By 1972 the genre of the tv detective show (in this case investigative reporter but the distinction is functionally negligible, replace angry chief with angry editor and you get the same “You’re a loose cannon!” speech) had pretty well crystallized into a shape that’s still recognizable today. ‘Columbo’ had been airing for years, ‘Mannix’ was still going strong, ‘Hawai-5-0,’ ‘The Streets of San Francisco,’ ‘McCloud,’ tv was lousy with the things.
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| I don't know why they picked this background either. |
As the supremely important 'Predator' has taught us, something as simple as genre combination can produce profound results. Here we have the classic TV P.I. template, a mostly down-on-his-luck everyman just doing the best he can to get to the truth in a world of moral and political corruption, pushing back against powerful forces, and then you just drop a vampire into his world. The first act practically writes itself.
It’s not a bad idea to examine our central character, Carl Kolchak. He’s basically just a schlub, which is why you cast Darren McGavin, but he’s a schlub with a passion for reporting. He’s a mid-level reporter at a local Las Vegas paper. He has a thing going with a cocktail waitress, feuds constantly with his editor, and is known by the entire police department who tolerate his presence at crimes scenes. He has a well-cultivated network of sources and contacts who generally seem to like him. He’s clearly ambitious, chasing stories at least in part because he hopes one’ll be big enough to get him back into the big leagues, but at one point he also gives a speech about how wrong it is that everyone in the city knows what’s going on with the recent murders except for the people and he seems to genuinely mean it. He’s no paragon of virtue but he’s the only character in the movie with anything close to convictions.
Which makes the choice to focus so much of the movie on all of the people and institutions telling Kolchak to shut up all the more interesting. The evidence all tells a pretty straightforward story: a series of young women, all with throat wounds, dying from shock due to extreme loss of blood. Couple that with robberies of local blood banks and the obvious conclusion is that someone who thinks they’re a vampire is going around doing crazy vampire things. But absolutely everyone from the mayor to the chief of police to the Kolchak’s own editor are dead set against running with the story, dismissing his reporting as crazy nonsense. Kolchak’s frustration and the frequent reminders that he’s been fired from a number of previous newspaper jobs gives the impression that this is far from the first time that established power has gotten in the way of his reporting.
Because despite the body count the vampire isn’t the actual villain of the movie. He’s eventually given a name and a backstory but he’s not really a character. His actor doesn’t even have any lines. The same basic story could have been told about any number of sensational crimes, this one happened to be about a vampire. From the very beginning Kolchak’s stories on the murders keep getting spiked and he keeps demanding to know why. He has quotes, pictures, facts, but his editor doesn’t care. He keeps asking probing questions during press conferences and showing up at crime scenes to interview witnesses and they keep locking him out and shouting down his inquiries. Finally, after yet another confrontation with his editor, the truth comes out: the police and city hall are pressuring the paper to keep quiet about the sensational nature of the murders to keep the population calm and under control and the editor is playing ball.
The way the vampire is treated in this movie is pretty interesting. We don’t actually see him until we’re about a third of the way through the runtime, by which point it’s already been established that the women are dying of blood loss, their throats have been bitten by something leaving human saliva, and the killer is supremely strong. The movie knows we know it’s an actual vampire so doesn’t really try to pretend it isn’t. Despite all of the Hammer films and the burst of exploitation Draculas in the years preceding it this vampire is a pretty traditional one, fangs, pale skin, frightened of crosses, burned by sunlight, and killed by a stake to the heart. An interesting wrinkle is the whole stealing from blood banks thing, which is usually shorthand for vampires trying to feed without killing, but in this case it’s because he’s kidnapped a woman and draining her almost to death before giving her transfusions and starting the cycle again. There’s a whole wealth of unexplored vampire lore here that's just established as background details.
The vampire also doesn’t give a shit about Kolchak. For a while you think their clash is going to be personal as Kolchak is present at two confrontations between the vampire and the police and gets some direct pictures of him. When the murders are eventually public enough that they have to let Kolchak write some stories we see a POV shot of the vampire reading his byline. Traditional storytelling makes you think that the vampire is going to come gunning for our hero but the only reason they end up in a confrontation at the end is because Kolchak just has to poke around and get the scoop rather than waiting for the police.
The movie ends on a real bummer, but also it really couldn’t have ended any other way. Throughout the movie Kolchak clashes with the mayor and the chief of police, who are trying to downplay the murders. As they begin to pile up and especially after witnessing the killer tank some bullets and throw police officers around like children Kolchak goes from thinking it’s a madman who believes he’s a vampire to thinking it’s an actual vampire. We don’t get any single scene where he becomes a believer, he just keeps witnessing things until eventually it’s the only logical conclusion. The police don’t want to hear it and insist on using standard tactics to apprehend the killer. Things keep escalating until finally after a confrontation involving the entire police force, shutting down all of the roads leading out of Vegas, and which leaves several officers dead, Kolchak lays out a proposal: he’ll tell them how to catch the killer if they promise to give him the exclusive scoop. They accept, but only on the condition that if what he says doesn’t work he has to leave town in 12 hours. He agrees, then breaks out the crosses and wooden stakes. They reluctantly agree.
Kolchak leaves this meeting, already planning on going back to being a big city New York reporter again, when one of his sources comes through with a probable address for the vampire. Instead of waiting for daylight then going in with the police he tells his source to wait until sunrise before telling the cops then goes to scope out the place himself. There he finds the inevitable coffin with native soil inside as well as the kidnapped woman the vampire’s been keeping to feed upon. As he’s attempting to free the woman the vampire comes home and discovers him. Kolchak holds off the vampire with a cross as he makes his way down the stairs but stumbles and drops it. As they struggle one of his law enforcement friends comes in and through a combination of crosses and the newly risen sun they subdue the vampire long enough for Kolchak to stake him through the heart, at which point the rest of the cops finally show up.
Then, with an inevitability that’s in a way almost satisfying, Kolchak gets his comeuppance. He hands his triumphant story over to his editor, who is uncharacteristically quiet and receptive. He tells him to get over to the courthouse, where he’s met with the mayor and chief of police. He’s calmly informed that they have a warrant in hand for his arrest for the murder of the killer, who wasn’t in custody and not even charged. Their story is that they were staking out the house but Kolchak burst in seeking fame and glory, ruining their operation. Instead of his original story the paper is printing one they’ve written under his name about the sterling work done by the Las Vegas police department who were forced to kill the criminal in a pitched gun battle. They tell him to get out of town and if he ever utters a word of the truth they still have that warrant for murder all ready to go. They even ran his girl out of town. Crushed, he leaves, and the movie ends with him listening to a recording of the book he’s written about the entire ordeal before mirthlessly laughing and tossing the manuscript onto a table and into the end credits.
Despite being shot and released before Watergate actually became Watergate it’s very much a newspaper movie of its time. The titular night stalker is essentially a stand-in for any number of inconvenient truths that those holding power would rather not be made public or be examined in any detail. That’s what I meant when I said that the movie basically had to end this way. By trying to work with and through the existing power structures Kolchak was doomed to be destroyed by those structures when he was deemed inconvenient. No authority is going to allow independent establishment of facts not under its control and Kolchak should have frankly known better. The fact that he still tried is why, even in defeat, he’s the good guy at the center of the story. The movie was such a success that it spawned a sequel the next year and even a television show that didn’t quite last a year. This was far less of a vampire movie than I expected and far more of an early 70’s newspaper one, but it was a pretty good newspaper movie so I don’t mind at all.
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