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Dis­cov­er this shock­ing 70s deep cut to mid­dle-class America

17 Dec 2018

Words by Anton Bitel

A woman with curly hair wearing a red blouse speaking on a vintage telephone.
A woman with curly hair wearing a red blouse speaking on a vintage telephone.
A babysit­ter is ter­rorised by an anony­mous called in Fred Walton’s pro­to-slash­er When a Stranger Calls.

It is for a sin­gle (lengthy) sequence, per­haps even for a sin­gle line, that Fred Walton’s debut fea­ture When a Stranger Calls has tak­en up res­i­dence in the col­lec­tive uncon­scious. The film’s open­ing sec­tion was adapt­ed from Walton’s ear­li­er short The Sit­ter, which was in turn inspired by an urban leg­end from the 1960s, the babysit­ter and the man upstairs’. In it, as babysit­ter Jill John­son (Car­ol Kane) sits down­stairs in the sub­ur­ban LA home of Dr and Mrs Man­drakis, occa­sion­al­ly help­ing her­self to a for­ti­fy­ing drink from their liv­ing-room bar, she becomes increas­ing­ly alarmed by a nui­sance caller who keeps ask­ing, in his dis­tinc­tive Eng­lish accent, Have you checked the children?”

On paper, the sce­nario might sound repet­i­tive, but on the screen it it ago­nis­ing­ly tense, as this opu­lent bour­geois envi­ron­ment grad­u­al­ly has every notion of secu­ri­ty stripped away from it. Even as Jill behaves with impec­ca­ble respon­si­bil­i­ty, doing all the things one should in her sit­u­a­tion, her iso­la­tion, vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty and help­less­ness become ever more pro­nounced. The caller’s words, with their insis­tent ref­er­ence to the children’s safe­ty, cut to a deep anx­i­ety of mid­dle-class Amer­i­ca, expos­ing the dan­gers that can so eas­i­ly prowl the shad­ows in even that safest seem­ing of places, a well-appoint­ed, all-mod-cons home in a good neighbourhood’.

This open­ing act ties When a Stranger Calls to Bob Clark’s 1974 slash­er Black Christ­mas, with its sim­i­lar he’s call­ing from inside the house!’ plot­ting, while also obvi­ous­ly influ­enc­ing the open­ing sequence of Wes Craven’s revi­sion­ist meta-slash­er Scream. And the film’s sub­se­quent two acts, set sev­en years lat­er, direct­ly evoke John Carpenter’s Hal­loween by hav­ing child killer Curt Dun­can (played by a ter­mi­nal­ly ill Tony Beck­ley) escape his psy­chi­atric asy­lum and come home’. Accord­ing­ly When a Stranger Calls is stan­dard­ly asso­ci­at­ed with the slash­er end of hor­ror. To appre­ci­ate just how dif­fer­ent it is from the oth­er entries in this then still nascent sub­genre, we need to move on from its open­ing to its more crit­i­cal­ly neglect­ed mid­dle section.

When a ter­ri­fied Jill final­ly flees to the house’s front door and opens it with a scream, a jar­ring jump cut to the face of John Clif­ford (Charles Durn­ing) sug­gests that he is the one who has been ter­ror­is­ing her. In fact, John has not appeared at the door until sev­er­al hours lat­er, and he is not the men­ac­ing killer but the police detec­tive assigned to inves­ti­gate the gris­ly crime scene at the Man­drakis property.

Yet the film con­tin­ues to con­fuse the iden­ti­ties of Curt and John: the for­mer, though still crazed, is also human­ised and appar­ent­ly seek­ing some sort of redemp­tion; while the lat­ter, now a pri­vate inves­ti­ga­tor hired by Dr Man­drakis, is not just hunt­ing Curt (as Curt him­self hunts), but is also express­ly plan­ning to kill Curt in cold blood. Make it good,” is the eth­i­cal­ly iro­nised com­ment made by Sgt Sack­er (William Boyett) when he learns of his for­mer police partner’s mur­der­ous intentions.

As this moral­ly murky rever­sal of rôles unfolds in the dingy dives, church mis­sions and mean streets of down­town LA, the cat and mouse between John and Curt plays out as grit­ty neo-noir, com­plete with plen­ty of expres­sion­is­tic shad­ow pro­ject­ed onto the walls of alley ways, under­pass­es and home­less shel­ters. It’s prob­a­bly just some weirdo,” the police­man had told a wor­ried Jill down the phone line in the film’s open­ing scene. The city’s full of em. Believe it or not, we get reports like this every night.”

The sec­ond act of When a Stranger Calls takes us deep into that weirdo city, and into a demi-monde of tecs, bums and barflies – peo­ple who, unlike the Man­drakis fam­i­ly, have to fight for every downed drink and every last cent. In her jad­ed, tough-as-nails, seen-it-all-before atti­tude, Curt’s lat­est quar­ry Tra­cy Fuller (Colleen Dewhurst) could hard­ly be in greater con­trast with Jill – and the dif­fer­ence in class terms between this urban set­ting and the leafy locale of the first act could not be starker.

Curt is a mis­fit, yet down­town he seems to fit right in. Beat up, broke and lost in his new envi­ron­ment, Curt imag­ines him­self invis­i­ble’ – a view which is as much social com­men­tary as his psy­chosis doing the talk­ing. In hous­es like that of the Man­drakis’ or of Jill and her hus­band, Curt must hide – where­as amid LA’s over­looked under­class, he does not have to. Of course, there is noth­ing America’s monied class­es fear more than the inva­sion of that indi­gent sub­strate upon their pri­vate prop­er­ty. I had to come back,” Curt taunts Jill in the film’s cli­max, and do you know why?” The ques­tion is left unan­swered, but one read­ing might be that this deranged man wants anoth­er taste of the good life that Jill and oth­ers enjoy, and from which he is social­ly excluded.

When a Stranger Calls is released on Blu-ray by Sec­ond Sight on 17 December.

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