A horror legend made this forgotten 46-year-old TV movie shortly before his masterpiece

Director John Carpenter has always strived to hone his diverse talents as an artist (be it directing, writing or composing). That’s a big reason why, after directing independent productions like Dark star And Attack on District 13 In the late 1970s, Carpenter accepted a contract from NBC to direct the direct broadcast of his oft-forgotten horror film Someone is watching me! shortly before he staged his masterpiece, Halloween, in 1978.

Once considered lost in time, Someone is watching me! was re-released to the home media market relatively recently in 2018. Since then, long-time John Carpenter fans have been able to see for themselves how one of the greatest horror directors of all time cut his teeth and honed his craft. Better yet, Someone is watching me! is a mix of Carpenter’s idiosyncrasies as a director and the influences of one of the greatest directors of all time: Alfred Hitchcock.

Why is someone watching me?

If you feel like you’re being watched, it’s because you are

At the offset of Someone is watching me!Television director Leigh Michaels (Lauren Hutton) moves into a new downtown Los Angeles apartment known as Arkham Tower. Leigh recently moved from New York City and needs a new job. She finds this as a director of live television shows in LA, where she becomes friends with her co-director Sophie (Adrienne Barbeau). Shortly afterwards, Leigh also meets a philosophy professor named Paul (David Birney) at her local pub and the two begin a romantic relationship.

Practically speaking, life couldn’t be much better for Leigh, but then everything goes to hell when she starts getting anonymous calls from a stranger and receives a series of bizarre gifts in the mail: everything from a possible free vacation to a telescope to a swimsuit. When this stalker intrudes into all areas of Leigh’s life, she enlists the help of Sophie and Paul and sets out to unravel the attacker’s identity herself, as the police seem unwilling to help.

Leigh’s investigation quickly uncovers one fact: whoever this stalker is, he lives in the apartment complex directly across from her, overlooking her house. Leigh, Sophie and Paul take turns staking out the building across the street using Leigh’s new telescope, leading to the arrest of a man who Leigh believes to be her stalker, but who, as it turns out, did not follow up on his capture by the police .

When the strange letters resurface, Leigh realizes she’s been pointing the finger at the wrong man and her stalker is still very active in the building across the street from hers. When Leigh spots a man spying on her from his balcony, he attempts to confront him, armed only with a knife and a walkie-talkie to communicate with Sophie in Leigh’s apartment. However, when Leigh enters the man’s apartment, she hears Sophie screaming and can only watch from across the street as someone attacks her friend. Leigh rushes back to help, but when she gets there, both Sophie and her attacker are gone.

Alone in her apartment, Leigh finds a hidden microphone that the stalker has been using to monitor her every move, meaning he somehow has access to her apartment. Suspecting that her property manager may be her stalker, Leigh breaks into his house, where she finds evidence of his crimes in the form of surveillance devices. When Leigh returns home, she is shocked to find a suicide note with her name on it on her table. Then Stiles attacks from the shadows and Leigh must use all her resilience to survive.

What influence did Alfred Hitchcock have on someone watching me?

Carpenter makes excellent use of the classic Hitchcock formula

While John Carpenter is leading the way Halloween borrowed heavily from the master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock Psycho, Someone is watching me! was inspired by another of Hitchcock’s classic masterpieces: rear window. As opposed to Psycho, rear window is less of a horror film and more of a thriller.

rear window offers its viewers a truly voyeuristic tale in the story of James Sterwart’s LB Jefferies, who is stuck in his New York apartment after an accident in which he breaks his leg and cannot resist the urge to spy on his neighbors. Jefferies witnesses a murder that he suspects took place in the building directly across from his house. The only problem is that no one seems to believe him. So if he wants to prove that his neighbor killed someone, he has to do it himself.

Jefferies’ day job in rear window is as a photographer, which in turn is a commentary on the voyeurism that underlies the film. John Carpenter has fun with this idea, updating it to make Leigh a live television director who undoubtedly spends as much time as Jefferies (if not more) looking at life through the lens of a camera.

Like other films that will be released soon in the future, Someone is watching me! took Rear windows Starting premise and had a bit of fun with it. While Leigh certainly uses her powerful telescope to decipher the true nature of her stalker’s crimes, it’s Stiles who spends the most time spying on her. As John Carpenter jumps back and forth between the two characters, secretly observing each other, he heightens the tension and keeps the audience on the edge of their seats as to what might happen next.

While Someone is watching me! And rear window While the two films certainly have similarities (including a supportive best friend and a romantic interest who is willing to believe the hero when no one else will), these two films also have differences. For example, Leigh’s character is a lot more active than Jefferies’. Part of that has to do with the fact that Jefferies is in a wheelchair all the time rear windowbut it also depends on how Carpenter Leigh writes, giving the character far more agency than Hitchcock gave him (even if her intuitions often prove wrong).

With a powerful lead character, Leigh faces far greater mortal danger than Jefferies almost ever is, as seen in the sequence where she pursues her stalker in her building’s laundry room and has to hide under a basement grate when he turns on her and tries to catch them off guard. As the walls close in on Leigh (literally), Carpenter beautifully choreographs the danger for his protagonist, taking her from the wide-open relative safety of her apartment into the tighter spaces where she is penned in by forces that which she cannot control.

In the end, both films end more or less the same way: the hero barely survives the encounter with the person he knew all along was a criminal. And while that certainly sounds like a typical, trite happy ending, the joy of these two films lies in the thrill you experience while watching them.

How did someone watching me direct John Carpenter to Halloween?

It helped him get his official awards as a filmmaker

Someone is watching me! has long been referred to as “the lost Carpenter film” due to its relative infrequency availability compared to many of the master’s other films. The film’s original title was going to be “High Rise,” and Carpenter agreed to direct the film for one important reason: to work his way into the Director’s Guild of America.

John Carpenter’s 1970s filmography
Year	title	Roll
1974	Dark star	Director/writer/composer
1976	Attack on District 13	Director/writer/composer
1978	Zuma Beach (TV film)	writer
1978	Someone is watching me! (TV film)	Director/Writer
1978	Halloween	Director/writer/composer
1979	Elvis (TV film)	director
1979	Better late than never (TV film)	writer

As a bonus, Carpenter also met his future wife on set, actress Adrienne Barbeau, who played Sophie (and who would later star in other Carpenter classics). The fog.) During a conversation with film critic Tom McCarthy, Carpenter said to him:

“I thought it was a really, really good idea. So I had my first experience with television. And my first union experiences. That’s how I got into the Director’s Guild. I really had a lot of fun doing it, I have to say. “You.”

As good as life was for John Carpenter back then, it was about to get even better. According to tradition, it was delivered just two weeks after being packed Someone is watching me!The director took over the direction of the film that was supposed to be his masterpiece: The slasher prequel, Halloween.

Thanks to the experience he gained on a professional film set for the first time in his life, Carpenter was able to apply all of these little tips and tricks Halloween. Previously he had not been able to maintain this confidence in his work so easily, but he created a catalog of films that rivaled any other film in the genre. And Carpenter is quick to point it out anyway Someone is watching me! Despite its relative lack of success, he is still very proud of what the film is.

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