Kolchak: The Night Stalker - The Vampire

Carl Kolchak first came to believe in the supernatural in 1972 when he covered a rash of serial murders in Las Vegas.  The killer turned out to be one Janos Skorzeny...and he was a vampire.  By the time it was over, Kolchak thought the story had been neatly wrapped up (along with his career).  He was wrong.  One of Skorzeny's victims has just awoken by the side of the road where Skorzeny buried her two years ago.  She is no longer human.

That connection from The Night Stalker (1972 telefilm) to Kokchak: The Night Stalker (1974 series) is neither overtly stated nor alluded to by Kolchak himself, so anyone who hasn't seen the original film won't need to feel  they're missing anything, but it does help explain Kolchak's sudden urgency to be on the  scene when he hears that a string of homicides from Vegas to L.A. has left victims with "an inordinate loss of blood".  If you haven't seen the telefilm, it just looks like a reporter's zeal.
 
On learning of the murders from an old friend (TV comedy stalwart Larrry Storch as "Swede" Breitowski), and hearing that Vincenzo needs a reporter to fly to LA to get a story on a celebrity spiritual leader, Kolchak secures the assignment by pretending not to want it.  Updyke volunteers, and has read up on the subject - just a little - but Kolchak knows how to play his boss, and though Updyke sees through it he's helpless to do anything about it.  Too bad for both him and Vincenzo, because Updyke would actually have written the story - Kolchak has no   interest in the guru, it's just a plane ticket to him.

Where the earlier three episodes allowed some mystery for us and Kolchak to discover, 'The Vampire' lets us in on the killer's identity from  the beginning.  Even the story title mocks a concern for spoilers.  Her name is Catherine Rawlins, and we  watch her progress even as Kolchak is still winging his way across the continent. Her introductory scene is possibly the creepiest single image from the series as her hands rising from the earth by the stalled car of a motorist.  It's a blood-curdling moment. In life, she worked L.A. and Vegas as a prostitute.  Returning to L.A. in death she kills her former roommate, steals her clothing, and makes herself  attractive to a pimp who will put her right where she can find easy victims.  By implication Rawlins must be able to pass for human, including speech, but never appears onscreen as anything but a feral animal caught in the act of feeding.  Woe to whoever catches her, because she's violent and stronger than human. Skorzeny was kept silent as well in the movie.  It's an effective approach, minimizing what humanity she once had. 

A police investigation is led by William Daniels as Lt. Matteo, bringing to the role the same imperious irascibility he displayed in 1776 and St. Elsewhere.  Excellent casting -that's two in a  row, following James Gregory, as authoritative foils both  strong and amusing.  Matteo is working on a theory that the killings are being conducted by Satanists using vacuum pumps to drain the victims of blood for use in rituals.  It's preposterous in the details, but at least presents down-to-earth perpetrators. He's about to run headlong into Kolchak who keeps throwing vampires in his face.  Matteo  doesn't have the patience for it.  Do people really get 'run out of town' by police?

Here's a bit of a problem as Kolchak for the first time starts to sound like a loon even to us, the audience.  We know he's right, of course, but what does he do to convince Matteo?  Walk him through the logic?  Ask Vincenzo to tell Matteo what happened two years ago in Vegas?  No, he rants.  Rants about stakes and hammers and the undead. Rants like a true believer thinking the conviction of his passion alone will convert everyone else regardless of reason or fact.  If you're already in a hole, stop digging.  Kolchak is so  carried away he can't stop digging with Matteo.  He can't get it through his head that others have to go through the same process he did, from  skeptic to believer.

Again, it's a testament to Darren McGavin that we cheer on and enjoy Carl Kolchak even though he treats those around him in spectacularly selfish and thoughtless ways.  To remain in L.A. he  has to placate Vincenzo with his given assignment.  To do that, after a token stab at covering it himself, he bamboozles a one-time journalist wannabe into writing it for him.  I have a little trouble with this as well, on a couple of levels.  Faye the realtor was for a brief time a genuine journalist.  Her mind bends to estates these days, and drafts a piece detailing the property the guru used to live in...and I wonder whether she shouldn't know better.  It's comic relief, of course, and we are meant to understand that she is now a realtor because as a writer she made a better estate agent.  No writer's instinct, then, but...not even a fundamental understanding of covering a story?  It may be a quibble, but the more I see of the episode the less these interludes in 'The Vampire' play for me.  Vincenzo should immediately spot that the submitted piece was not written by his own reporter: another quibble.  K:TNS is precariously balancing between character-driven humor and goofiness, and I have to say that camp has never been my favorite flavor.   Speaking of character, I'm leery of Kolchak's intention to sign his byline to Faye's writing.  It's grossly unethical, of course, and a shitty thing to do...but even granting that Kolchak is willing to sink to any dirty trick to get a story, I had always thought his own work was something he held sacrosanct. This isn't the same Carl who shared a lunch with Jane Plumm.

