10 Best Films Based On Urban Legends

It's one of the creepiest, classic urban legend horror stories everyone has hard, in large part thanks to the original version of When A Stranger Calls, with Carol Kane and Brian Dennehy.

A babysitter is at her charge late at night when the phone rings. A whispering voice asks bluntly, "Have you checked the children?" who are sound asleep upstairs. She hangs up, ignoring it as a prank, until it happens again. Then again. Eventually, she calls the police to make a report. The call is made again and the police call back. "We've traced the call," the officer says. "The calls are coming from inside the house!"

The babysitter rushes upstairs to find the children dead, the murderer either still there or elusive, depending on the version. The legend dates back to the 1960s, when North American teenagers were seen by the moral majority as irresponsible.

This makes up the first act of When A Stranger Calls, and it's easily the best part of what turns into a fairly standard police/serial killer procedural. Technically, it's a remake of a 20 short film called The Sitter. Studios took note and remade the film in 2006, expanding the opening act into a feature film that, had the PG-13 horror wave not been in full swing, might have actually been scary.

Variations on the tale have been used as a horror trope for decades, perhaps more famously used as the hook for what is considered by many to be the first slasher film, Bob Clark's Black Christmas. There were no children to be checked in that one, just a group of carefree sorority girls who receive calls with only a deep, heavy breathing on the other end.

The film's phone call tracing scene is anachronistically fascinating. This being decades before caller I.D., a phone company representative must run through computer terminals the size of filing cabinets to find the corresponding phone line, creating a suspenseful scene that could never happen in a modern-era film.