RetView #84 – Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things (1972)

Title: Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things

Year of Release: 1972

Director: Bob Clark

Length: 87 mins

Starring: Alan Ormsby, Anya Ormsby, Valerie Mamches, Jeff Gillen, Paul Cronin, Jane Daly, Bruce Solomon

Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things (also known as Revenge of the Living Dead, Things from the Dead, Cemetery of the Dead, The Siege of the Living Dead, and Zreaks) is an iconic piece of work co-written and directed by Bob Clark, who would go on to direct Deathdream (1974) and the classic frat comedy Porky’s. Riffing off Night of the Living Dead (1968), the script was written in 10 days and the movie shot in 14 on a budget of just $50,000, with most of the people working on it being college friends making it a true labour of love. Most of the cast were not even trained actors, with only a select few going to to have modest careers in TV or cinema. Also, this must be one of the very few zombie movies starring a married couple, Alan and Anya Ormsby who’s characters, hilariously, are also named Alan and Anya. Nod, nod, wink, wink. The quips and one-liners come thick and fast (“What a bunch of stiffs!”). At least, they do until the shit hits the fan.

The story follows a theatre troupe (“I do have talent when I have a good part!”) who travel by boat to an island off the coast of Miami that is mainly used as a cemetery for criminals, for a night of campy fun. When they arrive, their director Alan (Ormsby), a twisted, sadistic individual, tells the motley crew of actors, whom he refers as his ‘children’, stories about the island’s grisly history in a concerted effort to unsettle them. He also digs up the corpse of a man named Orville, which is certain to make any party go with a bang. The names written on the styrofoam tombstones, by the way, are the names of various crew members.

“They’re having trouble all over the world with graverobbbers, ghouls, and people breaking into cemeteries.”

“But we’re the graverobbers. Who’s going to bother us?”

“Nobody but demons.”

And zombies, as we are soon to discover.

Eventually, Alan leads the group to a cottage where they are supposed to spend the night, and then proceeds to get robed up and prepare the group for an ancient ritual to summon the dead. Probably not the smartest move when you’re on an island off the coast of Miami that is mainly used as a cemetery for criminals, but okay then. When some of the group aren’t so keen (understandably) he threatens them with the sack, which I am pretty sure would be a breach of some ethical code or other these days, but this was the seventies. Alan’s bullying and cheap jokes soon stop when the gang realise the ritual they performed had worked, and the entire island is now swarming with freshly reanimated zombies. It kind of makes you wonder what they expected to happen. Even for a low-budget seventies horror comedy film, “They seem pretty slow. Why don’t we make a run for it?” has to be one of the dumbest lines ever uttered.

In a desperate attempt to get themselves out of the mess they had created, the group attempts to perform another ritual to return the zombies to their graves. And it works! For a bit. However, they neglect to return Orville to his grave, prompting the zombies to re-emerge and ambush the group as they leave the house. Alan and Anya retreat back inside, and in a last ditch effort to save himself, despicable Alan throws Anya to the zombies and locks himself in the bedroom where he left Orville’s corpse, not realising Orville is now a zombie, too.

In these #RetView posts I try to keep spoilers to a minimum and not to discuss plot holes or endings. I’m not here to be a killjoy, and my hope is that readers will seek these films out themselves. On this occasion, though, I feel I have to mention it. The zombies get on the boat, see. The boat the group had taken to the island. As the zombies board it, you can see the inviting lights of Miami twinkling in the background, the implication being that the zombies will soon enter the mainstream, so to speak. But… who is going to sail the boat? Sailing a boat is a tricky business, or so I imagine. These zombies are shambling husks that can barely walk. I doubt very much any of them retain enough brain function, let alone dexterity, to captain a boat across a choppy section of water. I know I’m probably pedantic but as the credits rolled all I could think was, “Shit! The zombies got on the boat!” which was, I suppose, the desired effect. But this was quickly followed by, “Oh, it’s okay. they won’t get far. We’re good.”

Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things is currently rocking a 42% rating on review site Rotten Tomatoes and in reviewing the later DVD release, Bloody Disgusting said: “[This] is well worth your time if you haven’t gotten around to it yet [and] really should be held among the top zombie movies of all time.” Meanwhile, the website 100 Misspent Hours was less generous, saying, “The biggest problem with Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things is that it’s an 85-minute zombie movie in which the zombies don’t turn up until minute 64.”

