The Scare Salon

John Carpenter should need no introduction to anyone reading this, but the movie we’re talking about today just might. Made for TV just before the filming of Halloween began in 1978, and broadcast on NBC a couple of weeks after Halloween hit theaters, Someone’s Watching Me! (also known as High Rise) was for a long time considered Carpenter’s “lost” film, at least until Scream Factory released it on Blu-ray in 2018. As of this writing, it’s also streaming for free on Tubi, which is where I watched it. Oh, and fun fact: this film was also the first time Carpenter met Adrienne Barbeau, who he later married and who starred in his iconic 80s films The Fog and Escape from New York.

As you can probably guess from the title, Someone’s Watching Me! is a stalker-type thriller more than straight horror and has some very obvious homages to Alfred Hitchcock (particularly Rear Window), but it’s a solid made-for-television production with some great acting performances, decent suspense, and a heaping helping of that John Carpenter panache.

We’re following Leigh Michaels (Lauren Hutton), a live TV director who has just moved to L.A. from New York after what we’re led to assume is an unpleasant breakup. She moves into a swanky, high-tech apartment in a newer building, gets a job at a local television station, and settles into her newly-single life.

She immediately befriends a coworker named Sophie (Adrienne Barbeau) and gets obnoxiously hit on by another coworker named Steve (Grainger Hines) in a way that absolutely wouldn’t fly with most HR departments nowadays. The audience is sort of led to believe that the thing with Steve is going to be a bigger deal than it is, but it’s really only there to set up some foreshadowing for the more troubling shit that’s about to come down the pipeline.

I’d also like to add as an aside that Adrienne Barbeau as Sophie is a delight in this film, and plays a surprisingly modern character for 1978, an out lesbian whose sexuality is barely mentioned and treated as completely normal and not a significant driver of the plot at all. When she mentions her last girlfriend to Leigh, Sophie immediately cracks, “Don’t worry, you’re not my type,” to which Leigh replies, “I’m not worried.” And that’s pretty much the end of it. It’s actually really refreshing, especially for that time period.

Anyway, despite being a quirky, intelligent, independent woman, it’s clear that Leigh is lonely, so one night she goes to what looks like your standard singles bar, sitting there having a cocktail and reading a magazine. She blows off one kinda skeevy fella who approaches, but then notices a handsome dude sitting alone in the corner, also reading and pointedly not being skeevy. She approaches him and charms him with her strange sense of humor (and the fact that she’s, y’know, Lauren Hutton and therefore drop-dead gorgeous), and the pair eventually become an item. Her beau is philosophy professor Paul Winkless (good lord, that name), played by David Birney, and though he doesn’t factor hugely into the plot going forward, he does provide a solid emotional support system for Leigh as the shit begins to hit the fan.

So the first thing that happens in regards to the stalking is that Leigh comes home from work and finds the door to her apartment is ajar. Slightly alarmed but not as wigged out as I would probably be, she goes inside and looks around, then notices that her new landline phone has been installed. She calls the landlord and even though he insists he locked her door after the phone technician left, she assumes that he just fucked up and accidentally left it open. No harm, no foul. However, we the audience see a random dude behind her, sprinting out of her apartment without her spotting him.

From there, things slowly start to become more sinister. She begins receiving crank phone calls, sometimes just someone hanging up, but sometimes a man with a creepy voice calling her by name and saying shit like, “You didn’t go to work today.” She’s unsettled, but tries to downplay it by making jokes.

The next day, Sophie comes over for dinner, and Leigh gets a weird-ass letter in the mail from a company called Excursions Unlimited. It basically says that she’s won a six-month trip to Europe, and that the company is going to be sending her a series of free “gifts” that are supposedly clues to her destination, and if she guesses the destination correctly she wins the trip. Of course, both women assume this is probably a scam and don’t think too much more about it.

