A Horror Legend Helmed This Forgotten 46-Year-Old TV Movie Right Before His Masterpiece (2024)

Director John Carpenter has always sought to refine his many talents as an artist (whether that be directing, writing, or composing). That's a big reason why, after having helmed independent productions like Dark Star and Assault on Precinct 13 in the late 1970s, Carpenter accepted a job from NBC to direct the straight-to-television release of his often-forgotten horror film Someone's Watching Me! right before directing his masterpiece, Halloween, in 1978.

Once considered lost to time, Someone's Watching Me! was only rather recently re-released for the home media market in 2018. Since then, longtime 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's Watching Me! is an amalgamation of Carpenter's idiosyncrasies as a director and the influences of one of the all-time greats ever to do it, Alfred Hitchcock.

What Is Someone's Watching Me About?

If You Feel Like You're Being Watched, It's Because You Are

At the offset of Someone's Watching Me!, television director Leigh Michaels (Lauren Hutton) moves into a new downtown apartment in Los Angeles known as Arkham Tower. Having recently relocated from New York City, Leigh needs a new job, and she finds it directing live television in LA, where she befriends her co-director, Sophie (Adrienne Barbeau). Shortly thereafter, Leigh also meets a philosophy professor named Paul (David Birney) at her local watering hole, and the two strike up a romantic relationship.

Practically speaking, life couldn't be going much better for Leigh, but then everything goes to hell when she begins getting anonymous phone calls from a strange person and is sent a series of bizarre gifts in the mail: everything from a potential free vacation to a telescope and even a bathing suit. As this stalker invades every facet of Leigh's life, she turns to Sophie and Paul for support and sets about trying to decipher the identity of the assailant herself because the police are seemingly unwilling to help.

Leigh's investigation quickly turns up one fact: whoever this stalker is, he lives in the apartment complex directly across from hers, with a sightline that stares into her home. Taking turns, Leigh, Sophie, and Paul stake out the building across the way with the help of Leigh's new telescope, leading to the arrest of a man Leigh believes to be her stalker but who turns out not to have been following his capture by police.

When the strange letters resume again, it becomes apparent to Leigh that she pointed the finger at the wrong man, and her stalker is still very active in the building across from hers. Spotting a man spying on her from his balcony, Leigh attempts to confront him, armed with only a knife and a walkie-talkie, to communicate with Sophie back in Leigh's apartment. However, once Leigh enters the man's apartment, she hears Sophie scream and can only watch from across the street as someone attacks her friend. Leigh rushes back to help, but by the time she gets there, both Sophie and her attacker have disappeared.

Alone in her apartment, Leigh unearths a hidden microphone the stalker has been using to surveil her every move, meaning that he somehow has access to her apartment. Suspecting that her building manager might be her stalker, Leigh breaks into his home, where she finds proof of his crimes in the form of monitoring devices. Returning home, Leigh is shocked to find a suicide note sitting on her table with her name on it. That's when Stiles attacks from the shadows, and Leigh must marshal every bit of resilience she has to survive.

How Did Alfred Hitchcock Influence Someone's Watching Me?

Carpenter Put the Classic Hitchcock Formula to Excellent Use

Whereas John Carpenter's seminal Halloween borrowed heavily from the Master of Suspense, Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, Someone's Watching Me! took its inspiration from another classic Hitchcockian masterpiece, Rear Window. Unlike Psycho, Rear Window is less of a horror film and more of a thriller.

Rear Window offers its audiences a truly voyeuristic story in the tale of James Sterwart's L.B. Jefferies, who, while stuck in his New York City apartment following an accident in which he broke his leg, finds himself unable to resist the urge to spy on his neighbors. While doing so, Jefferies witnesses what he believes to have been a murder in the building directly across from his own. The only problem is that no one seems to believe him, which means that if he's going to prove his neighbor killed someone, he'll have to do so on his own.

Jefferies' day job in Rear Window is as a photographer, which, itself, is a comment on the voyeurism at the heart of the film. John Carpenter has fun with this idea by updating it to make Leigh a live-television director, someone who no doubt spends just as much time as Jefferies (if not more) peering at life through the lens of a camera.

Like other movies soon to come in the future, Someone's Watching Me! took Rear Window's initial premise and had a little fun with it. While Leigh certainly uses her high-powered telescope to help decipher the true nature of her stalker's crimes, it's Stiles who spends the most time spying on her. As John Carpenter bounces back and forth between both characters secretly monitoring one another, he ratchets up the tension and keeps the audience in suspense about what might happen next.

While Someone's Watching Me! and Rear Window certainly have similarities (including a helpful best friend and a romantic interest willing to believe the hero when no one else will), these two films also have differences. For instance, Leigh's character is quite a bit more active than that of Jefferies. Some of that has to do with the fact that Jefferies uses a wheelchair for the entirety of Rear Window, but it's also in how Carpenter chooses to write Leigh, giving the character far more agency than Hitchcock granted his own (even if her intuitions often prove incorrect).

Having a forceful main character places Leigh in far more mortal peril than Jefferies almost ever is, as is seen during the sequence in which she tracks her stalker to her building's laundry room and must hide under a basement grate when he doubles back on her and tries to catch her unaware. As the walls close in on Leigh (quite literally), Carpenter beautifully choreographs his main character's peril by taking her from the wide-open relative safety of her apartment to the more confined spaces of being boxed in by forces she can't control.

In the end, both films more or less conclude the same way, with the hero barely surviving a run-in with the individual they knew was a criminal all along. And while that certainly sounds like your typical trite happy ending, the joy in both of these movies comes from the thrills you experience while watching them.

How Did Someone's Watching Me Lead John Carpenter to Halloween?

It Helped Earn Him His Official Filmmaking Stripes

Someone's Watching Me! has long been referred to as "the lost Carpenter film" due to its relatively scarce availability compared to many of the master's other movies. The film's initial title was going to be "High Rise," and Carpenter agreed to helm the picture for one key reason: to work his way into the Director's Guild of America.

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

As good as life was for John Carpenter at that time, it was about to get even better. According to lore, just two weeks after wrapping on Someone's Watching Me!, the director moved on to helm the film that would arguably become his masterpiece, the slasher progenitor, Halloween.

Thanks to the experience he was able to garner on a professional movie set for the first time in his life, Carpenter was able to take all of those little tips and tricks and apply them to Halloween. Maintaining that type of confidence in his work wasn't something he was able to do as easily before, but he'd go on to create a catalog of films that rival anyone else's in the genre. And Carpenter's quick to point out that despite Someone's Watching Me's! relative lack of success, he's still very proud of what the film is.

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Halloween (1978)

R

Horror

Thriller

Where to Watch

• stream
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*Availability in US

Director

John Carpenter

Release Date

October 27, 1978

Cast

Jamie Lee Curtis , Donald Pleasence , Nancy Loomis , P.J. Soles , Tony Moran

Writers

John Carpenter , Debra Hill

Runtime

91 minutes

Main Genre

Horror

Production Company

Compass Internation Pictures

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