When a Stranger Calls (1979)
Directed by: Fred Walton
Premise: A killer terrorizes a babysitter (Carol Kane) with harassing phone calls. Seven years later the killer escapes a mental institution and he is pursued by a private detective (Charles Durning).
What Works: The opening twenty minutes of When a Stranger Calls dramatizes the urban legend of a babysitter harassed by a mysterious caller asking, “Have you checked the children?” The opening is incredibly well done. The sequence starts naturally and then becomes stylized with amplified sound effects, pregnant pauses, tight framing, imposing lighting, and a frightening music score. Actress Carol Kane does a great job in the film especially in the opening sequence. She is frightened but smart and there is an earnestness to Kane’s performance that makes her character empathetic. After the opening, When a Stranger Calls becomes a different sort of film. It borrows the premise of Black Christmas and Halloween with the murderous psychopath absconding from an institution but When a Stranger Calls does not follow a strict slasher template. The movie is primarily about a detective who was the responding police official in the opening scene but is now a private investigator out to find and kill the escaped murderer. The killer (Tony Beckley) is not a silent superhuman phantom but a flesh and blood man who is disturbed. Although it was made at the beginning of the slasher cycle, When a Stranger Calls plays as an imaginative disruption of the formula. The detective’s quest to kill the killer is not far removed from Dr. Loomis in Halloween but the tone is quite different, creating an interesting moral ambiguity. There are a few tense scenes throughout the picture although nothing quite matches the opening sequence.
What Doesn’t: There is a long subplot in which the killer makes repeated contact with a bar patron (Colleen Dewhurst), becoming increasingly erratic and threatening. Not much actually comes of this subplot. It’s used as a way of crossing the detective and the killer’s paths but this part of the story doesn’t make much sense. The logic of When a Stranger Calls is often tenuous. Characters show up in places randomly and happen to arrive at the right time. The former babysitter returns to the story in the final half hour, now a wife and mother, but it’s unclear why the killer would return to this particular woman or how he would find her. The ending is especially random and underwhelming.
Disc extras: None.
Bottom Line: When a Stranger Calls is an entertaining mix of a horror film and a thriller. It has an exceptional opening that the filmmakers never top but When a Stranger Calls does distinguish itself as a unique title in the early period of the slasher genre.
Episode: #1068 (October 12, 2025)