When A Stranger Calls (1979)
Starring: Carol Kane, Colleen Dewhurst, Charles Durning, Tony Beckley
Director: Fred Walton
Synopsis: Really is every babysitters nightmare... worth a good chill or two
Reviewed by: Omar Khan

A sleeper hit the year it came out, it cashed in on the publics desire to be pulverized with fear in the wake of John Carpenter's magnificent Halloween.

This film has a killer premise which is used to devastatingly terrifying effect in the opening and concluding scenes in Stranger. The middle bit differs from most Stalker - slasher movies in that the focus is not on the actual stalk and slashing but on the psychology of the killer and the motivations that drive him to kill.

Fred Walton's idea was apparently developed from his own short film, however when one watched the unheralded Black Christmas it is clear that this film is the one that introduced this particularly great horror movie scenario.

The same idea of the menacing phone calls has been used in When a Stranger Calls to good effect and then again much more recently in Wes Craven's Scream. Stranger is commendable for its effort to shed light on the psychological aspects of the killer rather than to merely concentrate on shocks alone. The first twenty minutes of this movie are about as intensely frightening as any one has ever seen.

Then the movie sort of loses direction along the way, only to pick up in intensity towards the climax. It is a superior 80's psycho killer movie head and shoulders above cheap pretenders like the admittedly charming Friday The 13th. Contains some of the most terrifying moments in modern horror movie history. "why haven't you checked the children?"…….every baby sitters worst nightmare. A superior 80's horror film, thoughtful, provocative and at times intensely frightening.