Evil Phone

Don't answer it!

That's not my ringtone...

—One Missed Call

So ur with ur honey and yur making out wen the phone rigns. U anser it n the vioce is "wut r u doing wit my daughter?" U tell ur girl n she say "my dad is ded". THEN WHO WAS PHONE?

—So Bad It's Good Horror meme

The phone is ringing. Dear God, THE PHONE IS RINGING! The camera slowly closes in on the phone. The noise is deafening. Cut to the protagonist, who has terror in her eyes. She answers the phone. "Hello?!"

Roughly half the time, the call is not from who she thought it would be (instead being, say, someone who wants to switch her long distance or some equivalent of a Cat Scare).

This guarantees the second call, immediately afterward. She picks up the phone and says, "I'M HAPPY WITH MY LONG DISTANCE, DAMMIT".

Then she hears the voice of evil on the other end of the line.

If upon answering the phone, she hears dead air, she is required to say, "It's dead," and someone else is then required to say, "Could you please not put it that way?"

One specific variant of this trope that now lives in Urban Legend territory is The Calls Are Coming From Inside the House.

Examples of Evil Phone include:

Anime & Manga

• At the end of one episode of Noein, the old house phone starts ringing even though it's unplugged. After a lot of weird noises, it turns out the protagonist is calling herself from an alternate future timeline with some advice. Not quite evil, but still creepy as hell, especially because her future self sounds so sad...
• At the end of the first arc of Umineko no Naku Koro ni, Natsuhi, Battler, George, and Jessica are holed up in Kinzo's study. The phone lines have been cut, as they discovered some time before when attempting to contact the police. While they're all sitting there in tense silence, all of a sudden, the phone rings. One of them goes over and picks it up... and all they hear is Maria singing creepily in the distance.
  • Also near the end of the fourth arc, after Jessica, George, and Maria are sent off, the phone rings, and greets Battler with..."Congratulations."
• Hanako and The Terror of Allegory has a few chapters that revolve around a Creepy Doll named Mary who will call you every five minutes to tell you about how she's hunting you down and preparing to kill you.