Bob Clark was said to have been considering a remake, but plans were curtailed when his Infiniti I30 was hit by a drunk driver in April 2007. Unless, of course, Alan Ormsby decides to raise him from the dead. Since then, other rumours of a remake have circulated, but none have so far come to fruition. It is available as a free download from the Internet Archive.

Trivia Corner

Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things, a track on Finnish heavy/doom metal band Wolfshead’s 2017 album Leaden, is based on the movie.

RetView #81 – The Mutations (1974)

Title: The Mutations

Year of Release: 1974

Director: Jack Cardiff

Length: 92 mins

Starring: Donald Pleasence, Tom Baker, Brad Harris, Julie Edge, Michael Dunn

Sometimes films, no matter how good they are, just get overlooked and then forgotten about, only to resurface decades later on some obscure satellite TV station, in this case Talking Pictures in the UK. In The Mutations (aka The Freakmaker), Donald Pleasence (What a Carve Up! Death Line, the first two Halloween films, and about a bazillion others) stars as mad scientist, Professor Nolter, who has taken it upon himself to pioneer what he sees as the next stage in human evolution by crossbreeding Venus flytraps with college students he abducts from his class (standard dialogue: “We are interested in cloning, not in clowning!”) his ultimate plan being to create a race of “plants that can walk, and men that can take root”. Seems reasonable enough, right? No problem there.

However, friends of the missing students start asking questions and obviously, science being what it is, the vast majority of Professor Nolter’s kooky experiments end in abject failure, leaving the crazed professor with a surplus of mutant human/plant hybrids which are handed over to a cruel circus freak show owner, Mr. Lynch (a barely-recognisable Baker, seen here shortly before his career-defining turn as Doctor Who) who attempts to exploit them for monetary gain which, as we all know, is the, ahem, root of all evil. Boom. This aspect calls to mind another classic Pleasence outing in Circus of Horrors (1960) though The Mutations is generally believed to have been directly inspired by Tod Browning’s classic Freaks (1932), which follows the exploits of a travelling French circus. And like that movie, it’s now frowned upon by modern standards because of the sometimes distasteful exploitation of actors with genuine disabilities who star alongside able-bodied actors with fictional disabilities, among the array of ‘freaks’ are the Pretzel Man, the Bearded Lady, the Monkey Woman, the Alligator-skinned Girl, and the Human Pincushion. Michael Dunn, a well-known American actor with dwarfism who played Lynch’s sidekick Burns, died at the Cadogan hotel in London at the age of 39 while the movie was in production. Other problematic scenes included the professor appearing to feed a live rabbit to a giant Venus flytrap. It seems people are cool with seeing scores of teenagers meet all kinds of inventive, grisly ends in the movies, but the moment you feed a rabbit to a Venus flytrap everyone loses their marbles. As you can probably guess, all this is bound to end in disaster. Good must triumph over evil. And the mutations, kitted out in shoddy costumes and grotesque make up, set out to wreak their revenge.

In much the same way as Tod Browning manages in Freaks (the parallels just keep coming), in the second half of the film the viewer is cajoled into feeling a measure of sympathy for the nutations who, from the outside looking in, would appear to be the monsters. These are the abused, the downtrodden, the disaffected, and the vulnerable, who wouldn’t even consider being evil if something evil hadn’t happened to them first, and you want them to find justice. This isn’t exactly a new mechanism, harking back to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and maybe even earlier, but is unusual none-the-less. Mr. Lynch, aka, ‘the ugliest man in the world’ is also a very complex character. Horribly disfigured, he yearns to be normal and refuses to take his place among the ‘freaks’ (“He’s one of us!”). At one point he goes to a prostitute and pays her extra to say ‘I love you.’ Aww.

The Mutations was directed by legendary British cinematographer Jack Cardiff (1914-2009) and released through Columbia pictures. Though filled with crackpot theories and pseudo-science, it raises all kind of moral and ethical questions, chief among them being how much should (or could) people interfere with nature? Is it selfish to attempt to guarantee the future survival of a species? Or is it necessary? Pleasence is wonderfully cast, though he does tend to resemble Pete Townshend a bit too much for my liking. Speaking of music, also worthy of note is the truly unsettling soundtrack by Basil Kirchin, which starts with something resembling a heartbeat in the opening credits, and twists and writhes throughout. The film has been released on DVD several times since 2005, most notably in 2008 by Subversive Cinema as a part of a 2-Disk ‘Greenhouse Gore’ movie pack with The Gardener (1974) about a deranged landscaper who turns into a tree.

