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When A Stranger Calls
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 When A Stranger Calls Production NotesTagline: Have you checked the children lately?
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?"
In a remote hilltop house, high school student Jill Johnson (Camilla Belle) settles in for a routine night of babysitting. With the children sound asleep and a beautiful home to explore, she locks the door and sets the alarm. But when a series of eerie phone calls from a Stranger insists that she “check the children,” Jill begins to panic. Fear escalates to terror when she has the calls traced and learns that the calls are coming from inside the house. Jill must summon all of her inner strength if she is going to fight back and make it out of the house alive.
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.”
Creating the Team….
Once the filmmakers were on board, they set out to find the perfect writer. Jake Wade Wall was on his way to a week-long house-sitting excursion in Nevada when he got the call from his agent about doing a pitch for When A Stranger Calls. “All I remembered from the original was a babysitter and phone calls and loving it,” says the writer. “When I got to my sister’s very big house, I went to the video store and rented it. While I was watching it, I realized that I had only really remembered the first part and how scary it was. Afterwards, I spent the first night in my sister’s house alone and every noise freaked me out – the house adjusting, the refrigerator turning itself on and off, and the wind blowing. Every noise made me jump and I felt ridiculous because I was sleeping upstairs, and not wanting to even go downstairs to get a glass of water because I was so scared!”
Jake got through the house-sitting trip just fine, and when he came back to Los Angeles he met with Screen Gems. His pitch was to cut the whole original film and take that kernel of a good idea -- one girl alone in a strange house -- and make it a full-length feature. He got the job on the spot.
“I kept remembering that week I spent house sitting, where every little thing was frightening and I realized that we didn’t need a guy with a knife chasing a girl around a house or people getting their throats slit. What really frightens people is the expectation of fear and their own imaginations. Whatever you can imagine in your head is probably scarier than an ax or some guy holding a head in his hand dripping with blood. Hitchcock really inspired me in that way. If you remember the shower scene in PSYCHO, you’ll remember a little blood hitting the drain and her facial reaction and that was more frightening than actually seeing what happened. STRANGER needed to be this way.”
The next order of business would be to attach a director who shared the vision of the rest of the team. Simon West would be that director. With such credits to his name as CON AIR and LARA CROFT: TOMB RAIDER, West was known for his ability to bring both suspense and emotion to the screen. John Davis liked the visual dazzle and style the director showed in his commercial work in England and thought he would provide the perfect combination needed to direct STRANGER.
When Simon first read the script, he liked the fact that it was all set in one house. Many of the big action adventure and dramatic films he had directed in the past took him to deserts and jungles all around the world for upwards of a hundred days of production at a time. With STRANGER, Simon saw an opportunity to exercise his creative muscles in a very different way. “This piece felt much more sophisticated than the action films I’ve done,” he says. “There are very few elements and I saw it as a way to spend every day working a very fine, detailed kind of craft and that’s what sold me on the project.”
“I’m not particularly attracted to horror films,” he adds, “but I love thrillers and this is definitely a thriller. Thrillers are smart and clever and give directors a chance to really manipulate the audience in subtle ways, rather than handing them shock value on a plate. I love that this story is so real. It could happen to anybody, and most of the situations we’ve all been in. We’ve been in the big empty house at night and gotten nervous hearing strange noises. It’s usually our imagination playing tricks on us. But what makes this movie terrifying is that it could happen to anyone in the audience. The scariest moments can happen in the audiences’ imagination and the trick is to manipulate them into using their own brains to scare themselves rather than putting a lot of stuff on the screen that’s obvious.”
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Camilla Belle as Jill Johnson in When A Stranger Calls.
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