Film

• The hotel room phone in 1408. Not only did it talk in a nightmarishly calm and pleasing woman's voice, it also melted for some reason.
  • Forget "Seven days!" How creepy is it to hear "Five. This is five. Ignore the sirens. Even if you leave this room, you can never leave this room. Eight. This is eight. We have killed your friends. Every friend is now dead. Six. This is six."
• Black Christmas practically started this trope, and was the first film to use the urban legend-based trope of the killer being in the house with his victims, which was pretty cutting edge back then.
• Played with a little bit of actual creepiness in the intentionally Narm-laden Doom House. Determined to defuse the creepiness by any means necessary, Reginald picks up the phone with a goofy hand gesture, then discovers that the aforementioned voice of evil sounds utterly ridiculous. The gratuitous presence of his cat doesn't hurt, either.
• The Fifth Element reveals that Corrupt Corporate Executive Zorg is allied with the Eldritch Abomination who calls him over the phone using the moniker "Mister Shadow". Zorg is terrified when those calls come. Not the least because Mister Shadow can make people bleed out of their foreheads over the phone.
  • Also the phones made by Zorg's company appear to have semtex installed, as standard, ready to be detonated whenever Zorg is disappointed.
• Inverted in The Matrix. Neo receives a FedEx package. There's a phone inside, and it starts freaking ringing the moment he pulls it out. Neo's eyes bug out and he answers it. Turns out it was Morpheus, exactly who Neo expected it to be.
• An unconventional example shows up in The Ruins. The phone itself isn't evil or used by a villain to menace somebody, but the sadistic Man-Eating Plant lures its prey by imitating a cellphone's ringtone.
• In Chakushin Ari and all its sequels and the remake, young people receive voicemail messages that detail their final moments, complete with Ironic Nursery Rhyme ringtone.
• In the film vaguely inspired by The Mothman Prophecies, Richard Gere gets phone calls from someone who is either Indrid Cold or the Mothman. Not quite evil, but thoroughly creepy, since his voice patterns were "outside of human vocal range".
  • Also, the phone calls that may be from Klein's dead wife, although you never know due to him refusing to answer the phone and that even come through when the phone is unplugged.
• A Nightmare on Elm Street, before it got all schlocky. Nancy tries to call her boyfriend, Glen Lantz, to warn him not to go to sleep. Then the phone rings. She picks it up. It's the sound of Fred's claws being sharpened. She (understandably) freaks out, tears the phone out of the plug, and throws it across the room. Then, despite being unplugged, it starts ringing again. This time, it's Freddy again, telling her that "I'm your boyfriend now, Nancy, and then he tries to stick his tongue down her throat, through the phone.
• Averted in Red Eye, where the phone call is the police saying that they're right on their way. Though the phone calls Rippner wants her to make for him are fairly sinister themselves.
• The Ring. ("Seven days!")
  • It also pulls the "first call is fake" variant in both versions, as the first victim tells her tale of the tape, and then receives a call from her mother just to unnerve the audience. Unfortunately, it also takes the edge off the horror by having one of the real calls intercepted... by Rachel's voicemail. Which she then deletes.
    • And then spoofed to hell in Scary Movie 3. Aside from the Evil Phone getting dragged into actual conversations, it tries to contact the female protagonist's son and gets her instead, gets hung up on, calls back and poses as a solicitor, and then finally asks her to take a message for him.
• The killers from the Scream series were quite fond of messing with their victims over the phone.
• The Silence of the Lambs. ("Well, Clarice, have the little lambs stopped screaming?") The book had Lecter send Clarice a letter, instead.
• When a Stranger Calls plays with the urban legend of The Babysitter and the Man Upstairs.
• The Gate. The protaganists are not sure what the hell (literally) is up with the huge hole in the backyard. Evidence comes when the phone rings. It seems to be Mom, checking up on the boys, but then 'Mom' screams 'You've been BAAAD!' and the phone melts. Nightmare fuel indeed.
• In Monster House DJ gets a phone call from the house across the street the night after he saw its sole inhabitant suffer an apparently-fatal heart attack. All he hears on the line is spooky creaking and groaning noises.
• In the original Halloween, Michael strangles Lydia to death with a phone cord just as she calls Laurie. Michael then picks up the phone to listen to Laurie's frantic cries, before calmly hanging up.

Literature

• Stephen King's original idea for the phone in 1408 was actually more disturbing than that used on film—the voice, as described in the original short story, doesn't so much resemble a human being as an electric razor that has learned to talk. His performance of it in the audiobook is memorable, to say the least.

Phone: This is nine! Nine! This is nine! Nine! This is ten! Ten! We have killed your friends! Every friend is now dead! This is six! Six! ... Eighteen! This is now eighteen! Take cover when the siren sounds! This is four! Four! ... Five! This is five! Ignore the siren! Even if you leave this room, you can never leave this room! Eight! This is eight! ... Six, this is six This is goddamn fucking six!

• In The Regulators (also by Stephen King, or rather Richard Bachman) we have the Tak phone, which is not easily described but may well be the most subtly frightening example of the trope ever.
• Also also by Stephen King, there is Sorry, Right Number, in which the phone isn't precisely evil, but creepy.
  • INT. THE PHONE It lies on the carpet, looking both bland and somehow ominous. CAMERA MOVES IN TO ECU- the holes in the receiver once more look like huge dark chasms. We HOLD, then FADE TO BLACK.
• ALSO also also by Stephen King is the novel Cell, in which cell phones initiate a Zombie Apocalypse.
• In Dean Koontz's Phantoms, the titular phantom likes doing this to the protagonists.
• In Spellbent, Jessie's cellphone briefly behaves this way while she's in close proximity to a Hell Gate.

