Someone's Watching Me! (1978)

When Leigh Michaels moves into Arkham Tower, a massive apartment building in Los Angeles, she becomes just one among literally thousands of tenants. She thinks she is safely anonymous in the crowded building, but she catches the eye of a Peeping Tom with a high powered telescope in the building across the street.

The peeper employs his telescope and an array of recording equipment hidden in her apartment to harass Leigh and keep tabs on her. He sends her presents, calls her at work, sends her champagne when she is at a restaurant, uses a remote dimmer switch to mess with her lights... She can't sleep, won't eat... She's falling apart. Even when she changes her phone number, the calls keep coming.

The police are no help, so she has to use her wits to discover who's watching her from a distance before he gets too close.

In every shot inside Leigh's apartment, at least before she realizes that her mysterious caller can see her. her curtains are wide open and she is very visible through her big windows. Looking out those windows at the building across the street, we can see the lights on and people moving around in the hundreds of apartments visible from Leigh's. It illustrates the vulnerability and lack of privacy that Leigh and all of these apartment dwellers have to feel in their own homes.

Someone's Watching Me was a television movie, but due to the skillful direction of John Carpenter and the strong performance by Lauren Hutton as Leigh, it's as suspenseful as many movies that receive theatrical releases. And now on DVD, it is presumably even more suspenseful than it was in its original television presentation, as there are no ads for Topol - the Smoker's Tooth Polish! - and K-Tel Records popping up to break the tension.

It stops short of being a full-on horror/slasher movie, keeping the body count, swearing, and sexual content to a minimum for the sake of the television audience. It may not be as intense as a blood-soaked, limbs-flying, knives-flashing psychotic killer movie of the type that dominated the theaters in the following years, but it's quite suspenseful, well acted, well shot, and pretty good for TV.