What a way to celebrate Friday the 13th! And what a year for supernatural adventurers, in which Vampirella celebrates her 55th anniversary, and now a certain searsucker suit–wearing representative of the fourth estate hits a special 50th.
On January 11, 2017, I saluted the 45th anniversary of The Night Stalker, a 1972 made-for-TV vampire movie that introduced horror fans to Carl Kolchak, a newspaper reporter in Las Vegas, Nevada, who starts out investigating a string of bizarre homicides and eventually finds himself battling a vampire.
Kolchak was played by veteran character actor Darren McGavin (The Martian Chronicles, A Christmas Story), with stellar support from a cast that included veteran actor Simon Oakland (Bullitt) as Kolchak’s boss, Tony Vincenzo, Carol Lynley (The Poseidon Adventure) as Kolchak’s love interest, Gail Foster, and Barry Atwater (Star Trek: “The Savage Curtain”) as vampire Janos Skorzeny.
The movie was adapted from Las Vegas Sun journalist Jeff Rice’s then-unpublished novel The Kolchak Papers by author and screenwriter Richard Matheson (I Am Legend, The Incredible Shrinking Man, episodes of the classic Twilight Zone), produced by Dan Curtis (Dark Shadows, Trilogy of Terror), and directed by John Llewellyn Moxey (Horror Hotel).
“Jeff Rice wrote this wonderful book because he couldn’t write about the Las Vegas of the mob and official corruption,” said McGavin. “That’s the key. If you take the secrets that go on in the world in which we live, we are surrounded by mysteries that we don’t know how to combat or deal with…. Kolchak really wants to get in there and expose all of the true monsters that are affecting our lives.”
As Rice explained to reporters Al Satian and Heather Johnson in the interview “The Night-Stalker Papers,” published in the Marvel Comics horror magazine Monsters of the Movies #1 (cover-dated June 1974), the original telefilm’s title went through an extremely awkward evolution:
“Originally, I wrote it as a novel, under the title The Kolchak Papers. That’s the title they started filming it under. Then, before they actually started filming, they changed it to The Kolchak Tapes. The first day of filming, they renamed it The Kolchak Papers because The Anderson Tapes [a 1971 crime movie starring Sean Connery] had just been released. When they got through filming it, they decided they didn’t like that title, so it went through various evolutions. At one time it was going to be called Fee Fi Fo Fum, I Smell the Blood…
“Finally, they decided on The Night Stalker, which I thought was ‘original,’ since there’d been a 1964 picture with Robert Taylor and Barbara Stanwyck called The Night Walker!”
Fee Fi Fo Fum, I Smell the Blood… What a god-awful title that would’ve been. A childish “Jack and the Beanstalk” fairy-tale reference used as the name of a modern-day vampire movie set in Las Vegas? It would’ve killed any interest from potential viewers. Talk about dodging a bullet! Fortunately, the better-named The Night Stalker became the highest-rated TV movie at the time, which naturally meant a sequel was ordered by the network.
Kolchak returned to TV screens on January 16, 1973 in The Night Strangler, which took him (and Vincenzo) to Seattle, Washington, where he ends up hunting an immortal serial killer played by Richard Anderson (best known as The Six Million Dollar Man’s Oscar Goldman) with the help of a belly dancer played by Jo Ann Pflug (Scream of the Wolf, M*A*S*H). This time, Matheson provided both the story and screenplay, and once again, ratings were strong enough that ABC remained interested in seeing Kolchak’s further adventures.
At first, a third telemovie was greenlit: The Night Killers, with a story by Matheson and screenplay by William F. Nolan (coauthor of the sci-fi novel Logan’s Run). In it, Kolchak and Vincenzo renew their always-strained working relationship in Hawaii, where Carl uncovers a plot to replace world leaders with android duplicates—that are controlled by alien invaders! McGavin was reportedly displeased with the plot, but his objections became moot when ABC reversed its decision for a movie and instead opted for a weekly series.
Which brings us to Kolchak: The Night Stalker, which made its broadcast debut 50 years ago—on Friday the 13th, 1974!
After being run out of Seattle at the conclusion of The Night Strangler the year before, Kolchak and Vincenzo have made their way to Illinois, where Carl works the crime beat for editor/boss Tony, who now heads the Chicago-based Independent News Service. Their combative love/hate working relationship in the films remains in full effect, with Vincenzo continuing to be exasperated by his reporter’s insistence on turning in outlandish stories about monsters stalking the streets of America—none of which ever make it to publication. (And yet Carl never loses his job…)
Over the course of the series’ one-season, 20-episode run, Carl has to deal with such terrors as shapeshifters, werewolves, space aliens, a headless motorcyclist, a swamp monster created by dreams, and (in the first episode) the return of Jack the Ripper. One episode—the blandly titled “The Vampire”—is a loose sequel to The Night Stalker, with one of Janos Skorzeny’s previously unknown victims rising from the dead in Las Vegas and relocating to Los Angeles; neither Skorzeny, nor Kolchak and Vincenzo’s prior connection to Sin City, is mentioned.
