TV's 25 Scariest Episodes - #s18 & 17 - Kolchak Double Feature

October 12, 1:52 PMClassic TV ExaminerDoug Krentzlin

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      Darren McGavin as Carl Kolchak in The Night Stalker (ABC)

Dan Curtis is a name you're going to be seeing a lot of in my blog this month. Curtis, bless his heart, was television's Master of Gothic Horror in the 60s and 70s. He was our generation's Tod Browning, James Whale, Val Lewton and Roger Corman all wrapped up into one.

When The Night Stalker, an episode of The ABC Movie of the Week, was first broadcast on January 11, 1972, few people dreamed it would earn the highest ratings to date for a made-for-tv movie. This low-budget gem not only spawned a sequel and a regular series that ran for one season, but also proved to be highly influential. (Chris Carter acknowledged that it was the main inspiration for The X-Files.)

The director was John Llewellyn Moxey and the producer was the aforementioned Dan Curtis whose most notable credit to date was the supernatural TV soap opera Dark Shadows. The script was adapted from The Kolchak Papers, an unpublished novel by Jeff Rice, by celebrated horror and sci-fi author Richard Matheson who, along with Rod Serling and Charles Beaumont, was one of the main contributors to The Twilight Zone.

Matheson turned The Night Stalker into an affectionate homage to the classic newspaper melodramas of the 30s and 40s. (The über newspaper saga The Front Page was directly referenced in the sequel The Night Strangler.) Criminally underrated movie and television actor Darren McGavin (TV’s first Mike Hammer) had his most high-profile role as Carl Kolchak, the quintessential cynical, burned-out crime reporter.

Fired from gigs all over the country, Kolchak is working for a small Las Vegas rag under the command of archetypical grouchy editor Tony Vicenzo (Simon Oakland) when he starts to investigate a bizarre series of murders of young women who have had all the blood drained out of their bodies. Initially, Kolchak believes the killer might be a maniac who thinks he’s a vampire, but eventually he comes to the astonishing conclusion that the murders are the work of a genuine member of the undead.

Given the unexpected success of The Night Stalker, it was not surprising that ABC commissioned Curtis and Matheson to come up with a sequel the next year. Using Barre Lyndon’s play The Man in Half Moon Street as his model, Matheson came up with The Night Strangler. Directed by Curtis, The Night Strangler has Kolchak discovering that women in Seattle are being strangled by Dr. Richard Malcolm (Richard Anderson), a doctor who has stayed eternally young for over a century using a potion that requires the young women's blood as one of the ingredients. (The X-Files borrowed the premise for its third episode Squeeze.)

In both movies, the town leaders use their authority to suppress Kolchak’s investigations for fear of driving off the tourist trade. (Peter Benchley’s best-selling novel Jaws was obviously inspired by the Kolchak films.) Both films also boasted first-rate supporting casts consisting of veteran Hollywood character actors: Claude Akins, Charles McGraw, Kent Smith and Elisha Cook Jr. in The Night Stalker and Scott Brady, Wally Cox, Margaret Hamilton and John Carradine in The Night Strangler. (Carol Lynley was Kolchak’s girl friend in the first film; Jo Ann Pflug was his romantic partner in the second.) 

As mentioned before, a television series featuring Kolchak aired during the 1974-75 season, but that’s another story…