Kolchak: The Night Stalker: "The Vampire" (Universal, NBC-TV, aired 10/4/74)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Afterwards Charles and I watched the fourth episode of the 1974-75 TV series Kolchak: The Night Stalker, dealing with reporter Carl Kolchak (Darren McGavin) who’s constantly getting in trouble with irascible editor Tony Vincenzo (Simon Oakland, best known as the guy who came forth at the end of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and explained What Made Norman Run) and various paranormal phenomena. The episode was called “The Vampire” and according to imdb.com was actually a made-for-TV sequel to the show’s pilot, a TV-movie script in which Kolchak brought down a ring of vampires in Las Vegas and kills them all with the obligatory stake through the heart. Only one of them, a woman vampire named Catherine Rawlins (Suzanne Charny), accidentally escapes and is set free when a Nevada construction crew accidentally digs up her underground grave while digging the foundation for a new freeway. (No doubt writers Bill Stratton and David Chase had seen the 1944 film Return of the Vampire, in which Bela Lugosi’s vampire character is similarly unearthed after he’s discovered in the wreckage of an old church that was destroyed by the Nazis as part of the London Blitz.)

Catherine Rawlins manages to restart her old career as a prostituten and put the bite – literally – on guys who were hiring her for sex. Carl Kolchak gets the chance to fly out to L.A. to interview a 15-year-old Indian guru who is about to get married (obviously the writers were basing this character on the real-life Guru Maharaj Ji, who at age 13 was proclaimed the world’s “Perfect Master,” a title previously held by Buddha, Jesus and Muhammad, until scandal rocked his church and he had a public falling-out with his mother, who installed his elder brother in his place: http://www.ex-premie.org/pages/hinduismtoday83.htm). Only he misses his appointment with the guru because he’s too busy chasing the call-girl turned vampire and running afoul of the L.A. cops, who like the ones in his native Chicago can’t stand him and wish he was able to get out of their hair. Eventually Kolchak subdues his vampire by lighting a Christian cross and setting it on fire – the Ku Klux Klan would be proud – even though he laconically adds later that he has to pay to replace the monument (with what, one wonders? All we hear from him is how difficult it is to put something like that on your expense account).

Charles put his finger on just what was wrong with Kolchak: The Night Stalker afterwards: the sheer unlikability of the central character. Had this been made in the 1930’s it’s obvious who would have played him: the similarly obnoxious Lee Tracy, who in the 1932 film Doctor “X” actually did play the same sort of character: an utterly obnoxious reporter who blows the whistle on a killer who harvests his victims’ blood for something called “synthetic flesh.” (Doctor “X” was shot by Warner Bros. in two-strip Technicolor and fortunately survives that way: it was the first science-fiction film in color, anticipating Destination Moon by 18 years.) And it’s equally obvious that Edward Everett Horton would have played the comic-relief doofus Ron Updyke, who in the 1970’s version is portrayed by Jack Grinnage as an obnoxious guy who’s constantly running to the bathroom in revulsion at the modern-day monstrosities Kolchak uncovered – though at least in this episode he’s in just one sequence, asking a former colleague how he can break into television news because it’s easier, safer and pays better than print. I like The Night Stalker overall but, like Charles, I wish the writers would have made Kolchak less like a 1930’s hero and more like a 1940’s film noir lead.