Author and film critic Leonard Maltin criticised The Mutations’ ‘predictable’ story and what he called “grotesque elements” while the TV Guide awarded it one star out of five, saying, “Though at times the film is so bad it’s unintentionally funny, it has a certain cruelty to it.” Contemporary review site My Bloody Reviews notes, “more of a curiosity piece than essential viewing The Mutations is criminally dull and only comes to life whenever Tom Baker is on screen, otherwise this is rather pedestrian and questionable in its depiction of ‘freaks’”. Michael H. Price of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, was slightly more impressed, giving it a solid three stars and praising both the effects and Kirchin’s “dissonant orchestral score” which he claims “adds mightily to the mood of unease and gathering madness.”

Trivia Corner

According to Tom Baker, while filming he and Willie Ingram, who played Popeye, so-called for his uncanny ability to make his eyes pop far out of their sockets, struck up an unlikely friendship. They used to frequent a pub, where a particular waitress made it clear that she didn’t approve of Baker, who was white, being friends with Ingram, who was black. To get back at her, Ingram would make his eyes pop out when she passed, then pretend nothing had happened.

RetView #78 – Burnt Offerings (1975)

Title: Burnt Offerings

Year of Release: 1975

Director: Dan Curtis

Length: 116 mins

Starring: Oliver Reed, Karen Black, Burgess Meredith, Eileen Heckart, Bette Davis, Anthony James

What a stellar cast. Oliver Reed and Bette Davis each have (had, sorry) the ability to elevate any only crap to whole new levels, and to have them both in the same film is just absurd. Being an English language geek, however, it took me a while to get past that title. Is it burned or burnt? Turns out it can be both though the former is more common in American English, which makes it even more surprising that they’ve chosen to go with ‘Burnt.’ It takes its title from the book of the same name by American author Robert Marasco published in 1973. Anyway, back to the movie, and this is very much a slow burner (get in!) low on gore and big on atmosphere typical of the raft of seventies haunted house films. Interestingly, Stephen King lists it as one of his favourite horror movies and there is ample evidence to suggest that the original book at least partly inspired his own novel The Shining. It won a slew of Saturn Awards, including Best Horror Film, and Best Director. Bette Davis also won the award for Best Supporting Actress.

Writer Ben Rolf (Reed), his wife Marian (Black), their 12-year-old son Davey and Ben’s elderly aunt Elizabeth (Davis) visit a large, remote, neo-classical 19th-century mansion with a view to renting it for the summer. The home’s eccentric owners, elderly siblings Arnold (Meredith) and Roz Allardyce (Heckart), offer them the property at a bargain price of $900 for the entire summer, which seems too good to be true. And it is. The offer comes with with a request: the Allardyce’s elderly mother, who they claim is 85 but could pass for spritely 59, will continue to live in her upstairs room, and the Rolfs are to provide her with meals during their stay. The old woman is obsessed with privacy and will not interact with them, so meals are to be left outside her door. Like that isn’t a red flag. Anyway, Marian soon becomes obsessed with the house, and eventually starts wearing some Victorian-era clothes she finds and distances herself from the rest of the family. Various unusual circumstances occur: Davey falls and hurts his knee playing in the garden, a dead plant starts to grow again, Ben comes a cropper with champagne bottle, and a malfunctioning light bulb is mysteriously repaired. Ben is also haunted by visions of an eerie, grinning hearse driver (James) who he had first seen at his mother’s funeral years earlier.

Despite the awards and the all-star cast, Burnt Offerings received mixed reviews. George Anderson of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette criticized it as being “dependent on typical horror tropes such as shocks and loud music hits” and described the tension as, “A lot of sinister huffing and puffing to little effect”. While praising Meredith and Heckart (who had won an academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in 1972 for her performance in Butterflies are Free) as the best performers in the film, Richard Dyer of The Boston Globe argued the source material gave the actors too little to work with. He called Black, who was four months pregnant during filming, “particularly inconsistent”, said Reed looked “like an eggplant”, and stated Davis “tries to create a Bette Davis character without any Bette Davis lines to work with.” At the other end of the spectrum, in a contemporary summary, Rovi Donald Guarisco of Movie Guide called the film “worthy of rediscovery by the horror fans who missed it the first time”, concluding that “In the end, Burnt Offerings is probably a bit too methodical in its pacing for viewers accustomed to slam-bang approach of post-’70s horror fare, but seasoned horror fans will find plenty to enjoy.”

