Sink Your Fangs Into This

While writing earlier this week about the sad demise of Jeff Rice--whose then-unpublished horror novel, The Kolchak Papers, spawned the wildly popular 1972 ABC-TV Movie of the Week, The Night Stalker--I started to dig through my file boxes for the 1974 Fall Preview edition of TV Guide. It was in that issue, I knew, that Darren McGavin’s hour-long drama based on the ’72 teleflick (as well as its 1973 sequel, The Night Strangler) was introduced. Unfortunately, I was not able to find the magazine--until this afternoon.

The page below comes from TV Guide’s September 7-13, 1974, edition. What we now remember as the short-lived series Kolchak: The Night Stalker is listed here simply as The Night Stalker--the title it carried through its first several episodes. Whoever penned the mag’s preview of McGavin’s Friday chiller had some fun with its concept. “This show is a scream,” he or she wrote. “And a moan and a gasp and a shriek. Not to mention eyes widening in terror, hands clutching throats, bodies slumping to floors, and figures lurking in shadows.” You can read the rest by clicking on this image:



The 1974 fall TV season had its bright spots: Valerie Harper’s Rhoda and James Garner’s The Rockford Files both premiered in September of that year, as did Little House on the Prairie, Police Woman, and David Janssen’s underrated private-eye drama, Harry O. But that fall also welcomed short-timers such as The New Land (“a Swedish Waltons”), The Texas Wheelers (starring Jack Elam and Mark Hamill), and Clint Walker’s Kodiak, which cast the former Cheyenne star as an Alaska State Patrol officer charged with keeping the peace on 50,000 square miles of backwoods. Kolchak: The Night Stalker probably wouldn’t be remembered if it hadn’t become a cult favorite.

READ MORE: “Claim That Tune,” by J. Kingston Pierce (Limbo).

Say Good-bye to Kolchak’s “Father”

Just the other day I was thinking that it had been a long while since I’d last watched the 1972 made-for-television vampire flick, The Night Stalker, starring Darren McGavin as journalist-turned-monster hunter Carl Kolchak, and that it was probably time for me to revisit that picture, along with its 1973 sequel, The Night Strangler. But now comes news that Jeff Rice, who created the Kolchak character, died on July 1 in Las Vegas, Nevada, at age 71. John L. Smith, a reporter for the Las Vegas Journal-Review reports that Rice had “suffered from severe depression throughout much of his adult life” and adds that, “In an eerie tribute to the mysteries that surrounded his fiction and life in Las Vegas, the cause and manner of death is pending the results of a toxicology test by the Clark County coroner’s office.”

Jeffrey Grant Rice was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1944 but spent part of his childhood in Beverly Hills, California. He was the son of Bob Rice, characterized by Smith as “a mob-associated costume jewelry maker … and early investor” in Vegas’ old Dunes Hotel and Casino. “Through those family’s connections, the son gained access to the neon glitz and subterranean shadow of Las Vegas. He even worked for a time at local newspapers. Some of that experience seeps into the pages of his story just as it surely crept into his consciousness.”

The story of Rice’s connection to McGavin’s original Night Stalker film has been repeated so many times, it’s probably now part legend; it’s certainly a cautionary tale. Here’s one synopsis, cribbed from Mark Dawidziak’s 1997 book, The Night Stalker Companion:

True-life newspaperman (and actor!) Jeff Rice created Carl Kolchak in The Kolchak Papers, a 1970 horror novel which Rice submitted to [screenwriter] Richard Matheson’s agent. Then, in a shocking example of Hollywood sleaze, the agent sold the unpublished novel’s TV movie rights to ABC--without first signing Rice!--trapping Rice in a done deal he’d never agreed to!

Heart-breakingly, Rice had hoped to write the TV script himself, but the agent had already secured the teleplay assignment for Matheson. Dawidziak adds: “It’s important to note that Rice does not in any way blame Matheson for what he views as shady Hollywood dealings.”

“Rice sued the network…,” explains Smith, “and [ABC] gave creative credit on screen to Rice. But that left him well short of Easy Street. By the time all the Hollywood double dealing was resolved, Rice’s novel was published in 1973 after the hugely successful TV movie. A series followed, and Rice also found success with a second novel, The Night Strangler, co-authored with Richard Matheson.”

I don’t remember when it was that I saw The Night Stalker; I was pretty young when that teleflick first aired, so the likelihood is that I caught up with Carl Kolchak--along with his newspaper boss, the irritable Tony Vincenzo (played by Simon Oakland), and his winsome dancer of a girlfriend, Gail Foster (Carol Lynley)--in reruns. However, I was hooked from the beginning, as a blood-sucking vampire started knocking off the otherwise carefree visitors to Vegas’ showy Sunset Strip. When I later discovered there was a second Kolchak adventure, The Night Strangler (which took place in a highly fictionalized Seattle Underground and found McGavin’s seersucker-wearing newsie confronting a Civil War-era doctor who kept himself alive with an elixir featuring blood taken from murdered women), I could hardly wait to watch that, too. And after I read (in this very article, from a 1973 edition of my then-hometown newspaper, the Portland Oregonian) that an ABC-TV series featuring McGavin and Oakland would debut on September 13, 1974, you can bet I cleared my calendar of other commitments. Sadly, I was disappointed at first with Kolchak: The Night Stalker, which moved the action to Chicago, found Kolchak and Vincenzo working for a wire news agency, and came up with some truly cheesy monsters for our tape recorder-carrying hero to combat--everything from an android and a lizard-man to a headless and homicidal motorcycle rider. (Interestingly, that last episode, “Chopper,” was scripted by future Rockford Files writer and Sopranos creator David Chase.) Only in recent years have I come to better appreciate Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1973-1974) for its humor and McGavin’s portrayal of a lonely, rumpled reporter who accepts the world’s horrors--actual, metaphorical, and outright fictional--with more courage and pragmatism than those around him.

