Lauren Hutton wears an unidentified watch

Phone pressed to her ear, alarm rising in her face, Leigh Michaels wears a gold watch on a tan strap at the wrist gripping the receiver. Lauren Hutton plays Leigh in Someone's Watching Me!, the 1978 TV movie John Carpenter wrote and directed the same year he made Halloween, a thriller about a television director who realizes a stranger across the city is watching her apartment through a telescope and phoning to tell her so.

Leigh is a working woman alone in a high-rise, and the film is Carpenter's Rear Window in reverse, the watched instead of the watcher, all phone calls and curtains and the slow horror of being seen. The watch is a gold dress watch on a light strap, the everyday piece of a busy professional, but the dial never clears and no maker reads, so the brand stays unidentified.

The whole film runs on telephones and timing, the stalker's calls landing on a schedule, and Leigh races to prove she is not imagining the eye at the far end of the glass. Carpenter made it for television only months before Halloween made his name for good.