For what it’s worth, I thought the performances were superb but found the overall package slightly overwrought and overlong, especially for a film where, frankly, there isn’t much plot. You could easily cut 20-25 minutes off the running time and lose nothing except some snivelling from Bette Davis and some posturing by Ollie Reed. In short, there’s more style here than substance, but what substance!

Trivia Corner

Bette Davis reportedly detested Oliver Reed. She insisted on referring to him as ‘that man’ and only speaking to him when they shared on-screen dialogue. After filming, she described him as “possibly one of the most loathesome human beings I have ever had the misfortune of meeting.” She also had conflicts with Karen Black, feeling that Black did not treat her with an appropriate degree of respect. Oh dear.

Retview #45 – The Beast Must Die! (1974)

RetView #45

Title: The Beast Must Die

Year of Release: 1974

Director: Paul Annett

Length: 89 mins

Starring: Anton Diffring, Calvin Lockhart, Marlene Clark, Charles Gray, Peter Cushing

As regular readers of the world-renowned Retview series will know, I’m a sucker for a good werewolf movie. Or even a bad one. You could say werewolves are my favourite mythical supernatural beastie, as evidenced by previous instalments covering An American Werewolf in London, The Howling, Dog Soldiers, and Hound of the Baskervilles. Okay, spoiler alert, that last one turned out to be more of a massive painted dog than a werewolf, but the viewer doesn’t know that until right at the very end when Sherlock Holmes helpfully breaks it all down. Ironically, Peter Cushing, the actor who played Holmes in that classic pops up again here in a role so fitting that it could have been (and perhaps was) written especially for him. Even before the opening credits kick in, the brief is laid bare with a bold voiceover proclaiming, “This film is a detective story in which you are the detective. The question is not, ‘Who is the murderer?’ but, ‘Who is the werewolf?’

Dum, dum, DUM!

And we’re off. Millionaire Tom Newcliffe (Lockhart) has invited an eclectic bunch of acquaintances including an artist, a famous pianist, an archaeologist and a diplomat to his mansion in rural England, every inch of which has been placed under surveillance by a high-tech security system featuring CCTV, motion-detectors and all manner of other (then) advanced technological wizardry. In time, Newcliffe and his wife (Clark) reveal to the group that one of their collected number is a werewolf, and the reason for the soiree is to find out who it is and then kill it, hence the title.

And so the fun begins.

All manner of lycanthropic lore is then called upon in a concerted attempt to uncover the beast in question, from using the wolfsbane flower to silver bullets. Needless to say a few suspects get eaten along the way, along with someone’s dog, when the werewolf goes on the rampage and starts steadily reducing the list of suspects. In fact, it probably can’t believe it’s luck. As intimated earlier, it is then up to the viewer to solve the mystery and unmask the beast.

Like Dr Terror’s House of Horrors almost a decade before, the Beast Must Die was made by Amicus Studios, a production company based at Shepperton Studios which flourished between 1962 and 1977, and came near the end of their reign. This was an era when horror movies were just beginning to come into their own, and many studios tried to be innovative and push the boundaries in a variety of ways. This particular effort was marketed as a horror mystery, and challenged the viewer to uncover the identity of the werewolf by picking up clues along the way and distinguishing them from the multitude of red herrings typical of 1970s cinema.

Conversely, near the climax there is a 30-second semi-interactive ‘werewolf break’ where viewers are encouraged to put their momney where their mouths are and name their suspect, which you can see would provoke some discourse between viewers. Though it also heavily features elements drawn from elsewhere, The Beast Must Die is based on the short story ‘There shall be No Darkness’ by American sci-fi writer James Blish, which was published in the pulp magazine thrilling Wonder Stories.

