When a Stranger Calls

I love the horror genre. There are so many little forgotten gems buried underneath the rubble that it has mostly become. This is one of those gems. When a Stranger Calls is two separate movies. The first consists of the opening twenty minutes of the film in which a babysitter keeps getting a phone call from some creepy guy telling her to check on the children. This section is the horror movie, and a damn good one. The second is a game of cat-and-mouse when a man (the caller) escapes from an asylum, he is tracked down by a private investigator played by Charles Durning. This section is more of a conventional thriller, yet also a good one. Tony Beckley plays the escaped psycho by making him strangely sympathetic. It's an unusually good performance. The body count and the violence level is low, but the suspense is high. It surprises me that the director, Fred Walton, didn't go on to do anything better because he has a solid grasp on the genre and knows how to work with an interesting premise. This is the kind of angry-caller horror film that paved the way for Scream, yet itself was influenced by Black Christmas, but thankfully it doesn't seem like a cheat or a rip-off. If nothing else it will probably always be remembered as the film from which the THX logo gets its music.