HALLOWEEN HORRORFEST 2019: The Night Stalker (1972)

Today’s film is sponsored by Buffalo’s Own, writer/director/film festival chairman Greg Lamberson!  You may have heard Greg talk about the making of his midnight movie classic Slime City on The Honeywell Experiment this summer, and you may have read my review during last year’s Halloween Horrorfest of Johnny Gruesome.  Johnny Gruesome is still available for streaming on Amazon Prime and Tubi, while his new film Widow’s Point is doing the rounds at festivals; if you’re in the Rochester area tomorrow, you can catch a screening at the Upstate NY Horror Film Festival!

Greg chose a film that has a lot of significance for me personally, as it introduces one of my favorite fictional characters of all time.  It’s also a relic of a particular time in television history, where TV movies could be anything--including a horror tale that was, for a time, the highest rated scripted program in television history.  Today, I get to talk about The Night Stalker.

Carl Kolchak (Darren McGavin) is a reporter for the Las Vegas Daily News who has a history of being fired for rubbing the local authorities the wrong way.  At this moment, he is following a series of murders on the Strip, murders where the female victims are exsanguinated.  Certain facts confound the local sheriff (Claude Atkins)....and lead Carl to suspect that the killer believes he is a vampire.  As the murders pile up, he realizes suspect Janos Skorzeny (Barry Atwater) is a real vampire and works against a cover-up to get the story.

There are three things that makes this film work so well, all of which come together so beautifully it becomes a damn near perfect film.  One is the script by the late, great Richard Matheson.  Matheson took a rather dull book (don’t look at me like that; I read the damn thing) and restructured it, turning it into a borderline noir procedural and infusing it with a narration worthy of a great detective novel.  Matheson’s dialogue crackles and pops and takes full advantage of the noir structure to breathe some vitality into even the sketchiest of characters.  I also like the fact that the police presence in this story aren’t totally resistant to what’s going on.  Sure, there’s a lot of them acting like the townsfolk of Jaws, but there are some, like the county coroner and Kolchak’s FBI contact, who accept his theory and work it into their own.  It’s that fusion of detective tropes with horror subject matter that makes the material sing.

The second is the direction of John Llewellyn Moxey (not Dan Curits, who only produced this one but who I sometimes say directed this one because I’m old and stupid and sometimes forget things).  Moxey was primarily a television director--it turns out he directed my absolute favorite episode of The Avengers, ‘Who’s Who’--who specialized in suspense thrillers and he brings all that he learned to bear fully.  Wisely sensing where Matheson is taking inspiration from, Moxey gives the film a dry, matter-of-fact, almost documentarian sensibility...which makes the film ‘feel’ realer than its story and budget would normally allow.  He also leans into what probably attracted everyone to the project in the first place and tries his damndest to set a bunch of it in broad daylight.  A scene of Kolchak accompanying the sheriff in inspecting a crime scene where the circumstances just seem impossible (body in the middle of the desert, no footprints leading to or away from it) is all the more eerie--and believable--for it being so brightly lit.   And the way Moxey establishes the narrative framing sequence (the first shot is of Kolchak’s tape recorder) as integral to the overall story is masterful.  You believe this could happen, so that you don’t notice some of the less credible elements, including a vampire who looks a little goofy, until you’ve watched it far too many times (something that simply wasn’t possible in 1972).

And third we have Darren McGavin himself.  He is not the only great actor in the film--in addition to the people already cited, there are good performances by Larry Linville, Elisha Cook Jr., Simon Oakland (whose relationship with his employee is so integral to the noir feel that his character was carried over into the sequel and the subsequent television series) Kent Smith and Carol Lynley--but the film would simply not work without his presence.  Curtis claims in an interview on the DVD I viewed this on that he never considered another actor to embody Kolchak, and there’s a good reason for it.  McGavin, who played Mike Hammer in the 50‘s, has one of those world-weary faces and sonorous voices that were made for film noir and both are put to excellent use here.  It also helps that I think McGavin bonded with something in this character*--there’s simply not a false step in his performance, and he knows when to be light and when to be dreadfully serious.  In Kolchak, McGavin is unwittingly creating a new sort of character and genre for television, a character without which we wouldn’t have The X-Files or Millenium (what is Frank Black if not Carl retired and with a home life?) or Supernatural or even something like the Bryan Fuller adaptation of Hannibal, a perfect fusing of two signature genre into a unique whole.

I should also mention a few other things, like the excellent discordant score by Bob Cobert and the stunt work or the way the film takes full advantage of Las Vegas in the 70‘s as a city that aspires to be

something glamorous and cosmopolitan where it’s actually kinda grimy and garish.  So consider them mentioned.

I’m not going to lie; this might seem tame to someone who’s visiting this now.  It’s a horror film done without special effects and minimal make-up, but it works because it is cannily written, directed and acted and knows how to make the most of its limitations and turn its weaknesses into strengths.  I cannot recommend this one enough.

Our sponsor tomorrow is Scream Queen Royalty, everyone’s favorite post-apocalyptic cheerleader Kelli Maroney! We’ll be moving ahead one year for Kelli’s pick, a classic film that for a long time had the reputation as ‘the scariest film ever made,’ William Freidkin’s The Exorcist!

If you want to join Kelli, Greg Lamberson, Felissa Rose, and other great Horror Luminaries in geting me to watch a movie of your own choice during the Halloween Horrorfest, please consider joining the Domicile of Dread Patreon at the $3 Tier or greater.  Each new patron gets a free slot in this Gauntlet of Ghoulishness!  There are still nine open slots, so act fast!

*--I think it’s telling that the TV series was cancelled not due to low ratings, but because McGavin was so burned out by acting as an unofficial producer on the show that he felt he couldn’t do a second season!