Before the Kolchak: The Night Stalker TV show came the original TV movie The Night Stalker, which first introduced dogged yet deeply-irritating reporter Carl Kolchak, brilliantly and unforgettably played by Darrin McGavin. Our grizzled, disheveled hero starts listening to his own notes on a tape recorder, about a very strange murder case. We see a Vegas girl get killed by an incredibly powerful man, then cut to an autopsy performed by a pre-M*A*S*H Larry Linville (who would go on to play a Police Captain of The Week Who’s Annoyed With Kolchak’s Shenanigans in the TV series), who discovers that a body has been completely drained of blood. So three minutes in, any viewer is going to figure a vampire is stalking Las Vegas. (And it was obviously filmed in Vegas; everyone looks believably hot and sweaty.) It takes the Vegas police a whole lot longer to figure things out.
Enter our intrepid seersucker-clad hero.
Kolchak is pretty much fully formed the moment he walks into the news office, a smart, cynical, sarcastic reporter with authority issues. You quickly see how he would get on just about anyone’s nerves. (Later he recites all the cities he’s been fired from newspapers in. “Wasn’t it twice in Boston?” his much too young and pretty girlfriend (played by the recently deceased Carol Lynley) asks, to which he holds up three fingers.) He doesn’t think much of being assigned the first murder, but when a second one shows up, also drained of blood, with no tracks leading to her final sandy resting place, he realizes something is up, and tenaciously goes digging into the story, despite staunch opposition from both the police chief (Claude Aikens) and his own editor Tony Vincenzo (Simon Oakland, in a role he’d reprise in The Night Strangler sequel and the TV show).
The plot moves along at a quick pace, police procedural fashion, as it quickly becomes apparent to Kolchak that an actual vampire is killing young women in Las Vegas. The “vampire police procedural” has been done plenty of times since, but this was pretty much the first media instance (though Leslie H. Whitten’s novel The Progeny of the Adder preceded by seven years), and even today, despite the obvious budgetary constraints of a TV movie, it has a compelling intensity to it that later examples have never duplicated.
But McGavin’s Kolchak is what holds the entire thing together. He was a great, underrated actor, and in the scene where the police finally break down and promise to follow his lead and give him the exclusive, he’s so wonderfully, unbearably smug that you know exactly why he keeps getting fired. The movie has a panoply of solid TV character actors, tight direction, and plenty of tension when (inevitably) Kolchak tracks the vampire back to his lair…
We watched a beautiful Kino Lorber Blu Ray, but the movie is also available on YouTube if you want to get a taste:
There are a few extras on the Blu-Ray, including with producer Dan Curtis and director John Llewellyn Moxey, who said it was much easier to get a TV movie made in the early 70s. You had an idea (comedy, drama, horror, whatever), and if someone at the network liked it, you got a greenlight to do it. He said that now there are too many people involved in the process to get anything approved anymore. Wikipedia says that it was made for $450,000 and earned “a 33.2 rating and 48 share,” which is absolutely unheard of for a TV movie in today’s media landscape.
(More thoughts from Dwight.)