of his treatment with Lilian. It is hard to shake that first clear look at the horrible cracking and creaking of the creature’s movements as it slowly approaches Nolan. Easily the scariest moment in the film.
This story originally appeared on Movieweb
