‘Kolchak: The Night Stalker’ Left the Airwaves 50 Years Ago Today! Check Out Five Freaky Facts You Didn’t Know About the Show
50 years ago today, on March 28, 1975, intrepid reporter Carl Kolchak (Darren McGavin), star of Kolchak: The Night Stalker, solved his final mystical mystery. Created by Dan Curtis, the macabre mind behind Dark Shadows and Trilogy of Terror, Kolchak began its reign with two success TV movies, 1972’s The Night Stalker and 1973’s The Night Strangler, both penned by horror and sci-fi wizard Richard Matheson. The series that followed ran for only one season — but its reverberations are felt to this day. TV’s first paranormal detective, Kolchak was an explicit inspiration for The X-Files, influenced shows like Evil, Supernatural, and many others.
Read on to find out a few things you didn’t know about the first major series about fighting back against the things that go bump in the night.
1Kolchak starred in a holiday classic
Depending on your age and tastes, you may best remember star McGavin from his turn in the 1955 Frank Sinatra flick The Man With the Golden Arm, his run as the title character in the 1958 show Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer, his role in 1984’s The Natural, or as Brian Madison, tycoon father to Adam Sandler‘s famous man-child in 1995’s Billy Madison. But a good many of you probably saw his photo and instantly thought, “Fragile! It must be Italian!” Yes, McGavin played the leg-lamp-loving father in 1983’s A Christmas Story.
2It was based on an unpublished novel
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The character of Kolchak was originally developed by writer Jeff Rice, who penned a novel called The Kolchak Papers. Rice based some of the novel loosely on his own experiences as a reporter working for the Las Vegas Sun in the 1960s — well, the journalism part of the story, at least. According to a posthumous retrospective on Cleveland.com in 2015, Rice wrote a novel about a journalist who must track down a vampire because he intended it to be “a horror novel that would metaphorically comment on the corruption he’d seen at so many levels in Las Vegas.”
His book wasn’t initially published as a book — instead, in 1971, the rights to the story were sold to ABC, which used his story as the inspiration for the original Night Stalker film, with a screenplay written by Matheson. Rice’s book was released under the title The Night Stalker in 1973.
Rice came up with the story concept for The Night Strangler, but rights issues and lawsuits kept him off the series. He passed in 2015, at the age of 71.
3McGavin was responsible for the show becoming a series …
Courtesy Everett Collection
Though McGavin’s agent initially convinced him to do the first Kolchak film, he became passionate about the character. In fact, during the shooting of the first film, he immediately began pitching a series to producers: “The second night we were shooting The Night Stalker movie, I said to a network executive, ‘I’m free now, I have no plans for next year, and this would make a terrific series.’ The executive said I was out of my head.” In a 1975 interview, he claimed that, “I feel very responsible for [for the show]. From the very beginning I said that if it was bad, it would be my fault.”
4… and for it ending
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But while he always loved the character of Kolchak, he found the production of the series to be more of a mixed bag. In a 1983 interview with Fangoria Magazine, McGavin said that during shooting, “There was a lot of friction between myself and the production entity. We ended up spending so much money on scripts that were totally unproducible. There were scripts we just threw away.”
Interestingly, some of his problems related to the show’s pioneering use of the “monster of the week” format, a style that’s become beloved to horror TV fans, and formed the backbone of shows like Buffy and The X-Files. “How many monsters can you go through?” McGavin said. “It’s silly. You’re gonna do the werewolf, you’re gonna do the vampire, and you’re gonna do the zombie, and when you run out of those, what other stories are you gonna tell?”
He later pulled the string to end the show: “I’d have to give a symposium to explain what happened. I called up the network and said, ‘Let’s cancel this god-damn thing. You’re losing money, we’re losing money, and I’m tired and I don’t want to do anymore. Why don’t we just stop?’ Three hours later, they canceled the show.”
5There was a 2005 reboot
In 2005, producer Frank Spotnitz get to live out a reality that horror TV fans had fantasized about for decades: he launched a new version of Kolchak. Spotnitz had been a major producer on The X-Files — which was not only inspired by Kolchak, but included McGavin as a guest star — as well as the spin-off series The Lone Gunmen. The new Kolchak starred Stuart Townsend, who had recently starred in the Anne Rice adaptation Queen of the Damned, as well as Gabrielle Union, who was just beginning her career at the time. The X-Files had created a lot of interest in Kolchak — and since it was recently off the air, there was a supernatural procedural vacuum on TV. Everything seemed right for a re-imagining.
Except for a little thing called CSI. CSI was five years into its reign of TV dominance on CBS, when ABC aired Kolchak opposite it. The monster hunters turned out to have met their match in the crime scene investigators — only six of the 10 planned episodes aired on the network, with the rest later appearing on the Sci-Fi Channel.
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