31 Nights of Halloween Horror - The Night Stalker

The Night Stalker
74 mins.
Dir. John Llewellyn Moxey
1972/USA



You see kids, back in the day they actually made movies specifically for TV.  Not only that, but sometimes they made horror movies for TV and they were actually quite good.  Faced with more of a challenge by standards and practices these movies needed to be more creative when they couldn't splash the red stuff.  This caused us to get some really great films, Don't be Afraid of the Dark, the terrifying Salem's Lot and in this case The Night Stalker, which was the most popular highest rated TV movie at its time and spawned a sequel and a TV series afterwards.

Darren McGavin, who if you don't know from this, you will remember as the father in A Christmas Story plays a Carl Kolchak, a reporter who has been fired from numerous papers throughout the country for his outlandish brackish stories.  He winds up in Las Vegas writing for a small paper with a boss who fights him on every article he hands in.  One day women start winding up dead around town drained of all their blood, but no traces of footsteps or blood around.  The police are dumbfounded as always, and Kolchak always seems to find his way to the scene of the crime and get in the way.  With sources on the inside, doctor, a friend in the FBI, Kolchak comes up with his own hypothesis of this killer on the loose, a vampire.  Of course despite the evidence pointing to this, the police don't want to hear it and try to shut Kolchak up.  Not until the final confrontation are they forced to believe, and even so will they still let Kolchak get the truth out?



A strong influence on the X-Files, The Night Stalker is a fun detective horror story, brief and to the point.  Darren McGavin is perfect for the role, throw in writer Richard Matehson, Producer Dan Curtis, Director John Llewellyn Moxey (City of the Dead/Horror Hotel) and you have a horror classic in the making.  Perhaps scary at moments for it's time, the vampire in this does not speak, has super human strength as shown in a humorous scene where he is stealing blood from a hospital and throws orderlies out of the way with one hand while running out the door and evading the police who are just shooting blindly regardless if there is a pedestrian around or not.  Our vampire also snarls quite a bit, kind of like the werewolf Waldemar Daninsky in Paul Naschy's werewolf films.  If you are a horror fan, you owe it to yourself to watch this film, if you are looking for something safe for the kids to view, this being a TV movie, there is nothing questionable.  We could sure use another show like The Night Stalker series around again.

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