I fell asleep a number of times while watching When a Stranger Calls Back, Fred Walton’s 1993 made-for-TV sequel to his somewhat remembered (remembered enough for a remake in 2006) horror film from 1979. My dozing isn’t the film’s fault, given that I’d made it select viewing for after work, where my body slowly decompresses after a bar shift and the rhythm of the film starts to lull me. Psychological thrillers are usually best for this, with—for some reason—their compounding tension good to get me to mentally wind down, and When a Stranger Calls Back’s bizarrely naturalistic setting for much of the middle portion of the film made it exceptional at allowing my brain and body to rest. That’s beside the point, because the real testament to its greatness is I wanted to finish it.
There was partially a supernatural pull to the film: when I first began watching it, I fell asleep during the prolonged home invasion opening, and re-awoke as the ostensible protagonist, Julia (Jill Schoelen), is talking with John (Charles Durning, reprising his role from the original) about how frustrating it is trying to go on living with this seemingly meaningless and awful stalking popping back into her life. In this sequence, the diegetic audio was low, with one of the harassing phone calls from earlier in the film playing over, as if the trauma of the event was overtaking the reality of the present. It was striking, and also not what the film was really doing. As I paused the movie to shut my laptop and go to bed, the audio from the phone call kept going. I hastily closed my laptop and threw it aside. That was terrifying.
Once I reached the same sequence again a night or two later, this time I was struck by its naturalism—the banality of the cafe compared to the hyper-stylization of the opening, with its white window light of a downtown shop standing in incredible contrast to the party-gel’d blues and smoky sets of the opening. Walton’s film, while premised on this extraordinary break with the everyday, is ultimately about every day after.
No better example of this than Jill, the main character from the original film played by Carol Kane. Jill’s a counselor where Julia goes to college, and the only one that believes her about the intrusions: she’s been there before. In the 15 years since audiences had last checked in on her, Jill has taken up self-defense classes and now works to try to protect vulnerable young women like she once was. The texture of this dynamic calls to mind the very culture of sexual violence that young women endure from—particularly from their teenage years and through college—and how those experiences can manifest into total doom (for Julia) and self-reliance mixed with generational solidarity (for Jill). In this middle portion of the movie, When a Stranger Calls Back barely feels like a genre film at all, as if the culturally reflexive premise of the film had dropped the metaphor and the narrative suddenly found itself living in the confines of reality.
The stranger part of Stranger is how it dips back into its horror foundations. There’s another turn which happens suddenly, late in the film, as John’s investigating ventriloquists (he believes there weren’t two callers to Julia, but one). In a scene at a cabaret club, John finally finds one, dressed and made up in all black. The man begins his performance by trying to stay out of the spotlight, telling the operator to stop tracking him and keep the light fixed. He begins his act, with his dummy talking about how God creates us in His image, and how we look at ourselves in the mirror. When the dummy’s head turns upwards, we see that it has no face, no mouth, no eyes. Yet its performer speaks through it. Nobody in the room can believe what they’re seeing, what they’re hearing—a rich woman or a bunch of drunk college kids—some break with what everyone expected has happened, and the spell of the show is gone. What’s left is something more bizarre because, in the context of the scene, they’re seeing something real unfold before them on stage.