I’ve covered quite a few made-for-TV movies lately, but this is one that’s especially close to my heart.
Someone’s Watching Me! is a John Carpenter film that aired on NBC in November 1978, right on the heels of Halloween. Carpenter had done TV work before, penning the Suzanne Somers-led Zuma Beach, but this was the first he’d written and directed, and I think it’s safe to say that it’s more Carpenterian in style and tone.
Where it’s decidedly un-Carpenterian is where it’s weakest: this is one badly scored movie, with the music lumbering about like a bull in a china shop, knocking the emotional texture around willy-nilly. It’s so hands-on in its attempt to manipulate me that it alienates me instead, and on a couple of occasions, it even, much to my annoyance, takes me right out of the movie. I have this bad boy on a Scream Factory Blu-ray, but if they ever somehow talk Carpenter into composing a better score for it—or, hell, slotting in something from Lost Themes—I’ll buy it all over again.
Lauren Hutton stars as lovable oddball Leigh Michaels, a TV producer who’s just made the cross-country move to LA. She has a beautiful high-rise apartment, complete with climate control and a stunning view. After a quick trial by fire, she lands a job at a local station, and the job lands her a best friend, Adrienne Barbeau’s wry, smoky-voiced Sophie. Soon enough, she even has a philosophy professor boyfriend, Paul (David Birney).
She has the makings of a good life on the West Coast, but she also has a stalker. And over the course of the film’s 97 minutes, we watch this smart, funny1, distinctive woman unravel, flattened out and drained by a campaign of terror. Stalking is essentially rape, Sophie says, because “rape is when a man consciously keeps a woman in fear,” and Someone’s Watching Me knows that kind of fear is a living death. Lauren Hutton continues to walk across the sets, fragile and jerky and enormous-eyed, but Leigh is going and going, if not quite gone. After a while, she stops making so many jokes. She’s pinned between slides in someone else’s microscope, and he’s crushing the life out of her.
This is, strangely enough, one of the best hangout movies Carpenter has made. A lot of his masterpieces are propulsive, with immediate threats forcing action at a fairly relentless clip. But stalking, at least at first, feeds on the victim’s ordinary life, and it takes a while to completely corrupt and destabilize it. Besides, while Leigh’s life is at stake here—we know that well before she does, thanks to a bleak cold open—the more pressing concern is her sense of self. In Halloween, it’s enough to show fairly generic life—lusty, impulsive, silly—to make the audience feel the terror of it being snuffed out; we all know life. We don’t all know Leigh, so Carpenter and Hutton have to give us time with her. That’s how the agony builds and particularizes, becomes more than the opener: I don’t want this happening to anyone, sure, but also, I don’t want this happening to her.
It also gives the film space to develop in some unconventional directions. Sophie is a lesbian, a fact Leigh takes in stride, and I can probably count on one hand how many close lesbian-straight woman friendships I’ve seen on TV over the years. In bars, Leigh is more comfortable being the pursuer than the pursued; she turns down an advance, but she’s the one who makes the first move with Paul. She knows what she wants, and that extends to knowing when she wants to have it; there’s a likable frankness to how clear she is with Paul that she’s attracted to him but a little gun-shy after a bad break-up, so she’s going to say no to sex tonight, but he shouldn’t think that’s a no in general. (And it’s not: this isn’t a prudish film.) Leigh may tell flippant lies as a gag, but she’s always honest with herself and about the things that matter.
Making Leigh and Sophie not just cookie-cutter “strong female characters” but well-defined ones with particular virtues and strengths is good writing that makes the horror and suspense more effective, but it’s also a rebuke of the stalker’s flattening, misogynistic gaze. Since this is a world full of troubling men—Leigh’s pushy colleague, her bad ex, a stray voyeur, cops who say to call them when he “does something”—it’s a rebuke of them too; one of the built-in bits of creepiness here, as is common in this genre2, is that there’s no shortage of suspects. It’s like Leigh’s constantly, unwillingly microdosing on misogyny, and she’s learned to deal with that, but the now-deadly level she’s grappling with means that all of this is freshly visible and felt as too much. It’s all the straw about to break the camel’s back.
The stalker thinks he’s entitled to Leigh’s private life, but he doesn’t even care what it consists of. He’d do this to any attractive woman with a window in the right place. He really is more rapist than traditional stalker; he’s not obsessive about Leigh, he’s obsessive about making a woman subject to his whims.
Which brings us, late in the game, to the fact that this is, with a few caveats, an incredibly effective thriller. The stalker, unbeknownst to Leigh, has set up shop in the complex opposite hers; he watches her through a telescope and listens to her through a bug he’s planted in her apartment. He makes disturbing calls, often at all hours. He sends gifts.
Leigh changes her phone number and keeps it unlisted, but the stalker finds her anyway (thanks to the bug, probably). What my friend pointed out when I watched this with him is that it never seems to occur to Leigh to unplug her fucking phone, at least at night. This is the kind of detail it’s hard to unsee. You can make excuses for it—she wants to be reachable, so it subconsciously didn’t even feel like an option?—but there’s a glaring hole where even the most forced and half-hearted explanation would be. Maybe it’s tied to her reluctance to move, which would let him win. I for one would move in a heartbeat. I suspect in both cases, the real reason is, as Pitch Meeting would say, “so the movie can happen.”
