‘Have you checked the children?’
The problem with any filmmaker attempting to turn a successful short film into a feature film is how to lengthen the story without compromising on quality. Fred Walton released short film The Sitter in 1977. The film was a retelling of the classic urban legend “The babysitter and the man upstairs” and was, by all accounts (I haven’t seen it), a huge success. When faced with the conundrum of how to take this fairly slight and familiar story and extrapolate it out to 97 minutes, Walton decided to create a whole new (and much less effective) narrative for the film’s mostly mundane second half. He should have stuck to the short…
The first part of the film, which would eventually provide the main inspiration for the Scream franchise, sees Carol Kane’s young babysitter Jill Johnson left traumatised following a series of menacing phone calls that culminate with two dead kids. This section, essentially a remake of the earlier short film, is one of the most effective opening set pieces in horror history. Unfortunately, the second half of the film, in which Charles Durning’s forgettable private investigator tries to track down the original killer (who has, predictably, escaped from a mental institution) is ponderous and derivative or other, better, slasher films.
The call coming from inside the house is a classic but still terrifying prospect and Kane really sells this terror in the opening 25 minutes or so. From there, however, as with something like Lights Out, another example of an excellent horror short that couldn’t sustain its quality over 90 minutes, When a Stranger Calls limps along until coming to life again in the last 10 minutes, which are, at least, pretty frightening.
All that being said, if not for the bombastic opening section, nobody would been talking about this film the week after release let alone almost 50 years later. While the opening section is certainly worth watching, for both its undeniable quality and the influence it has had on horror cinema, the rest of the film is a dud – very much a game of two halves.