Despite a campy, seventies feel exasperated by a soundtrack that wouldn’t be out of place in Shaft and some gloriously hammed-up acting, since it’s release, The Beast Must Die has enjoyed several re-issues, most notably in 2006, and garnered some generally favourable contemporary reviews mostly along the lines of, “Absolute Cushing classic,” and “Cracking little horror film that deserves a wider audience,” all of which which make it the very epitomization of a cult classic. An alternate version of the film omitting the ‘werewolf break,’ of which Annett was reportedly never a fan (he blamed the whole thing on producer Milton Subotsky), was later released under the title Black Werewolf (which rather gives a lot away) and you can watch the full movie, including the controversial ‘werewolf break,’ RIGHT HERE.

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Trivia Corner:

Due to the miniscule production budget, the ‘werewolf’ was played by a German Shepherd kitted out in shaggy dark fur to give it a larger, more ‘otherworldly’ look.

RetView #20 – Race With the Devil (1975)

Title: Race with the Devil

Year of Release: 1975

Director: Jack Starrett

Length: 88 minutes

Starring: Peter Fonda, Warren Oates, Loretta Switt, Lara Parker, RG Armstrong

Race with the Devil is the rarest of things; an action/horror/road movie mash-up of epic proportions. American audiences loved their car chases in the seventies. For a while, that was the whole point of making films and often, any plot or storyline was aimed primarily at manufacturing situations where people got behind the wheels of cars (or in this case, motorhomes) and chased each other around. Just look at that poster. They witnessed an unspeakable act! It screams, stopping just short of adding, “And that’s why they got in the ve-hicle so we could have us a good ole chase!”

After some suitably ominous music, we are introduced to motorcycle dealership owner Frank Stewart (Oates) who, along with his friend and keen motorcross racer Roger Marsh (Fonda) is preparing to head out to Aspen, Colarado, on a ski holiday. Along for the ride are their wives (Switt and Parker) and a belligerent little dog called Ginger. After being on the road for a while they find a quiet, secluded place to spend the night. While drinking beer and shooting the shit outside the motorhome, Frank and Roger see a fire burning in the distance. On going to investigate, they find a bunch of people dressed in robes, dancing around said fire and chanting which is all very reminiscent of Maiden’s Number of the Beast (“I feel drawn toward the chanting hordes, they seem to mesmerize, can’t avoid their eyes”).

When half the Satanists get naked, Frank and Roger settle down to watch what they anticipate will be a vast, open-air orgy, but things take a sinister turn when one of the naked women is stabbed to death by a dude in a mask, and apparently offered up as a human sacrifice. Just then, the interlopers are discovered by the newly-naked Satanists and lo and behold, we have our chase. Frank and the gang drive the motorhome through a river, up a hill through a forest, and then cross country (it’s a motorhome, not a fucking tank!) before eventually winding up in a small town where they report the unspeakable act they witnessed to the local sheriff (Armstrong). But isn’t there something slightly off about that sheriff? Of course there is. You know the drill. In fact, everyone they meet seems a little ‘out there,’ from the librarian to the mechanic fixing their window, which riffs off the whole generational hippy paranoia thing that was going on at the time. Vietnam, Watergate, race riots, Jesus Christ Superstar, post-Woodstock America was a deeply troubled place.

Things escalate when the group leave town and spend the night at a camp site populated by yet more iffy individuals where Ginger comes a cropper and they find rattlesnakes in the cupboards. That’s enough to ruin anybody’s holiday. Before long, they really are engaged in a race with the Devil. Or, more accurately, the Devil’s mates. The last quarter is one long adrenaline-filled smash ‘em up as the increasingly frustrated cult members try their hardest to prevent the Frank and company making it the real police leading to some pretty impressive stunt driving. At one point, a Dodge pickup truck pursues them for about three miles on two wheels. I shit you not. The supernatural elements do feel a bit tacked on, giving you the impression that these people could be being chased by anybody – cult members, rednecks, bikers, hippies, rogue penguins, aliens. But nevertheless, it’s thrilling, and sometimes chilling, stuff.

