Mar 2017
So how are you guys for long-ass reviews? I've been doing TNS one episode a week and am almost halfway through the series.
(introduction)
I was eight years old when Kolchak: The Night Stalker aired in 1974. Because it was Friday, I had permission to stay up an hour past bedtime - it played right after My Partner, the Ghost (aka Randall & Hopkirk, Deceased). It scared me plenty, and I wouldn't miss an episode. Bits and pieces of it stayed with me all my life...scenes, scares, and even certain music cues which I never forgot a note of. Even today, a sudden familiar noise at two or three in the morning will harken back to this show and suddenly I'll be wide awake with my heart beating too fast.
It was a time when American culture was taken with the 'supernatural'...with mysticism and the occult, with ancient Egypt and its mummies and curses and 'pyramid power', with UFOs, with Kirlian photography and ghosts and ESP, with reincarnation, with Bigfoot and spontaneous combustion. We had a fascination for the morbid and dark, The uncaught Zodiac awakening the chill of Jack the Ripper. Leonard Nimoy visited our living rooms for half an hour every weekend to take us In Search Of...the lost town of Roanoke, the Nazca Lines, the ghost of Van Gogh, the death of Pompeii. People carried tattered paperbacks of "Chariots of the Gods" like it was the new Bible. We wanted to know...we were desperate to know, and to believe. We were ready. There had to be more out there, if anyone would just ask.
We wanted to know about power, too. America's unlikeliest heroes that year were a couple of investigative journalists who broke a story of corruption in the highest office, and the name Watergate became a dictionary fixture. After the murder of JFK, after Vietnam, and now the President himself deceiving us we had become disillusioned by authority and wanted more Woodwards and more Bernsteins, tenacious seekers of truth who would defy the Powers That Be, to root out just what it was we weren't being told.
Carl Kolchak was that kind of reporter.
He'd already appeared in a couple of hit made-for-television films, The Night Stalker and The Night Strangler. Kolchak had been a print reporter in Las Vegas when a serial killer terrorized that city in 1972. As the gruesome facts came to be revealed, Kolchak was forced to reach a difficult conclusion that no one else was willing to: the killer was not a madman who thought himself a vampire, but was indeed a genuine vampire. Kolchak was a rational man, unimaginative and not given to fancies, bull-headed to the point of rudeness...but he understood facts. The facts were undeniable.
The movies worked for a number of reasons, but foremost among them was veteran character actor Darren McGavin as Kolchak, a newsman as exuberant as he was tactless. He is described in The Night Strangler as having walked straight out of a production of The Front Page, with his vented porkpie hat and simple blue-collar attire. That's him, boy, he'd have been at home in Hollywood's Thirties with his flippant jibes and irrepressible belief in his calling, his steadfast conviction in the people's right to know the truth. Carl Kolchak flows from McGavin like water from a spring. He's not a collection of mannerisms, he's a force of nature. If The Night Stalker had been a stage play it would have closed early because in McGavin's hands Kolchak would have chased everyone else off the stage in pursuit of a juicy story.
Stephen King wrote in his book Danse Macabre that Kolchak was the key to taking the vampire from its stuffy Gothic setting where we might see it as silly kids' stuff and making it a credible part of the real world - the mundane place of used car lots and property leases, of tired and hassled casino showgirls, of hospital blood banks and bureaucrats and bellicose editors. The supernatural was a hard sell for a down-to-Earth, no-bullshit guy like Kolchak, but if he could believe in vampires, King argues, then so could we. Producer Dan Curtis (of Dark Shadows fame) and author Richard Matheson convinced us by convincing Kolchak. King was praising the original Night Stalker telefilm. He was less laudatory of the series overall but still impressed with star Darren McGavin.
This eight-year-old didn't know anything about any of that. I'd never even heard of the two TV movies. But I knew what scared me, and Kolchak knew it before I did.
That's what this show is for me, the "safe scare" that the horror genre is at its heart unadulterated by gore, sex, subtext, or other concerns. It is simple fear distilled. It is the tale told at the campfire, in the dark, in the open where nothing will shelter you. You know it's not real, but...you look over your shoulders anyway. Just in case. 'Cuz you can hear the woods moving.
