A Film Canon

The 00s have witnessed a wave of nostalgic remakes of late 70s and 80s horror classics, but few have improved upon their source material as originally or quietly as When A Stranger Calls. Criticism of the film centred on the fact that previews gave away the supposed twist - that the increasingly menacing calls made to babysitter Jill Johnson (Camilla Belle) are coming from inside the house - but this is to miss both the omniscience of that twist in popular culture, as well as its mobile-phone redundancy. In fact, West seems so prescient of the fact that this can no longer be a twist- or shock-driven movie that he turns it into an exercise in pure suspense, and, in doing so, arguably creates a finer, if less iconic, film than Fred Walton's 1979 original. In particular, the house itself is transformed into a suspense-space worthy of Wes Craven, full of eccentric, nuanced reticulations and thresholds, yet never presented with the clunkiness that might imbue its almost impossibly sprawling parameters with the cheesier overtones of a haunted house. At the same time, West, cinematographer Peter Menzies Jr. and sound designer Glenn T. Morgan craft a sublime, diaphanous ambience that stretches the house itself out to so many sensory horizons, until it's little more than the very furthest Jill and the audience can see, hear or apprehend; a map, abstraction or musical stave of suspenseful cognition, precluding any real score. With such a spectacular set-up - and the set-up goes on for a remarkably long time, lingering over suspense with a loving, aestheticist relish - the more action-driven conclusion is anticlimactic, but this is also a problem with the original, and at least there's not the same clumsy attempt to rein everything back into narrative. Ultimately, When A Stranger Calls is testament to the aesthetic power of the supposedly lowbrow, Hollywood genre film, and an idiosyncratic counterpoint to the digital, three-dimensional and torture porn registers that tend to characterise 00s reworkings of the 80s.