That aside: damn, this works. If it takes Leigh a tad too long to realize that she’s being watched, not just pestered, the film makes up for it when her stalker calls her one morning (right after Paul’s left) and deliberately reveals the truth. The way she retreats, staggering instinctively to the bathroom—the one room with no windows—to collapse and curl up on the floor is gutting. It’s like the behavior of a wounded animal. Other standout sequences include a bit of cat-and-mouse in the basement of her apartment and a clever, stiletto-sharp homage to Rear Window. It even manages several good jump scares, though it gets the best one out of the way upfront: you’ll know it when you see it.
One of the most resonant horrors comes when Leigh, at her wit’s end from trying to convince the police that the crime they think is safely solved is still happening, goes into her bathroom and sees a message written on her mirror, stark against the foggy glass: “NO ONE BELIEVES YOU.” It doesn’t take long for the words to melt away.
No one else saw them.
Someone’s Watching Me! is streaming on Tubi.
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Lauren James
Lauren James is a writer who wears many different hats (and pen names). She lives in Connecticut with her wife and two cats.
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I know that feeling was why I eventually dropped House of Cards.
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Well, now you know the book you have to write!
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Usually, when a monstrous force has no limit to its powers and can affect people’s perceptions, I get bored, because if anything can happen and nothing I see can be trusted, and there’s no chance of even telling what’s real and what’s not, then it all feels meaningless. It turns out that there’s an exception to this: all can be forgiven if the film is fucking terrifying. And this one is. I don’t have time to worry about something not making sense when I’m busy internally screaming.
I think this is the first “neighborhood horror” film I’ve seen where the horror stems from, and spreads throughout, a place without being connected to some choice the people in that place have made (Freddy’s not targeting the children of Elm Street because he hates elms); it has more of a sense that what’s going on in your community can affect you, whether you want to be involved in it or not, and there’s no way to keep yourself separate or safe. It goes with the rotating protagonists, really: the structure prioritizes the collective over the individual. This is rare to see in horror–I tentatively suspect it being an Argentin film and not an American one may tie into that–and it’s cool.
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I need something between a meh and a full wooo. Wo, live music?
Woooooo live music!!
Another Woman — A small, closely-observed drama featuring Gena Rowlands as a self-controlled and successful philosophy professor whose midlife crisis is catalyzed when she begins to overhear therapy sessions from the office next door. Several of these scenes are simply Rowlands’ face filling the frame as she reacts in horror to some new revelation she is forced to recognize about herself. The description of the movie doesn’t do it justice; it is so precisely crafted that this story is as thrilling as Jaws even if the plot seems quotidian. (And of course that’s part of its effect — it could happen to you!)
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I saw this once years and years ago and remembered little about it save the conceit of the overheard therapy sessions. But now, at around the same age as the character (as well as the filmmaker) I found it mesmerizing.
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(Given how many smart people I’ve seen fucked over, sometimes by themselves, I sometimes wonder if intelligence is overrated. Certainly, trying to pretend you’re smarter than you are is a bad idea. From a dramatic perspective, it’s basically irrelevant – “Everyone gets what they want and everybody pays.”).
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Hell yeah. This is such a good film and the hang-out vibes with Hutton and Barbeau are impeccable. One of my favourite thing about John Carpenter is how many great deep cuts he has, and this is maybe my favourite thing in that category.
I really would put it high on my list of favorite Carpenters. And hell yeah to his great deep cuts.
Year of the Month update!
Here’s a primer on some of the movies, albums, books and TV we’ll be covering for 1973 in October!
TBD: Patrick Mio Llaguno – The Long Goodbye
Oct. 14th: Bridgett Taylor: Goodbye, Yellow Brick Road
Oct. 15th: Lauren James: Working
Oct. 16th: John Bruni: Shotgun Willie/Sweet Revenge
Oct. 22nd: Lauren James: The Wicker Man
Oct. 20th: Sam Scott: János Vitéz
Oct. 26th: Ben Hohenstatt: Mind Games
Oct. 29th: Lauren James: Don’t Look Now
And this November, you can write about any of these movies, albums, books, et al from 2018!
Nov. 10th: Bridgett Taylor: Aquaman
Nov. 12th: Ben Hohenstatt: Bark Your Head Off, Dog
Nov. 24th: Sam Scott: Ice Cream Man
I normally stay away from Tubi because of the ads, but it’d be kind of silly to complain about commercial breaks in a TV movie, wouldn’t it?
Tubi’s ads during movies are also not that intrusive whereas Peacock hates you and wants you to know that.
I still haven’t forgiven HBO for putting in ad breaks, especially because I discovered this watching Sinners and, I swear, it’s like they went out of their way to put every single commercial at the worst possible time.