Jeff Rice is to be thanked for bringing monsters out from under my bed, putting them on my TV screen, and making me appreciate them as much as I did. I only wish his own life had been a happier one. Although he is said to have found a grateful Internet following in recent years, Smith notes that Rice was also “extremely troubled and increasingly afraid of straying from his home near Desert Inn Road. In leaner times, Rice had rented a room from [his ‘close friend’ Bobbie] Carson and on occasion slept on her couch. She helped him through emotional and mental crises. He cared for her after the 78-year-old fell and broke her hip. The two met 14 years ago. In keeping with the local working-class subculture, they had a loan shark in common and struck up what became an enduring friendship.”

There are apparently no memorial services planned for Carl Kolchak’s creator. Yet you never know--maybe some vampires, werewolves, headless motorcyclists, and other ghouls will shed a tear to know that someone who might have been able to tell their stories, too, has disappeared from this world.

* * *

At least for now, 1972’s The Night Stalker--based on Jeff Rice’s book--is available for viewing on YouTube. Watch it all here.



READ MORE: It Couldn’t Happen Here: An Episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker a Day As Seen Through the Eyes of Peter Enfantino and John Scoleri.

So Long, Seersucker

Since we’d been led to believe, only recently, that It Couldn’t Happen Here ...”--the terrific blog devoted to that 1970s cult-TV series, Kolchak: The Night Stalker--would continue to offer new material for “a few more weeks,” we’re surprised by today’s announcement that it’s already shutting down, though not disappearing.

Over the last week, the blog has added posts about three never-filmed Kolchak episodes (“Eve of Terror, “The Get of Belial,” and “The Executioner”), as well as Mark Dawidziak’s look back at the books and graphic novels that either starred monster-hunting, seersucker-wearing reporter Carl Kolchak, or analyzed the original ABC-TV series. And today, David J. Schow recalls the very short-lived, 2005-2006 series reboot, The Night Stalker, which he notes “was cancelled right in the middle of a two-part episode, with four episodes unbroadcast until the series was re-run on the Sci Fi Channel in 2006.”

We’re sorry to see It Couldn’t Happen Here ... disappear into the night, but a link to it has been installed from The Rap Sheet’s page of archive sites, so it can be relocated easily the next time you want to remember one of American television’s most remarkable, if underappreciated, prime-time programs.

UPDATE: An index to all of the offerings in It Couldn’t Happen Here ..., complete with links, has now been established here.

READ MORE: “Still Stalking Kolchak,” by Amber Keller (Criminal Element).

Oh, Horrors!

It Couldn’t Happen Here ..., the new blog devoted to that horror TV series Kolchak: The Night Stalker, has dug up a 1975 article that crime novelist Stuart M. Kaminsky wrote for Cinefantastique about the Darren McGavin series and its protagonist, “the most unlikely heir to Dr. Van Helsing that one could imagine.”

“For the longest time this was the Kolchak writeup,” remarks blogger John Scoleri. You can read it for yourself here.

A Monster of an Undertaking

Have you checked in yet on the new blog, It Couldn’t Happen Here ..., which promises to deliver everything you ever wanted to know about ABC-TV’s 1974-1975 series, Kolchak: The Night Stalker?

Though it’s only a few days old, the blog has already featured an interview with Mark Dawidziak, author of The Night Stalker Companion; a look back at the 1972 teleflick, The Night Stalker, which launched investigative reporter Carl Kolchak’s monster-hunting career; and author Richard Matheson’s work to adapt Jeff Rice’s then-unpublished novel, The Kolchak Papers, as a small-screen film.

Creature Feature

Break out the porkpie hat and cassette tape recorder again, along with the garlic cloves and silver bullets, because that monster-hunting investigative reporter, Carl Kolchak (Darren McGavin), is back!

Online, at least.

Peter Enfantino and John Scoleri, who recently wrapped up work on their blog To the Batpoles!, an episode-by-episode recap of the 1960s ABC-TV mega-hit Batman, are readying the launch of It Couldn’t Happen Here ..., a new limited-run blog focused on ABC’s 1974-1975 cult favorite, Kolchak: The Night Stalker, and the two earlier teleflicks--The Night Stalker (1972) and The Night Strangler (1973)--that introduced Kolchak.

It Couldn’t Happen Here ... will open for business here on January 1.

McGavin, Mobsters, and Monsters

Incredibly, it was five years ago today that American actor Darren McGavin--whose television roles included leads in Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer (1958-1960), Riverboat (1959-1961), and Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974-1975)--passed away in Los Angeles at age 83.

I wrote about McGavin’s career the day after he died. Rather than rehash all that information, I’ll simply commemorate this anniversary by posting videos from two of the aforementioned TV series. The first clip is the main title sequence from McGavin’s Hammer, followed by a scene in which McGavin faces off against guest star Steve Inhat.





These next two videos show McGavin in what may be his best-remembered role, as investigative reporter Carl Kolchak, a guy with a frightening tendency to stumble upon mythical and murderous monsters. We start with the ABC series’ splendidly creepy introduction (and a brief scene from one of the episodes, “The Werewolf”), followed by a set of clips from the 1972 teleflick The Night Stalker, in which Kolchak faced off against a vampire in Las Vegas. The Night Stalker of course inspired the subsequent series and was, for its time, the highest-rated small-screen movie on record.





Rest in peace, Darren McGavin.

READ MORE: “How Kolchak: The Night Stalker Developed an Early Model for TV Horror,” by Phil Dyess-Nugent (A.V. Club).