“Rape is when a man consciously keeps a woman in fear.”
Written and directed by John Carpenter
What kind of horror movie is it? Made-for-TV thriller.
In the vast domain of geekdom, is there a more commonly uttered proclamation than “I love _insert name here_, but only his/her/their early work”?
I can’t begin to list the bands/singer-songwriters I’ve heard that comment lobbed at.
Fan love is awfully fickle. Once you make a name for yourself as an artist, you’re expected to maintain a recognizable style while still keeping up with the times at a frantic pace, lest your career be derisively revised as a mere one-hit wonder. Y’know, like how Devo are a one-hit wonder, except they had several Billboard-charting singles and albums in their active years.
It’s true what they say: nobody loves you when you’re down and out (definitely the work of another one-hit wonder). Still, you can’t help but wonder about whether the fate of most artists is to peak in a selected craft only to inevitably decline in later years.
Does genius have an expiry date?
John Carpenter, the subject of today’s Blogowe’en, is an exceptionally frustrating figure.
From his feature-length debut with the 1975 sci-fi comedy Dark Star to 1988’s satirical They Live, Carpenter almost never took a wrong step. This thirteen year period displayed considerable range from the director, as he segued effortlessly from drama (Elvis), romance (Starman), action (Assault On Precinct 13) and the many genres fused together to make Big Trouble In Little China. The horror films made during this period—Halloween (1978), The Fog (1980), The Thing (1982) and Prince of Darkness (1987)—are some of the creepiest in the annals of cinema. There were missteps, like his flaccid take on Christine or his weak script for Halloween II. In spite of these two, John Carpenter was still responsible for some of the most entertaining movies made in the seventies and eighties. Of which, the 1978 telemovie Someone’s Watching Me is a welcome addition to its better-known brethren.
Someone’s Watching Me follows TV producer Leigh Michaels (the gravelly-voiced Lauren Hutton), as she moves into a state-of-the-art, high-rise apartment in Los Angeles. Trouble is, she’s become the focus of an unseen figure who spies on her from another high rise apartment who begins calling her every night, arranging items to be delivered to her room, and leaving messages inside her apartment while she’s out.
Michaels’ stalker will stop at nothing until he has exerted complete power over her and soon shows that he’s unafraid to kill just to get to her.
Someone’s Watching Me was made the same year as Halloween, yet Carpenter shows no sign of exhaustion. He’s in top form here, with fluid, graceful tracking shots, and a tense, smart script full of pithy dialogue and populated by well-rounded, likeable characters. The script is one of Carpenter’s best and is really given life by a game cast head by Lauren and featuring B-movie vets Adrienne Barbeau (whom Carpenter married not long after filming) and Charles Cyphers (who appeared in a handful of John Carpenter films and was the evil gym coach on the episode of Buffy where the swim team turned out to be murderous fish-men). The main cast of characters are likeable, funny and thoroughly charming.
That Carpenter could go from writing the memorable female characters played by Hutton and Barbeau to the dim non-entities of Ghosts Of Mars is astounding.
Someone’s Watching Me is, like most Carpenter films, superbly-shot. With nicely understated photography that balances day-to-day mundanity with underlying menace, this isn’t the burnt out, who-gives-a-shit John Carpenter that indifferently helmed Vampires in ‘98, but a brilliant filmmaker at the top of his game.
So what happened?
Unfortunately, Carpenter’s output in the last two decades suggests that he’d rather be a hired gun than a proud auteur. It seems that years of undeveloped projects, like his proposed remake of Creature of the Black Lagoon or a biopic of Howard Hawks, and the initial critical drubbings he received for the now-beloved Thing and Little China have broken the man’s spirit.
Of his later work, only the terrific In The Mouth of Madness and the misunderstood Escape From L.A. are worthy. “Cigarette Burns” and “Hair” for TV anthologies Masters Of Horror and Body Bags were occasionally inventive, but mostly inessential. The rest of his output from the past two decades has been pretty dire, and seldom seen.
And I mean seldom seen. I was one of three people who went to see 2001’s Ghosts of Mars for its opening weekend. I can only assume the other two were also going out of loyalty to either Carpenter or star (and once-exceptional rapper) Ice Cube. Again, I ask, what happened?
Someone’s Watching Me’s recent DVD release includes an interview with Carpenter where he speaks of his fondness for this forgotten telefilm. The 61-year old director speaks with a passion that’s been noticeably absent on recent commentaries where he seems more interested in talking about his film scores or telling Natasha Henstridge why he loves smoking weed. Great work doesn’t happen by accident and John Carpenter was once a smart, young kid who was eager to get a certain kind of performance from actors and frame sequences in an interesting way. In his later years, it seems that the lazier tendencies that lead to the likes of Christine have overcome the man’s storytelling skills. It’s a damn shame, too. For him to make another nice, quiet surprise like Someone’s Watching Me would really be something.
Hey, Devo’s new album looks promising. Could a John Carpenter comeback really be so impossible?
Availability: Wherever fine DVDs are sold!
October 14th, 2009 at 10:49 pm
This movie is interesting for a bunch of reasons.
First of all, Carpenter does an amazing job of building the Stalker/Killer up to almost supernatural levels. For the vast majority of the film he’s just a shadow, or a disembodied voice, when he suddenly shows up in the flesh it’s quite a shock. He also looks like an early prototype for Michael Meyers.
The other thing I think is interesting, is that with his next movie John Carpenter laid down the template for what would become the Slasher film. That included the concept of the “Final Girl”, a usually virginal character who doesn’t engage in the vices of the other victims, and so survives to do battle with the killer, ultimately emerging as the victor. Halloween also signaled a shift from adult characters, who had traditionally populated horror movies, to generic teenagers who would come to dominate the genre.
In contrast, this movie’s heroine, Leigh Michaels is an established career woman, who picks up her philosophic(but not platonic) love interest at a bar. She drinks, smokes, has sex, and in the end, still kills the bad guy.
I think this movie sits right in the middle of the European tradition of the Giallo, and the American Slasher. It’s almost like it offers a view of what might have been in an alternate reality.
It’s also simply a well made, and stylish Thriller, that delivers plenty of suspense, and genuine scares.
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October 18th, 2009 at 2:28 am
It’s interesting that the movie with his most atypical cast of characters (read: teenagers) was the one that put Carpenter on the map. With the exception of Christine, he’s never gone back to that well.
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