(introduction)
I was eight years old when Kolchak: The Night Stalker aired in 1974. Because it was Friday, I had permission to stay up an hour past bedtime - it played right after My Partner, the Ghost (aka Randall & Hopkirk, Deceased). It scared me plenty, and I wouldn't miss an episode. Bits and pieces of it stayed with me all my life...scenes, scares, and even certain music cues which I never forgot a note of. Even today, a sudden familiar noise at two or three in the morning will harken back to this show and suddenly I'll be wide awake with my heart beating too fast.
It was a time when American culture was taken with the 'supernatural'...with mysticism and the occult, with ancient Egypt and its mummies and curses and 'pyramid power', with UFOs, with Kirlian photography and ghosts and ESP, with reincarnation, with Bigfoot and spontaneous combustion. We had a fascination for the morbid and dark, The uncaught Zodiac awakening the chill of Jack the Ripper. Leonard Nimoy visited our living rooms for half an hour every weekend to take us In Search Of...the lost town of Roanoke, the Nazca Lines, the ghost of Van Gogh, the death of Pompeii. People carried tattered paperbacks of "Chariots of the Gods" like it was the new Bible. We wanted to know...we were desperate to know, and to believe. We were ready. There had to be more out there, if anyone would just ask.
We wanted to know about power, too. America's unlikeliest heroes that year were a couple of investigative journalists who broke a story of corruption in the highest office, and the name Watergate became a dictionary fixture. After the murder of JFK, after Vietnam, and now the President himself deceiving us we had become disillusioned by authority and wanted more Woodwards and more Bernsteins, tenacious seekers of truth who would defy the Powers That Be, to root out just what it was we weren't being told.
Carl Kolchak was that kind of reporter.
He'd already appeared in a couple of hit made-for-television films, The Night Stalker and The Night Strangler. Kolchak had been a print reporter in Las Vegas when a serial killer terrorized that city in 1972. As the gruesome facts came to be revealed, Kolchak was forced to reach a difficult conclusion that no one else was willing to: the killer was not a madman who thought himself a vampire, but was indeed a genuine vampire. Kolchak was a rational man, unimaginative and not given to fancies, bull-headed to the point of rudeness...but he understood facts. The facts were undeniable.
The movies worked for a number of reasons, but foremost among them was veteran character actor Darren McGavin as Kolchak, a newsman as exuberant as he was tactless. He is described in The Night Strangler as having walked straight out of a production of The Front Page, with his vented porkpie hat and simple blue-collar attire. That's him, boy, he'd have been at home in Hollywood's Thirties with his flippant jibes and irrepressible belief in his calling, his steadfast conviction in the people's right to know the truth. Carl Kolchak flows from McGavin like water from a spring. He's not a collection of mannerisms, he's a force of nature. If The Night Stalker had been a stage play it would have closed early because in McGavin's hands Kolchak would have chased everyone else off the stage in pursuit of a juicy story.
Stephen King wrote in his book Danse Macabre that Kolchak was the key to taking the vampire from its stuffy Gothic setting where we might see it as silly kids' stuff and making it a credible part of the real world - the mundane place of used car lots and property leases, of tired and hassled casino showgirls, of hospital blood banks and bureaucrats and bellicose editors. The supernatural was a hard sell for a down-to-Earth, no-bullshit guy like Kolchak, but if he could believe in vampires, King argues, then so could we. Producer Dan Curtis (of Dark Shadows fame) and author Richard Matheson convinced us by convincing Kolchak. King was praising the original Night Stalker telefilm. He was less laudatory of the series overall but still impressed with star Darren McGavin.
This eight-year-old didn't know anything about any of that. I'd never even heard of the two TV movies. But I knew what scared me, and Kolchak knew it before I did.
That's what this show is for me, the "safe scare" that the horror genre is at its heart unadulterated by gore, sex, subtext, or other concerns. It is simple fear distilled. It is the tale told at the campfire, in the dark, in the open where nothing will shelter you. You know it's not real, but...you look over your shoulders anyway. Just in case. 'Cuz you can hear the woods moving.
Either way, I fully agree about McGavin's portrayal of the character. He was perfect for the role.