‘I have strange fears…’
In 1978, John Carpenter popularised the concept of the slasher movie with Halloween, a film that changed the horror landscape forever. What’s less known is that in that same year, he also directed the TV movie Someone’s Watching Me!. And while the former is obviously a more important film than the latter, they both share more than a few strands of rogue DNA…
Leigh Michaels (Lauren Hutton) relocates from New York to LA when she lands a job directing live television for a local station. Soon after moving into her new apartment, however, she starts to receive strange phone calls and threatening letters. With the help of her friend, Sophie (Adrienne Barbeau, who met Carpenter on the set of this film and subsequently married him) and Paul (David Birney), a philosophy professor she meets in a bar, Leigh refuses to run and instead attempts to confront her tormentor.
Despite being made for TV, Someone’s Watching Me! (awful title – unnecessary exclamation mark) still looks great. Carpenter uses surveillance as a visual language, with Hutton often viewed through POV voyeur shots that make us implicit in her anguish. Hutton, a successful model and actor in real life, does a great job in portraying a strong woman at breaking point, determined and yet almost weeping with frustration. Barbeau, who played Rizzo in the original stage version of Grease, brings some much-needed comedy and sass to a film that is often very serious and Carpenter’s mix of on-location shooting and exquisite matte paintings helps to make LA feel claustrophobic and sinister.
Someone’s Watching Me! may only be a minor entry in Carpenter’s filmography but it’s one that he himself was proud of and it signposts many of things that would make his later work so celebrated – a horror treat.
