Last year around
this time I paid tribute to the classic horror TV series Dark
Shadows. This Halloween I want to throw the spotlight on
another one of the finest horror series ever, Kolchak: the
Night Stalker. Derived from two TV-movies and cancelled
after just one season of 20 episodes, the show is revered
by horror and fantasy fans, as well it should be.
The premise was very
simple: veteran reporter Carl Kolchak (Darren McGavin) uncovers a
different supernatural or paranormal phenomenon in every episode,
cracks the story wide open, and then has his article squelched by his
editor, the local authorities, or the federal government.
One of the many
reasons the show is so beloved by its fans is the notion of Kolchak’s
Sisyphus-like job as a reporter. It’s a given that none of his
stories will ever see the light of print, yet he continues on,
remaining employed strictly because his harried boss Anthony Vincenzo
(sublime character actor Simon Oakland) respects him.
The show was unique
in that it contained a very healthy dose of humor. Kolchak was a man
out of time — a mid-Seventies reporter who wore a cheap straw hat
and a seersucker suit (the out-of-date wardrobe was McGavin’s own
idea — he said he saw the character as stuck in the early Sixties).
He was a comic figure who inhabited a comic environment (the newsroom
of INS, a lesser wire service), but who deeply believed in his
profession and would do anything, including putting his life in
jeopardy, to get his story.
Like the original
Star Trek, the show’s strength lay in its
scripting and casting. The people who have put it down over the years
(more on that below) have complained about the often
threadbare-looking monsters and the ridiculous idea that one reporter
could encounter so many different menaces.
Well, the show’s
scripters, among them David “The Sopranos” Chase (who served as
the show’s story editor), a young Robert Zemeckis, and Hammer
stalwart Jimmy Sangster (The Horror of Dracula, The Curse of
Frankenstein), carried it off by creating a raft of
extremely imaginative threats, included monsters from Native
American, Cajun, and Haitian legends. My all-time favorite (see
below) is the East Indian monster who appears to you in the form of
the person you trust the most, in Sangster’s episode “Horror in
the Heights.”
In addition to the
scripting, the show was immaculately cast with familiar faces from TV
and the movies. Among the guest stars, and folks cast as Kolchak’s
tipsters, in the 20 eps were Tom Skerritt, John Marley, Phil Silvers,
Nina Foch, Keenan Wynn, Jan Murray, Larry Storch, Carolyn Jones, Erik
Estrada, Scatman Crothers, Antonio Fargas, Lara Parker, James
Gregory, Mary Wickes, J. Pat O’Malley, John Fiedler, Army Archerd,
Milt Kamen, Nita Talbot, Dick Gautier, Jeanne Cooper, Richard Kiel,
Alice Ghostley, Severn Darden, Julie Adams, Bernie Kopell, Jim
Backus, Jesse White, Art Metrano, Jackie Vernon, Hans Conreid, Cathy
Lee Crosby, and both David Doyle and Tom Bosley!
The supporting cast
was also perfect for their cartoonlike roles, from Jack Grinnage's prissy reporter to Ruth McDevitt as the grandmotherly advice columnist
to the sublime Simon Oakland as the long-suffering Vincenzo.
The premier casting
coup, though, was the star himself. Darren McGavin positively shone
in the part, as he was able to capably balance the show’s humor and
chills. He also possessed a terrific voice and was one of the
all-time great hardboiled voiceover men — he had formerly starred
in the Mike Hammer TV show in 1958-59, where he
refined his craft.
Kolchak represented
a fascinating bridge between newspaper comedies of the Thirties like
The Front Page, and the post-Woodward and
Bernstein “reporter as free speech hero” films and TV narratives.
In fact, the most interesting thing about the show was its
anti-establishment stance. Carl Kolchak tries to expose the truth,
but is constantly lied to by the police, politicians, and other
authority figures. The killer-robot episode “Mr. R.I.N.G.” has Kolchak learning that a coverup has been put in place to
uphold “national security.”
It’s refreshing to
find a piece of popular entertainment that so blatantly has as one of
its themes the fact that the government lies to us (a lot). One of
the most common tropes in the series finds Kolchak’s photographs
and audio cassettes being either confiscated by the police or
destroyed. The only thing he’s left with is his trusty tape
recorder, into which he recounts the full story after the menace has
been disposed of.
Given the fact that
that the show is held in very high regard by many horror and fantasy
fans, it surprised me upon researching the series to discover that
there was a very vocal minority of people who thought the series was
a “mistake” — that only the two TV-movies should have been made
— and that those people included the folk behind the creation of
the original TV movies.
In the book Night
Stalking: a 20th Anniversary Kolchak Companion, author Mark
Dawidziak — who himself confesses that he thinks the series was a
mistake (although he wrote not one but two books about it) — got
interviews with all of the principals involved in the original pair
of TV-movies, and all of them complain that the Kolchak
series was completely misguided.
