Review: The Night Stalker (1972)

To put it as politely as possible, most made-for-TV horror films are just not good. They're derivative, lifting their storylines and monsters from their big-screen contemporaries. (Example: The Horror at 37,000 Feet combines elements from The Exorcist and Airport.) They're dull. They have tight budgets and restrictions imposed by network censors and concerned advertisers. Good ones are few and far between.

But for every rule, there is, naturally, an exception--in this case, The Night Stalker.

Darren McGavin finds the role of a lifetime as Carl Kolchak, a washed-up, rundown crime reporter for a Las Vegas newspaper who is underwhelmed at his latest assignment: The murder of a young woman who, it turns out, died of shock from massive blood loss. Two more victims turn up soon after, exhibiting the same massive blood loss. Kolchak sees a pattern, even though his hardass editor, Tony Vincenzo (Simon Oakland) considers it pure speculation and refuses to run the story.

Turns out Kolchak is correct--all three murders are connected. What's more, the medical examiner (Larry Linville) says that saliva was found in the wounds on the throats of all three women. Kolchak thinks it's "some nut who thinks he's a vampire," but the authorities refuse to believe it. Even Carl's friend, FBI guy Bernie Jenks (Ralph Meeker), tells him to lay off. But the murders continue, and the cops even corner the killer a couple of times, only to have him tear through the boys in blue like they were mannequins, even when they shoot him at close range. When the FBI determines that the suspect is 89-year-old Janos Skorzeny (Barry Atwater), wanted for a string of unexplained deaths going back at least 30 years, it becomes obvious--to Kolchak, at least--that this may not be "some nut who thinks he's a vampire," but an honest-to-goodness, actual vampire.

Based on a then-unpublished novel by Jeff Rice, himself a former Las Vegas reporter, and adapted for TV by Richard Matheson, author of numerous horror novels, short stories and screenplays, The Night Stalker takes a fantastic situation--a vampire on the loose--out of the fog-shouded streets and gloomy castles of classic horror films and integrates it into a contemporary situation--the hunt for a serial killer in a major modern American city. There is humor in the movie, especially in the arguments between Kolchak and Vincenzo, but the vampire is treated seriously.

And unromantically. He's a modern vampire in some ways--he drives a car, rents a house and uses disguises to slip into hospitals and steal plasma--but there's nothing suave, sexy or refined about Atwater's performance--he doesn't even have a single line of dialogue (unless you count snarls and hisses, which I don't). He is, simply put, an animal on the hunt; his hunting is ground Las Vegas, his prey the women there.

It doesn't hurt that producer Dan Curtis (who had produced the soap opera Dark Shadows and directed its big-screen incarnation) and director John Llewellyn Moxey (who had made City of the Dead a decade earlier) shows a steady hand, treating the material with an almost documentary level of respect. It also doesn't hurt to have an amazing veteran cast: McGavin (who played Mike Hammer on TV), Meeker (who also once played Mike Hammer), Oakland (the psychiatrist at the end of Psycho), Kent Smith (Cat People), Claude Akins, Elisha Cook Jr. and Carol Lynley (as Kolchak's girlfriend). And there's a terrific, jazzy score by Robert Cobert (who wrote the theme for Dark Shadows).

The Night Stalker was, when it was initially broadcast in January of 1972, the highest-rated TV movie of all time--with good reason. Not only is The Night Stalker the best made-for-TV horror film ever, but one of the best made-for-TV movies of any genre, period. It was popular enough to spawn a sequel--The Night Strangler, broadcast the next year--and a short-lived weekly series. That series inspired Chris Carter, creator of The X-Files, and has further inspired a "reimagined" series this year, which actually plays like a recast X-Files (they're reporters instead of FBI agents) without any of the humor of the original and was dropped into the time slot opposite CSI and The Apprentice. (Why not run this new Night Stalker in the middle of the night? I think more people would see it.)

Skip the "reimagined" version. This is the only Night Stalker you need.