Halloween Countdown Day 41 - Kolchack: The Night Stalker

If you want a job done right, you just have to foul it up yourself.
—Carl Kolchak, Kolchak: The Night Stalker


Greetings my putrid audience, your ol' pal Eerie Evan is back yet again with a Halloween countdown post. Do you fancy Fringe? Are you a self-styled X-Filer? Then you have this show to thank. A little known gem called Kolchak: The Night Stalker. Y'see kiddos, by the 70s, people were ready for a newer, more realistic kind of horror. Confidence in the government was at an all time low, the US was still losing the Vietnam War, and the Summer of Love had given way to the 'Me' decade. This was shown in the switchover in how we handled the 'spooky stuff'.



In the 1960s, The Munsters and that other kooky family, The Addams Family, graced the airwaves. But they weren't particularly threatening, or even that strange, just eccentric and endearing in a vaguely creepy sort of way. Shows from that era took their cues from the camp movement, and while they're fun to watch, it shows. Kolchak didn't really play that way.



Kolchak was all alone in his endeavors. People thought that he was a kook on one end of the spectrum, and down right dangerous on the other. He didn't have a friend to fall back on. At the end of the day, it was him, his wits, and his trusty camera. This kind of aware-individual versus the complacent and unaware system type of fashioning a story carries through in media as various as The Matrix films to the World of Darkness role-playing system.  



Carl Kolchak, the title character is an intrepid reporter type day, who gets wound up in messy occult conspiracies with monsters by night. A big part of the shows draw however, wasn't just the procedural Dragnet-style twists presented in the series, but also its own quirky sense of humor and levity.

In a way, I'd almost call Kolchak: The Night Stalker Diet Film Noir. There is a neigh Lynchian style in which the character's dialogue plays out, my personal all time favorite being "In short, I believe your brain has turned to Onion dip." McGavin's performance as Kolchak is highly enjoyable. He's good enough to get the facts, yet stumbles around difficult scenarios and is fallible. At the end of an episode, Kolchak often admits that while he'll never really understand what was going on, the Facts he has are the Facts, his editor be damned, he's going to stick to them.

If you have any interest at all in 70's horror or shows such as X-Files or Fringe, then you should really check out this series. Kolchak was only around for a season before they pulled the plug, but the memories still remain. It had an attempted relaunch 2005, recasting Kolchak as some guy who had his wife killed by werewolves to make it darker and edgier, but it didn't last. I've embedded a full episode of Kolchak below, one of the best in my own opinion. Enjoy kiddies, and until next time.