When a Stranger Calls

When a Stranger Calls (1979) is a US horror thriller you can watch online on iFILM. Director Fred Walton put Carol Kane in an empty house with two sleeping children and a telephone that will not stop ringing. The voice on the other end starts odd and gets worse — fast.

The opening sequence became a textbook example of how to build terror without showing anything at all, and film classes still use it that way. Charles Durning plays the detective working the case from the outside in. Everything the slasher and home-invasion genre reached for in the years that followed, this film had already laid out. Stream When a Stranger Calls (1979) online on iFILM.