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Horror cinema relies on a number of basic human fears in order to create stories which will be scary as well as entertaining. One of the most basic of these is a fear of the unknown. Those things that go bump in the dark and cold night, the things we can't see. The thoughts they raise create fears that we may feel are irrational; they grab hold of us nonetheless. The urban legend of the babysitter and the stranger upstairs plays directly into the hands of this fear.
This particular legend centers around a babysitter, alone in a home, caring for the children while the parents are away. The babysitter, having already put the little ones to bed, is occupying herself with some trivial pursuit, such as watching television. At some point, she begins receiving phone calls from an unknown person. These calls are unnerving, to say the least. They become so disturbing that the babysitter calls the police and tells them what has been happening. The police, upon tracing the origin of the threatening calls, determine that whoever is making the calls is somewhere inside the same house as the babysitter.
It's hard to know just exactly when this urban legend took hold. Many people attribute it to the true story of babysitter Janett Christman. However, as with so many stories which take on a life of their own, it's not clear as to where this one truly originated. Regardless of wherethe story came from, the themes within the legend are powerful and serve to lay a solid foundation for some truly scary movies.
There have been a number of memorable horror films which have capitalized on this particular urban legend to tell a truly terrifying tale.
Foster's Release (1971)
Written by Stephen Lorimore and directed by Terence H. Winkless, this short film has been credited with creating numerous tropes which have been successfully used in other horror movies. The film, which was shown at the Los Angeles Filmex film festival, the Chicago Film Festival and the Edinborough Film Festival, is the story of a teenager who must enlist the help of the local police department in order to deal with a series of harassing phone calls which she receives while babysitting one night. It's bad enough that this strange man calls the babysitter repeatedly. What's worse, he seems to know too much information about the babysitters immediate surroundings...
Black Christmas (1974)
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| Poster art for Black Christmas (Fair Use - Wikipedia) |
"A winner - all gift-wrapped and ready for starved scare fans who haven't had a really good shreik since Psycho"
- Movie review for Black Christmas (George Anthony, Toronto Sun)
"Horror movie decks its halls with corpses"
- Movie review for Black Christmas from the Windsor Star, November 5th, 1974
One of the earliest movies of the "slasher" genre, 1974's Black Christmas is a Canadian horror film written by A. Roy Moore and produced and directed by Bob Clark and August Films of Toronto. The film stars Olivia Hussey, famous for playing the role of Juliet in Franco Zeffirelli's 1968 "Romeo and Juliet" - her very first film role - when she was just 15. The movie also includes Margot Kidder, who would go on to gain worldwide recognition playing Lois Lane, the award-winning journalist for the Daily Planet newspaper in the Superman movie series, starring oposite Christopher Reeves.
"Hello...hello... Hey, quick. It's him again. The moaner."
While the film does not use babysitters as the victims, it does have a group of college sorority sisters who receive threatening phone calls, from someone they nickname "the moaner", whom the police discover, is making the calls from within the sorority house itself.
When A Stranger Calls (1979)
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| Movie poster for "When A Stranger Calls" (Fair use - Wikipedia) |
"Unequivocally the most terrifying movie I have ever seen" - AFTER DARK magazine
Described as a psychological thriller, When A Stranger Calls was a big budget remake of the 1977 short film The Sitter, both directed by Fred Walton. This version of the babysitter and the stranger upstairs legend develops the story of the deranged killer a step further, by bringing him back into the story once again, some time after the initial murders.
When A Stranger Calls Back (1993)
Released as a made for tv psychological horror film, When A Stranger Calls Back reunites the story of a crazed murderer terrorizing a babysitter with many of the cast members from the original When A Stranger Calls.
When A Killer Calls (2006)
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| Movie poster for When A Killer Calls (Fair Use - Wikipedia) |
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