Scripter Richard
Matheson, producer-director Dan Curtis, the creator of the Kolchak
character, Jeff Rice, and Darren McGavin himself all agreed that the two TV-movies were terrific, but they disliked the notion of doing a Kolchak TV series. After the show became a massive cult hit in reruns, McGavin
was fond of noting that he had a terrible time working on it
because it was produced in such a last-minute fashion (the shows were
shot in six days and aired in the order they were shot in, McGavin
noting “We were turning in wet negatives”).
Add to the dissenting voices Stephen
King, who derided the series in his book Danse Macabre
We do have to keep in mind, however, that this comes from a talented
craftsman who feels that every single line he writes is worthy of
publication (you ain't Dostoevsky or Pynchon, Steve, you're a goddamned genre novelist!). As for film/TV
entertainment, remember that King felt that the Kubrick
Shining could be improved upon by a meager U.S. TV
miniseries; he thought a similarly anemic rewrite of von Trier’s
sensational The Kingdom was necessary; and he
botched the EC formula for horror in his tribute to those classic
comics, Creepshow.
The Dawidziak book
(written in 1991) also contains statements in praise of the show. The
late mystery writer and film historian Stuart Kaminsky and several TV
critics, including NPR’s David Bianculli, go on the record
proclaiming the show to be one of the best fantasy series ever to air
on American TV. At this point, you could definitely add to that
chorus producer-writer Chris Carter, who has professed a major love
for the show and has stated that it was one of the key inspirations
for his X-Files — since Kolchak was the first TV
character to notice that “there's something out there.”
I fall in with the
latter camp. I think Kolchak: the Night Stalker was one of the best horror series ever and was also a triumph when it
came to mixing horror and humor. Sure, the monsters were often
super-cheap looking, but a good deal of the low-budget sci-fi and
horror films of the Fifties and Sixties contain bargain-basement
creatures.
Thus, I urge you to
check out the series and the two telefilms, all of which are
currently online for free, thanks to three very generous posters, “naysgrace”
and “Ocean71fvr”
having posted the bulk of the series, with “wgdvds”
picking up the slack and posting the remaining eps. Below I choose the must-see ten of the 22 Kolchak adventures.
No one – including
the dogmatic and all-too-wordy Stephen King – disputes that the
original Night Stalker TV-movie from 1972 is a
classic of its kind. When we first meet Carl Kolchak, he's working in
Las Vegas and the menace he uncovers is a vampire (Barry Atwater):
The second Kolchak
TV-movie, The Night Strangler (1973) finds Carl in
Seattle investigating an immortal strangler. The supporting cast in
this telefilm is filled with familiar faces:
The first episode of
the Kolchak TV series establishes that Carl and
his boss have set down roots in Chicago. The first menace encountered
there is a killer who may be Jack the Ripper:
The second episode
pits Carl against a zombie killer, resurrected by voodoo (the Mafia
are also involved, and the chief don insults Kolchak's “two dollar
hat”). One of the standard plot devices in the series was for Carl
to discover an arcane ritual that would kill the monster in question;
this episode contains one of the best death-rituals in the entire
series:
One of the best
traditional monster tales in the series was the fourth episode, “The
Vampire,” in which Carl hunts down a vampiress in Los Angeles (who
happens to have been “turned” by the vampire in the original
Night Stalker TV-movie):
Dark
Shadows' Lara Parker is a fashion model who just happens to
be a witch in the lively episode “The Trevi Collection”:
“Firefall”
contains one of the images from the series that has haunted me since
childhood. Kolchak hiding in a church as a deadly doppelganger bangs
at a high church window trying to get at him. In this case, the
doppelganger looks like an orchestra conductor and set his victims on
fire:
I will close out
with three of the best paranoia scenarios. The first is a UFO saga in
which Carl finds out that the government has covered up the fact that
killer aliens (who live by sucking bone marrow out of their victims)
have landed on Earth. The title of the episode is the rather
portentous “They Have Been, They Are, They Will Be....”:
A Cajun man involved
in a sleep experiment unleashes a swamp monster in Chicago in “The
Spanish Moss Murders.”
And finally, my
all-time favorite episode in the series, “Horror in the Heights.”
Here grisly killings take place when an ancient Indian monster
assumes the form of the person most trusted by its victims. Phil
Silvers guest stars, and Jimmy Sangster's tight and imaginative
script shows how good the series could be when all the elements were
at their best:
The New York Times reported that Bloomberg was dead set on having the NYC Marathon take place today, despite the fact that it would divert resources from those who needed them most – the citizens of the city the tiny billionaire chose to run (again, I think of Citizen Kane: "I think it would be fun to run a newspaper" – insert "a major city" in place of "newspaper"). He was only convinced to cancel it when he was informed that such a callous act would impact badly on his legacy. He does NOT care about the citizens of this city.
