Kolchak: The Night Stalker

Wow.

First off, a special thanks to Rob Floyd and Jim Blanton of Fantasmo Cult Cinema, the two fellows who were responsible for tonight's movie, Kolchak: The Night Stalker. They're awesome, bringing cult movies- horror, sci-fi, adventure and just plain weird (Can't Stop The Music)- to audiences once a month at the Chesapeake Public Library main branch in Chesapeake, Virginia.

I've been watching these movies on a small screen, it was nice to see it on something impressive- the library has a video projector set up to watch movies on a screen roughly the size of a small screen in a mall two-plex circa 1985.

So, the movie- Kolchak: The Night Stalker. A vampire is loose in Las Vegas and Carl Kokchak, a rumpled and discredited reporter trying to find the big story that will put him on the map again, played by Darrin McGavin, is the only one who realizes that the killings aren't the work of a psychopath, but of an actual monster.

It's a made for television movie that works well as a feature, there's a... texture to it- it's not too polished; kind of stark sometimes in that early seventies tv kind of way.

This might have something to do with McGavin's Kolchak, in his rumpled seersucker suit and battered panama hat, in the frame most of the time, barring the vampire attacks, giving a seediness to the story. Coupled with his voice overs in a prose style not too dis-similar to a tabloid muckraker, you've got a great portrait of someone who's regularly exposed to the less respectable side of things.

And in early seventies Las Vegas, there's plenty of that- the sheriff, the DA, and the police chief will do what ever it takes to suppress anything that might damage the tourist industry.

Richard Matheson's script brings television vampires out of the gothic context and into the modern era, setting the stage for the sequel The Night Strangler and the tv show Kolchak: The Night Stalker, but laying the ground work for Chris Carter's The X-Files (there's a character named after Matheson, a senator who supports the work of Agent Mulder and Darren McGavin plays a retired FBI agent who had investigated some odd cases on his own.)

Even though The Night Strangler wasn't a vampire movie, it does have ties to the genre (besides being a sequel)- Al Lewis - Grandpa Munster- plays a homeless person living in the underground Seattle, while John Carridine - Dracula in Universal's Houses of Frankenstein and Dracula- played Kolchak's publisher.

The television series had an episode related to the movie as well- in the episode The Vampire, October 4, 1974, one of the victims of the vampire from the movie travels to Los Angeles working as a vampire call girl.