Good luck trying to find
The Night Stalker.
Based on a novel by Jeff
Rice,The Night Stalkerwas
written by the late, legendary
Richard Matheson (The
Twilight Zone,I Am Legend)
and produced by TV giant
Dan Curtis (Dark Shadows,
The Winds of War).
It broke records when it
was broadcast on ABC
back in 1972, drawing a jaw-
dropping 54 share—and
scaring the pants off a gener-
ation of viewers, including
my then-11-year-old self.
Its success was so enor-
mous that it immediately
spawned a sequel,The Night
Strangler, and a short-lived
TV series,Kolchak: The Night
Stalker. But neither of those
was as powerful as the mas-
sive cultural earthquake that
was the originalNight Stalker.
A sort of contemporary
noir, it concerned Carl
Kolchak (Darren McGavin, in
a towering performance), a
down-and-out reporter in Las
Vegas who stumbles upon
the story of his career when
a string of exsanguinated mur-
der victims leads to only one
possible conclusion: The killer
is a real-life vampire, Janos
Skorzeny, who came to these
shores from the Old World
decades ago and has beenclaiming victims ever since.
The only way to repel
Skorzeny is with a cross, and
the only way to kill him is
with a stake through the
heart. Spoiler alert: Kolchak is
forced to perform the fatal
deed, and for his bravery, the
city fathers run him out of
town, preferring to bury the
truth rather than face it. In the
last of his many voice-overs,
Kolchak challenges us to con-
vince ourselves “it couldn’t
happen here.” I couldn’t, and
neither could a whole genera-
tion of TV viewers.
In a TV landscape popu-
lated mostly by cops, doctors,
and lawyers,The Night Stalker
was unlike anything else. It
featured an irascible, flawed
hero who challenged author-ity and championed the truth,
charming and bribing whom-
ever it took to get it. Its ending
was haunting, not happy, and
most of all it was scary as hell.
In the 1990s,The X-Files
was famously influenced by
The Night Stalker, to the point
that we named a recurring
character after Matheson (a
senator who aided Agent Mul-
der in the first two seasons)
and wrote McGavin himself
into the series as Arthur
Dales, who first uncovered
the FBI’s X-Files decades
before Mulder and Scully.
But today theNight Stalker
DVD is out of print, and you
won’t find it on iTunes, Netflix,
Hulu, or Amazon. (Even back
in 2005, when I attempted
aNight Stalkerremake, some
network execs had either
never seen the original or
didn’t remember that it
featured monsters—and, to
my incredulity, insisted my
version feature none.)
The fate ofThe Night Stalker
may give pause to those of us
who seek to make television
not for the overnights, but for
the ages. If a work as towering
asThe Night Stalkercan fall
into obscurity, what fate awaits
today’s television giants?
It’s an injustice that screams
to be rectified and doubtless
will be. Besides, something as
powerful asThe Night Stalker
could never really die. Its
narrative DNA wrapped itself
deeply into the imagination
of a generation of storytellers,
who in turn will influence the
next generation, and they the
next. The Night Stalker lives.
As told to Shirley Li
1972The X-Files andThe Man in the High Castle EP FRANK SPOTNITZ pays homage
to the TV movie, which he rebooted as a series in 2005