"Long Distance Call" (1953)

[spoilers] This Richard Matheson story is another nice example of a specific type of technology-related horror popular at midcentury. Let’s call it the “haunted telephone” story, reaching into the privacy of your home to make your phone ring and such. Who could be calling? Robert Aickman has a nice version in “Your Tiny Hand Is Frozen” (also from 1953) and there’s a host of others. In fact, the original title for this story, “Sorry, Right Number,” is a direct reference to the 1948 movie Sorry, Wrong Number, which features Barbara Stanwyck playing a disabled woman confined to bed but with an unfortunate line to the outside world in the telephone by her bedside. That movie has exactly the mood Matheson wants to set here: a little bit paranoid and a little bit helpless, and it’s all coming through the phone. Our gal in this story is much older but likewise confined to bed. The calls come in the middle of the night. At first the caller never speaks and he never hangs up. When he finally does speak, the things he says make no sense. The story is still a little scary—it made me nervous anyway, even if it’s also fairly obvious. Matheson could probably make recipe directions and technical manuals scary. The story plays explicitly with this technology that has access to our most private, intimate, and vulnerable lives. Today communications technology is ubiquitous and overwhelming, but still there are movies like Unfriended, which work similar angles with internet technology. With no caller ID in 1953, all incoming phone calls were anonymous, just the ringing of the phone. You knew some of the voices. The ones you didn’t know could be creepy until you knew who it was. Matheson leans into that and builds on it. The voice is ominous, but it doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t make sense, but it is ominous. So we are well softened for the ridiculous revelation that the calls are coming from a graveyard. I stayed under the story’s spell even with that, though there isn’t much more to it than that. Matheson’s habit of reaching for the darkest grim notes is compressed into the certainty of the imminent death of the woman receiving the calls. The rest is mysterious, eerie, unknowable ... on the other end of a telephone line.

The Best of Richard Matheson, ed. Victor LaValle
Listen to story online.