When a Stranger Calls (1979)

Film: When a Stranger Calls (1979)

Stars: Charles Durning, Carol Kane, Colleen Dewhurst, Tony Beckley

Director: Fred Walton

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

All October long, The Many Rantings of John is running a marathon dedicated to the Horror classics of the 1960's-90's that I'm seeing for the first time this month.  If you want to take a look at past titles from previous horror marathons (both this and other seasons) check out the links at the bottom of this article.

Earlier this month we talked about Carrie, which along with The Exorcist was a genuinely big deal with not just the box office but also mainstream awards, getting an Oscar nomination for both of its leading women.  Today, we're going to talk about a woman who was Oscar-nominated, but not for her horror film. Carol Kane is most-known to modern audiences for her roles in The Princess Bride and The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, but in the 1970's she was a regular in independent cinema, getting an Oscar nomination for Hester Street and having a prominent supporting role in Woody Allen's masterpiece Annie Hall.  In 1979, though, she was playing a teenager, very much in the vein of Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween for our film today, When a Stranger Calls, one of the most unusual horror films we're going to talk about this month because, well, it's not exactly a horror film.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie takes part in three acts.  The first shows Jill Johnson (Kane), a young woman who is babysitting and getting harassing calls from a crank caller who is telling her to "check the children."  Eventually she calls the police, and they trace the call...and it turns out, of course, that it's coming from inside the house.  The movie then takes a strange departure months later when John Clifford (Durning) is investigating not the crime (which was solved) but finding the killer Curt Duncan (Beckley) who has escaped from a mental asylum, and is now harassing a young woman named Tracy Fuller (Dewhurst), whom he met at a bar and is obsessed with.  While Clifford gets close to finding him, he escapes after attacking Tracy (more in a second).  This gets us to the third chapter, where an adult Jill is putting her own kids to bed, and gets a call at a restaurant saying "check the children"...indicating her own kids are in danger.  Though she comes home to no one, she knows better, and soon finds the man has killed her husband and is in her bed.  She nearly dies...before Clifford kills Duncan, having broken into the house, tracking him and fulfilling his promise to the parents of the original kids that he would avenge their children's deaths.

The movie is unusual for a variety of reasons, but let's get to first why it fits into this month.  The movie's opening scene is about as perfectly executed as a movie can get.  Claustrophobic (it does cutaways, but exclusively stays on Jill), we see her growing fear of what this man is capable of, and how he clearly wants to kill her (Scream clearly had this movie in mind when it filmed its iconic opening with Drew Barrymore).  Even if you know it's coming (this is based on a pretty famous urban legend, and was a story I heard before I'd ever heard of the movie), it's still staggering to hear "the call is coming from inside the house," and honestly...it would've been 5-stars had it been a short film, with Jill realizing what happened to her.  The ending is also creepy, particularly the scene where she realizes that Duncan is literally in her bed lying next to her (not, as she assumes, her husband-I honestly didn't see it coming).  Kane is superb in this movie, Grade-A horror acting & deserves her spot in the pantheon of "final girls."

But that's not really what most of When a Stranger Calls is about, as this isn't Jill's story.  For about an hour of the movie, she totally leaves the film, and we are left with Durning's cop, clearly tortured by the murder of these children, with him tracking down Duncan.  It's odd, particularly when you include Colleen Dewhurst's Tracy, who has almost as much screen-time as Kane, but whose fate is left unknown (we don't return to her after she's attacked by Duncan, but apparently alive in that scene).  It's a weird message for the movie that they're both willing to discard this woman in pursuit of their own obsessions, and as a result When a Stranger Calls reads in most places like a classic 1970's thriller more than a horror film.  Still, it's pretty good even with tonal issues, and the horror bits are edge-of-your-seat dynamite.  Highly recommend.

Past Horror Month Reviews (Listed Chronologically): The Golem, The Phantom of the Opera, Dracula, Frankenstein, Freaks, The Mummy, The Old Dark House, The Invisible Man, The Black Cat, The Bride of Frankenstein, Mad Love, The Raven, Werewolf of London, Dracula's Daughter, Son of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man Returns, The Mummy's Hand, The Invisible Woman, The Wolf Man, Cat People, The Ghost of Frankenstein, Invisible Agent, The Mummy's Curse, The Mummy's Tomb, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, Phantom of the Opera, Son of Dracula, The House of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man's Revenge, The Mummy's Ghost, The Uninvited, House of Dracula, She-Wolf of London, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man, It Came from Outer Space, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Abbott & Costello Meet the Mummy, Revenge of the Creature, The Creature Walks Among Us, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Attack of the 50-Foot Woman, The Blob, Village of the Damned, The Innocents, The Masque of the Red Death, Night of the Living Dead, The Wicker Man, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Carrie, Dawn of the Dead, Halloween, The Amityville Horror