When Leigh gets home from work the next day, though, there’s a big package waiting by her apartment door, and inside is a large and very expensive telescope, along with a card from Excursions Unlimited. Unsure what to do but doubtless thinking, “Hey, free telescope,” she sets it up in front of her apartment’s wide, ample windows. Another creepy phone call follows, in which the man confirms that he knows she got the gift. The day after that, an unseen person leaves another present for her with the doorman, and when she opens it, she finds it’s an orange bikini. This time the creepy phone call man just says, “I hope it fits.”

Now thoroughly disturbed, as you would be, she tells Paul and Sophie what’s been going on. Paul rightfully thinks she should contact the police, but Leigh points out that although the whole situation is sketchy as hell, the creepy man hasn’t exactly threatened her or anything. Paul tells her he knows someone on the force, though, and he’ll have a talk with him to see what can be done.

Since this is the 70s and there are really no stalking laws like there are now, the police can’t do jack until the man actually does something like breaking and entering, rape, or murder. Leigh isn’t surprised by the investigators’ inaction, but she’s still in a bit of a tough spot because she knows the dude’s behavior is going to escalate. And sure enough, the phone calls not only get more menacing, but the lights in her apartment start to dim and brighten on their own at random times, as if the guy is somehow controlling them.

One day, she gets a letter slid under her door from Excursions Unlimited, asking to meet her in the parking garage to talk about her “prize.” Thinking she’s gonna confront this motherfucker once and for all, Leigh grabs a knife and hauls ass down there, but gets startled and drops the knife down a grate when she hears someone coming. She removes the grate to retrieve the knife, then sees a shadow coming from the laundry room, so she hides down under the floor while the guy passes by. She gets a decent look at him as he walks over the grate, but she gets scared and runs back to her apartment after he leaves.

A bit later, the phone rings while she’s in the shower, and she throws on a robe and rushes to answer it. The creepy guy says he liked her better without the robe, and it’s right here where she finally realizes that the dude has been able to see her this whole time, and in fact has been watching her from another apartment building across from hers.

Sophie and Paul come over, and they use the gifted telescope to check out the building across the way to see if they can figure out which guy is watching her. And wouldn’t you know it, through a window they spot the man Leigh saw coming out of the laundry room downstairs and standing over the grate. He also has a telescope and appears to be training it toward Leigh’s window. Busted! They call the fuzz, cops burst into the man’s apartment and drag him outta there, and an officer named Gary Hunt (Charles Cyphers) later implies that the police used some strong-arm tactics to “convince” the man to get the fuck out of L.A. and move back to his native Iowa (since he hadn’t technically done anything he could be charged with, you see). Problem solved, right?

Well, there’s still about thirty minutes left in the movie, so obviously the answer to that would be no. Not long after the wrong man is chased out of town, Leigh gets another letter that pretty strongly hints that the stalker is done playing with her and is gonna kill her. The cops think the letter was sent before the other guy’s arrest, but Leigh then sees ANOTHER man in a different apartment watching her through a telescope from across the way. The cops of course don’t believe her, so she resigns herself to sorting the shit out on her own. I won’t spoil what happens after that point, but it’s a tense and somewhat tragic confrontation that’s all the better for how little we see of the antagonist.

Someone’s Watching Me! is naturally not the masterpiece that Halloween, The Thing, or Escape from New York are, but it’s a very entertaining thriller by one of the best directors then working in horror. Of course the TV medium is going to be a bit limiting at the best of times, but Carpenter wrings sufficient suspense out of the setup, and there are some legitimately taut and eerie sequences. Lauren Hutton knocks it out of the park, giving Leigh such a fun, witty, down to earth personality that you can’t help but root for her. And even though Adrienne Barbeau gets less screen time, she’s also a great character, sympathetic and resourceful; the interactions between the two women, while few, are a definite bright spot. While some of the Hitchcock touchstones may be a tad too on the nose, on the whole this was a real hidden gem, and even though I was barely aware of it prior to this, I’m really glad I finally got to see an early example of the work of a master right at the beginning of his ascent. Check it out on Tubi; you won’t regret it.

Until next time, keep it creepy, my friends.