Taglines: Whatever you do, don’t answer khe phone.
A remake of the 1979 Columbia Pictures cult horror film, which starred Carol Kane as a high school student traumatized while babysitting by a caller who repeatedly asks, “Have you checked the children lately?”
When A Stranger Calls is a contemporary update of a well-known suburban legend. When 16-year-old Jill exceeds her cell phone minutes, her parents force her to spend the night babysitting instead of attending a huge bonfire bash. As Jill’s father drives her to Dr. Mandrakis’s house for the evening, we are given the sense from the long drive, spooky music, and winding roads, that the home seems to be at the end of the World. Perched over the edge of a steamy lake, the mansion-like structure is made entirely of dark wood and glass.
With an arboretum built into its center, the palatial home feels both Zen-like and forbidding. With the children already asleep, Jill spends the first hour indulging in secret babysitter pleasures like snooping and trying on Mrs. Mandrakis’s jewelry. Without a cell phone or car, and all her friends’ phones out of range, Jill is particularly isolated–the perfect victim for a psychopath on the loose. As she begins to get calls from a heavy-breathing stranger, what at first seems like a prank slowly becomes a real threat, creating a panic-filled evening that’s any babysitter’s nightmare.
Using modern-day luxuries like caller ID, security alarm systems, and motion-sensor lights to its advantage, the film plays with themes of technology and wealth, pondering how much protection they actually provide. Clearly targeted at a teenage audience, the PG-13-rated film contains relatively little violence and instead uses unfamiliar spaces and a sense of the unknown to keep audiences scared.
When a Stranger Calls is a 2006 American horror film directed by Simon West and written by Jake Wade Wall. The film stars Camilla Belle, Brian Geraghty, Katie Cassidy in her film debut and Clark Gregg. Camilla Belle plays a babysitter who starts to receive threatening phone calls from an unidentified stranger, played by both Tommy Flanagan and Lance Henriksen. The film is a remake of Fred Walton’s 1979 horror film of the same name which became a cult classic for its legendary opening 20 minutes which this remake extended to a feature length film.
Principal photography began on January 1, 2005 and completed on 28 February 2005 in Vancouver, Canada. Bellarmine-Jefferson High School was used to portray the high school seen in the film while Signal Hill was used to portray the carnival shown in the film. Running Springs was used as the filming location for the road sequences. The house that was used in the film is located in Culver Studios – 9336 W. Washington Blvd., Culver City.
The film opened at No. 1 with $21,607,203. As of March 19, 2006, the film grossed a total of $47.9 million in the domestic box office, and $19,106,773 internationally for a total worldwide gross of $66,966,987 million.
Exhuming a Classic
In 1978, one of the scariest movies of its time took to the big screen and sent babysitters around the world into a frenzied panic. Often imitated (Scream), but never duplicated, When A Stranger Calls starred a terrified young baby-sitter…. an incessantly ringing phone… and whispered threats which set the stage for one of the most suspenseful chillers ever filmed.
Carol Kane starred as the baby-sitter tormented by a series of ominous phone calls from a faceless man asking her over and over “Have you checked the children?” This movie, which has since maintained a cult status, would raise the bar for psycho-thrillers and set the tone for future films of its kind.
More than a quarter of a century later, Ken Lemberger, former co-president of Sony Pictures Entertainment, took interest in a remake. “When I left Sony, I asked Amy Pascal if she would mind my going through the library of features as well as the abandoned properties file to look for material to re-adapt,” recalls Lemberger. “I was looking for films which weren’t overwhelmingly successful commercially and literally, the first picture that attracted my attention was When A Stranger Calls. I remembered from the original, that it was probably the scariest twenty-minute beginning of a film I had ever seen.”
Lemberger took the idea to Clint Culpepper, President of Screen Gems. The two concurred that the original film was essentially three different films rolled into one, and that their adaptation would focus on the very scary beginning most people remembered.
This would provide a blueprint for the whole story to be rewritten. With sixty-seven films under his belt, some of them remakes, John Davis would bring his love for the original film and talents as a franchise filmmaker to the table as producer. Davis, who doesn’t call this film a “remake,” so much as a “revisiting,” remembers the original well. “STRANGER was an incredibly timeless scary thriller,” he recalls. “I couldn’t get that famous line ‘Have you checked the children?’ out of my head.”
Updating the film would be a challenge, and things needed to change to make it work 28 years later. “We agreed to make the film more of a psychological thriller than the original,” he explains. “Terror lies with what you don’t see versus what you do. Having a young girl trapped in a house being stalked is a really relatable, scary notion. We all know babysitters or we’ve all baby-sat, and what makes this movie scary is that it could happen to any of us. One of our worst nightmares is having a family member being put into jeopardy like this.”
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When A Stranger Calls (2006)
Starring: Camilla Belle, Katie Cassidy, David Denman, Brian Geraghty, Kate Jennings Grant, Arthur Young, Karina Logue, Tessa Thompson, Madeline Carroll, Steve Eastin
Directed by: Simon West
Screenplay by: Jake Wade Wall
Production Design by: Jon Gary Steele
Cinematography by: Peter Menzies Jr.
Film Editing by: Jeff Betancourt
Costume Design by: Marie-Sylvie Deveau
Set Decoration by: Traci Kirshbaum
Art Direction by: Gerald Sullivan
Music by: Jim Dooley
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for intense terror, violence and some language.
Distributed by: Sony ScreenGems
Release Date: February 3, 2006
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