There are a few too many comedic touches in the show—Carl’s arguments with Tony, his run-ins with various extremely vocal police officials, his bumbling encounters with attractive women (an oddity, given he dated a call girl in The Night Stalker and teamed up with a belly dancer in The Night Strangler), his back-and-forth sniping with fellow INS member Ron “Uptight” Updyke (played by Jack Grinnage)—as well as a lack of meaningful characterization for everyone involved, and none of the episodes reach the level of tension and menace in the TV movies, but McGavin’s performance is just so good you’re willing to overlook all that. And occasionally there is a well-written episode—for instance, “Horror in the Heights,” written by Hammer Films veteran writer/director Jimmy Sangster, not only presents the tale of a shape-shifting rakshasa stalking a Jewish neighborhood but examines Kolchak’s trust issues—even with his friends; it’s considered the series’ gold standard of scripting among fans. “The Spanish Moss Murders,” with the aforementioned swamp monster, is pretty good, too.
Still, being scheduled at Friday nights (and then Saturday nights toward the end) pretty much guaranteed low ratings, and on March 28, 1975, the series came to an end with the cringey “The Sentry,” which involved a lizard-monster costume so low-budget and embarassing it made you think canceling the series was a mercy killing.
But Carl and Co. have never completely faded into obscurity. In 1979, CBS picked up the show and started rerunning the episodes as part of its late-night programming; in the early 2000s, the Sci-Fi Channel added it to their schedule. Today, the series runs on Saturday nights on MeTV, the home of horror-movie host Svengoolie. Even better, it drew a whole new generation of fans in the 1990s, when X-Files creator Chris Carter mentioned in interviews what inspired his massively popular series:
“I was inspired by the show Kolchak, The Night Stalker,” said Carter. “It had really scared me as a kid and I wanted to do something as dark and mysterious as I remembered it to be…. Although there’s no Kolchak character in The X-Files, the spirit of the show is in many ways the same.”
There might not have been a “Kolchak character in The X-Files,” but not for lack of trying. Carter approached McGavin at one point and pitched the idea of Carl making his return to TV, but was shot down. McGavin, however, did agree to guest-star as retired FBI agent (and first X-Files investigator) Arthur Dales in Season 5’s “Travelers” and Season 6’s “Agua Mala.” So, not Kolchak but…kinda Kolchak.
Unfortunately, Jeff Rice never reached the same heights of name recognition, or popularity, that his creation did. After The Night Stalker, his involvement with The Night Strangler only extended to his novelizing Matheson’s screenplay. The greenlighting of the TV series led to his filing a lawsuit against ABC and Universal because the studios hadn’t secured sequel rights from him before moving ahead. That, in turn, led to them canceling plans for Rice to write five more Kolchak novelizations, and his Hollywood days came to a quick end; his treatment makes me think of the ending of The Night Stalker, where Kolchak is railroaded out of Las Vegas by city officials and told never to come back.
As Mark Dawidziak—a friend of Rice’s, and author of The Night Stalker Companion and the Kolchak novel Grave Secrets—explained in 2015: “There was a settlement, and, among other things, it awarded Jeff the literary rights to his character. This allowed him to authorize Kolchak comic books, short-story anthologies, and novels (most published…by the Chicago-based Moonstone Entertainment.)”
(In fact, two unproduced but scripted episodes of the series were adapted by Moonstone for comics: Donn Mullally’s “The Get of Belial” and Stephen Lord’s “Eve of Terror.”)
In the years that followed, however, matters apparently only worsened for Kolchak’s creator…
“Beneath the biography and credits,” wrote journalist John L. Smith in 2015, “was a troubled man who, his close friend Bobbie Carson says, was extremely troubled and increasingly afraid of straying from his home near Desert Inn Road. In leaner times, Rice had rented a room from Carson and on occasion slept on her couch. She helped him through emotional and mental crises…. He was having trouble coping recently and wound up in a local emergency room without insurance. He called his friend and implored, ‘Just come and get me.’”
Jeffrey Grant Rice—journalist, author, and creator of one of horror’s most enduring characters—passed away on July 1, 2015. But his inquisitve, bowed-but-never-broken, monster-fighting alter ego continues to live on, in the pages of the comics, novels, and anthologies published by Moonstone.
So, as we celebrate Carl Kolchak’s short but extremely memorable time on television, and perhaps binge-watch the series whose anniversary we’re marking today, let’s also remember the writer who gave him to us.
Thanks, Mr. Rice. You did great.
Sources:
Mark Dawidziak, The Night Stalker Companion: A 25th Anniversary Tribute (Beverly Hills, CA: Pomegranate Press, 1997)
Mark Dawidziak, “Jeff Rice, creator of ‘The Night Stalker,’ had an enormous influence on horror entertainment (appreciation),” Cleveland Plain Dealer, August 4, 2015
Lisa Maccarillo, “A conversation with The X-Files’ creator Chris Carter,” Sci-Fi Entertainment, December 1994
Al Satian and Heather Johnson, “The Night-Stalker Papers,” Monsters of the Movies #1 (New York: Marvel Comics, June 1974)
John L. Smith, “Demons haunted ‘Night Stalker’ creator Jeff Rice,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, July 11, 2015
(“Happy 50th Anniversary, Carl Kolchak” © 2024 Steven A. Roman.)
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