Jill Johnson (Carol Kane is babysitting the children of Dr. Mandrakis (Carmen Argenzio) at their home. When the children are asleep, Jill receives a telephone call from a man who asks her if she has checked the children. At first, Jill dismisses the telephone calls as a practical joke. However, as the calls become more frequent and threatening, Jill becomes frightened and decides to call the police, who promise to trace the caller if Jill keeps him on the telephone line long enough. Jill, frightened to extreme measures, arms herself as she receives one final call from the nefarious stalker. Soon after the conversation, Jill receives a call from the police, only to find out that the stalker is calling from inside the house. A light comes on at the top of the staircase, and Jill sees the stalker's shadow. In a panic, she immediately runs to the door, unhooks the chain lock only to reveal a close-up of a detective when she screams. The camera then zooms out…”When a Stranger Calls”, 1979…(WikiPedia)
I was a sophomore in college, on a double date and I am not sure who screamed first, the loudest, the longest… me, my friends or the rest of the audience, when WE all discovered the worst news a horror fan could ever imagine…the monster, the thing, the creature, the boggy man, the bad person, the evil WAS in the house…the house in which you felt safe…you know the house with the locked doors, the tightly shut windows, the porch lights on in the front, back, side…your house, your place, you home…IT was waiting for you and all the time you knew as long as you stayed put, some semblance of safety would and should surround you comforting you until the parents came home, the family arrived the police knocked on your door…how in the world could something so BAD, AWFUL, HORRIFYING inhabit the place you were certain was a place no one would invade…then it happens and you scream bloody murder…
“We’ve traced the calls and they are coming from within the house.” So it seems fiction once again has become fact. Not alternative facts, not FOX News facts, but the kind of facts that send child to anyone in love with democracy. it seems we know the STRANGER, he/she are the leadership of the Republican Party, and the house is White. We will all, one by one, become victims of the terror and horror this STRANGER has planned if we only stop pretending just how dangerous and evil he is. Too late to scream, now we must act!