Much of the humor elsewhere is spot on, as when Carl flashes his INS credentials at a janitor and makes like a fed, having been mistaken  for one a few hours earlier.  There's the look on the face of a doorman when Kolchak pulls up in front of his hotel and sends a woman to his room with the instructions to "Start without me" before driving off.  There's an awkward scene wherein Kolchak arranges for the escort service to send  Rawlins to his room, and they send someone else.  She's a little alarmed, and a lot blase about whatever kink this sad bastard waving a cross at her must be into.  He's  drawn a cross on the door in lipstick.  It's sort of humorous in a nervous, uncomfortable way but not exactly comedy.  Nor is the horror-stricken shock on Matteo's face when he finds Kolchak having just driven a stake into the heart of a young woman.  He could only be thinking that her death is his own fault for not realizing this lunatic reporter was crazy enough to kill someone and not merely a nutter to put on a plane.  No, this show may be about  the boogeymen of our childhoods but it ain't for kids. 

"The multiple listings had described Catherine Rawlins' house as a baronial retreat.  It was actually a decayed turn-of-the-century mansion waiting to be turned into a  condominium, and it would appeal  to a special type of client: someone unconcerned with earthy comforts...and it was secluded. Who would go near it?  Only a vampire.  Or some fool looking for her."  'The Vampire' concludes with one of TNS' patented sequences of fumbling in the dark where no sane  person should be to find the monster-of-the-week in its lair, and a confrontation.  This is one of the better ones with Kolchak leading the vampire into a trap he has set with a local landmark.  It does suffer from being repetitive, though, echoing closely the same finale in The Ripper.  For a  formulaic series, this is something to avoid relying on.  I've seen pics of the cross on the hill but a quick (lazy) search turned up nothing. 

What to rate it, having set The Ripper at 7 for a standard?  I don't think the Faye scenes live up to that but the horror does, and I like that the story varies (if slightly) from the formula.   Okay then, 6.5 tubes of lipstick blessed by a priest.
 
Asides:
Kolchak's narration tells us this takes place in Spring, and later the more specific date of May 6th is given.  A week ago it was October! (They Have Been, They Are, They Will Be... was set on the first day of the '74 World Series).

I know I could not have heard correctly the name of the paper Faye worked for, and I hesitate to repeat it now for fear of offending anyone - sincerely, I'm not getting political - but it sounded like... "The Greaseball Republican"??  That  can't be right.  I'd hate to imagine the names of the more left-leaning publications that carry Carl's stories.

By now we've all seen the nightmarish image of a corpse digging its own way out of the soil it was buried in.  This got me wondering when that image might have been put on screen for the first time.  It was seen in Zombi 2 (Lucio Fulci, 1979), and Michael Jackson's Thriller (1983), in Return of the Living Dead (Dan O'Bannon, 1985), and Mario Bava's Black Sunday (1960 - highly recommended), and before then must have been a vivid description appearing in printed fiction. Oddly enough, George Romero never used it in his Living Dead films but I think he might have in Creepshow.  I asked the good people of the IMDb Horror Board, and while it may or may not be the earliest example I was pointed toward "Misterios de ultratumba" aka The Black Pit of Dr. M  (Fernando Méndez, 1959)  (Thanks, seth_yeah!) Psychotronicbeatnik made the astute observation that it likely was first used by the pulp comics like Eerie or Creepy, and AlamoScout210 came up with this: https://d1466nnw0ex81e.cloudfront.net/n_iv/600/769983.jpg, and tommix42 is recommending a later story by Richard Matheson and his son Richard Christian Matheson titled Where There's a Will.

Another repeated music cue I like comes in at about 44:23 on the older DVD.