10 Biggest Plot-Changing Movie Phone Calls

Five years after Black Christmas made the infamous babysitter calls a popular horror trope, director Fred Walton tried a more straight-forward retelling of the legend.

The first 20 minutes of When a Stranger Calls, which finds a young Carol Kane tasked with babysitting two sleeping children, follow the tale almost beat for beat, with the police revealing the location of the call too late. The film's opening moments are chillingly effective enough to have generated decades of cult fans, but few seems to recall the rest of the film.

After the caller is captured by police, the film leaps ahead seven years later, where he is in an insane asylum. He escapes, only to be hunted by a metally-scarred Kane and cop Charles Durning.

Beyond the first twenty minutes, however, the film starts to show its weaknesses, devolving into a fairly generic police manhunt film.

The film's remake course-corrected, but perhaps a little too far. Simon West's 2006 film expands the opening into a feature-length film. Given West's ham-fisted, Con Air-style, he was a bad match for a film that worked on suspense, nor did it help that it was released during a period when horror films were geared toward a PG-13 audience.

Fans of the original would serve themselves well to seek out the made-for-cable sequel, which reunites Durning and Kane and follows the same beats as its originator, with equally terrifying-to-middling results.