WHEN A STRANGER CALLS misunderstands what made HALLOWEEN a hit
#31DaysOfHorror — October 25th
This October, for the second year in a row, I’ll be reviewing one horror movie each day! Respected classics, trashy and forgotten B-movies, both new frights and old… I love ’em all. Well, some of them I’ll probably hate. We’ll see.
The Plot
Jill Johnson (Carol Kane) is a babysitter who’s home with the kids when she begins to receive disturbing phone calls from a man who asks menacingly, “W̶h̶a̶t̶’̶s̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶r̶ ̶f̶a̶v̶o̶r̶i̶t̶e̶ ̶s̶c̶a̶r̶y̶ ̶m̶o̶v̶i̶e̶?̶”̶ “Have you checked the children?”
Having somehow never heard the urban legend about herself, Jill is understandably frightened when the police put a trace on the line and discover that the calls are coming from inside the house!
Seven years later, one of the detectives who worked the initial case is now a private investigator, and when the psychopathic killer escapes from the mental hospital, the P.I. is hired to bring him in before he has the chance to terrorize Jill once more.
My Review
The plot of When a Stranger Calls is, of course, the stuff of urban legend. I remember being terrified by the story when I read it the first time when I was about ten or eleven; my parents had just had another baby, and I was just reaching the age where I could start to stay home for short periods of time with my younger siblings. The idea that there could be someone else hidden in the house who enjoyed messing with me, really messed with me. (My favorite variation of the story comes from Alvin Schwartz’ Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, involving repeated calls from a man calling himself “the viper.”)
So, I sat down to watch When a Stranger Calls expecting that I already knew the ending — the calls are coming from inside the house, of course. I saw the film was an hour and a half long, so I expected it to take its time getting to the titular calling, but just like Scream, the phone rings nearly right away. Carol Kane plays the babysitter; the role doesn’t require much from her at first, other than to look frightened when she answers the phone. She plays it mostly with a kind of dead-eyed curiosity that slowly develops into full-blown hysteria. She’s pretty great.
Surprisingly, the caller is revealed to be inside the house somewhere around the 20-minute mark, and the film jumps ahead seven years. And my interest plummeted.
The subgenre of slasher movie dealing with babysitters at the mercy of home invaders is well-worn at this point, but it’s easy to forget that it only started to be cemented on film sometime around Halloween in 1978. Instead of focusing on the babysitter, When a Stranger Calls completely sidelines its damsel in distress for a large part of the film, opting to become a crime thriller for a while rather than a horror movie. When a Stranger Calls was released only a year after Halloween, so perhaps the tropes of the genre hadn’t really settled yet; the film seems to think people were more interested in the sheriff and Dr. Loomis’ attempts to logically deduce Michael Myers’ location than they were in watching Laurie Strode be terrorized by the Shape.
That’s of course not the case. Don’t get me wrong; When a Stranger Calls is competently made, and it’s actually a pretty good crime thriller when that’s what it’s doing, including a lot of my favorite generic elements — for example, forced point-of-view identification with the killer, and copious amounts of dirty city streets awash in neon (don’t ask). But the cat-and-mouse game between Private Inspector John Clifford and killer-on-the-loose Curt Duncan just isn’t as interesting as the bookending scenes where Jill Johnson receives menacing phone calls.
Thankfully, the final half hour — where Jill is forced to rejoin the action — is just as thrilling as the first half hour. After successfully evading the investigator, Curt finds a newspaper with Jill’s picture in it and begins to terrorize her once more, this time going after her two children. The climax of the film is everything I want from an early slasher movie like this; it’s disturbing, eerie, shocking, and scary, all in equal measure, anchored in reality thanks to Tony Beckley’s all-too-real performance as the deranged Curt Duncan. When he’s allowed to be deranged, he’s gripping; when he’s begging for change or crying in the YMCA bathroom and feeling bad about what he’s done, not so much.
According to the trivia section of IMDb, the first segment of the film was indeed a short film called The Sitter that was expanded into a feature after the success of Halloween. (I swear I wrote the above section before I knew that fact). It’s a shame they seem to have misunderstood what made Halloween a hit.