Live-Action TV

• Are You Afraid of the Dark? had the "Phone Police" and their insane prisoner Billy Baxter.
• Used in the Doctor Who two-parter "The Empty Child"/"The Doctor Dances", with the Empty Child's ability to control things like radios and telephones. When he takes over the TARDIS' Police Box telephone (NOT the Trimphone seen on the console, but the one all normal Police Boxes had in the door), the Doctor is perturbed and notes, "Ringing? What's that about, ringing? You're not even a real phone and you're ringing?!"
  • "Father's Day" had the Doctor receive creepy, cryptic speech... that turned out to be the first phone call ever. It was the first sign that they officially broke time.
  • Also, in "The Impossible Planet", Rose gets a call from the Devil himself on her cellphone, which understandably freaks her out a bit.
  • This appears quite often in the Classic Series. For instance, the First Doctor was attacked with a sort of hypnotising beam sent via phone.
• Tales from the Darkside featured an episode written by Stephen King in which a woman receives an unsettling phone call from a frantic woman, which turns out to be herself in the future, after her husband has suddenly died.
  • Tales also had an episode where a woman is annoyed by a constantly ringing phone in the apartment next to hers. Later this escalates to what sounds like someone in the apartment trying to break through her bedroom wall. Finally she steels her nerves and goes over there...
• Spoofed in The Kids in The Hall. A guy refuses to answer the phone. Reasoning it must be a wrong number. But as the phone keeps on ringing, it causes increasing hysteria in his friends. They convince themselves that something sinister about the call. "Or it's a very wrong number. 42 rings? What kind of FREAK is sitting there by that phone?"
  • To be fair, it WAS a couple of clearly insane people calling.
    • No, no, they were stage performers, and NOT two clearly insane individuals. Isn't that right, Jerry?

Tabletop Games

• The Unbidden gives us the Fear-Powered Cell Phone, a phone that has Awakened and which draws charge from paranoia. It sends itself text messages that attempt to scare its current owner; however, it also sends itself texts that give very good advice, so that the owner comes to trust it.

Videogames

• The Silent Hill series has had several Evil Phones, and a few merely spooky ones.
• The Suffering and it's sequel. Sometimes nearby phones ring. Don't answer. Don't even pickup the non-ringing ones.
  • On rare occasions, you need to pick them up anyway to advance the story, and on even rarer occasions, they're helpful. Granted, the help comes from Doctor Killjoy, and usually only in the "Good" morality; but those rare bits of necessity can unfortunately instill a similar response for every other phone...
• Eternal Darkness has this as one of the Sanity-based freak outs. "Remember me, Alex?"
• Phantasmagoria 2 when you call yourself or your murdered coworkers.
• In Sierra's Shivers 2, the villain would often call to gloat and give you unsettling messages whenever you moved to a different room or building. Extra creepiness came from the implication that he must have been watching you (or following you) very closely to know where to call each time.
• Shortly after arriving in Paris, JC Denton enters an empty office with the phone ringing. Upon answering the phone, he has a short, cryptic conversation with Icarus. The use of the phone can be assumed to be pure Mind Screw on Icarus' part since he can (and does) message directly to JC in other points of the game.
• Is this the Payne residence?
• You can be one, briefly, in Geist, in order to scare a janitor so you can possess him.
• Answering a certain phone in the F.E.A.R add on extraction point will result in an Alma scream that shakes the room.
• In Batman: Arkham City Victor Zsasz begins a series of serial killings in which he calls random payphones and kills whomever answers them. In Batman's case he makes him track down another payphone somewhere else or else he kills innocents.

Webcomics

• In Silent Hill: Promise expect to be unhappy whenever the protagonist's cellphone rings.

Web Originals

• The Billy Goat Caller, a short film by Dom Fera of Lazer Collection fame, features a rather creepy prank caller.

Western Animation

• Spoofed in an episode of Ed, Edd 'n' Eddy. In "Sorry, Wrong Ed", Eddy gets a phone that Rolf desperately wants to get rid of. As soon as Eddy gets the phone, it starts ringing... without being plugged in, and every time he (or anyone else!) picks up the receiver, something bad happens to him.