Race with the Devil was directed by Jack Starrett (perhaps best known for his roles in Blazing Saddles and as asshole deputy Art Gault in First Blood) who made his name acting in a slew of biker movies in the late sixties and early-seventies. Conveniently, this dove-tailed with Fonda’s appearance in the legendary Easy Rider and several other notable contributions to the genre. It could have been preordained that these two were going to work together at some point, and when they did, motorcycles were going to be involved. Starrett even has a cameo role here as a gas station attendant. Interestingly, he later claimed to have hired actual, real-life satanists as cult member extras, though this statement may have been a publicity stunt. I mean, how the heck would he find them? You can’t just put out a call for satanists who wouldn’t mind being in a Hollywood movie. If it was a publicity stunt, it worked. Though it received mixed reviews, the movie tapped into the American psyche and was a huge success, drawing over $12 million at the Box Office from a modest budget of $1.75 million. It was released just when home video was taking off, bringing in another $6 million-plus in rentals, and was re-issued as a double feature in 2011 with another Peter Fonda film, Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry. It isn’t often talked about these days, which is a shame as it’s definitely worth a punt.

Trivia Corner:

According to IMDB, some of the chase scenes involving the motorhome and its steadily degenerating condition were used as stock footage in eighties TV classic The Fall Guy.

 

RetView #5 – The Night Stalker

Title: The Night Stalker

Year of Release: 1972

Director: John Llewellyn Moxey

Length: 74 mins

Starring: Darren McGavin, Simon Oakland, Carol Lynley

Note: This article concerns the original 1972 TV movie, not the unrelated 2016 release of the same name, or the 2002 movie Nightstalker, both of which focus on the activities of serial killer Richard Ramirez.

It’s probably fair to say that despite coming out before I was born, this made-for-TV movie, and the popular series that followed it, had more of an effect on me personally and professionally than anything else committed to celluloid. I didn’t even realise how much until relatively recently. How? Because the film married my twin obsessions with writing and the paranormal, ensuring that to my young and impressionable mind, that the two things would forever be entwined.

Shortly after I first saw it as a kid, I remember telling my parents I wanted be a journalist when I grew up. They facilitated this childhood ambition by going out and buying me a ‘reporters kit’ comprising of a notebook and pen and a magnifying glass. Obviously, I immediately went out looking for monsters, ghosts, and other supernatural entities, hoping to look at them in fine detail through the magnifying glass and write about them in the notebook, because I wanted to be just like Carl Kolchak.

Damn it, I still do.

For the uninitiated, Carl Kolchak (brilliantly portrayed by the sadly departed Darren McGavin) is a jaded Las Vegas newspaper hack under unrelenting pressure from his shouty editor Vincenzo (Oakland) to turn over a constant stream of newsworthy articles. Luckily for him, though less-so for the victims, he uncovers a spate of gruesome murders and a wide-ranging cover-up. The general feeling is that Kolchak is particularly anxious to solve this particular case out of concern for his dancer girlfriend Gail (Lynley). An investigation reveals that the murders go back centuries, and the victims invariably suffer extreme blood loss. There is a suspect by the name of Janos Skorzeny who Kolchak believes is an ageless vampire, but can he convince the authorities and his difficult editor?

Ultimately, he doesn’t need to convince anyone because during a late-night showdown Kolchak manages to destroy the suspected vampire, thereby saving the city. But his actions come at a terrible cost. He is told to leave Las Vegas immediately or face a trumped-up murder charge, and is given the devastating news that Gail has already left. The lovelorn reporter then blows his savings placing ads in the personal sections of newspapers up and down the country in an attempt to find her. He never does, and the movie ends as it begins, with Kolchak lying on a bed in a sleazy hotel room listening to a playback of his account of the crimes which he has narrated into a Dictaphone. I guess matters of the heart were a lot harder to resolve before Facebook and What’s App.

The story ark was continued in a sequel, The Night Strangler (1973), where Kolchak finds himself in Seattle and is hired once again by Vincenzo to report on another series of bizarre murders. The second movie immediately preceded the 20-episode TV series, which became a fore-runner for such shows as the X Files, Supernatural, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. There was also a short-lived, and frankly pretty terrible remake which lasted for ten episodes in 2005.

When it first aired on ABC over 45 years ago, The Night Stalker set the viewing record for TV movies, winning a 33.2 rating (the percentage of all TV homes). I might be wrong, but I don’t think that figure has ever been surpassed, and in the age of Netflix and streaming, it’s unlikely to ever happen. The screenplay for The Night Stalker was written by sci-fi legend Richard Matheson (the man behind I am Legend, the Incredible Shrinking Man, A Stir of Echoes and many more), and adapted from an as-then unpublished novel called the Kolchak Papers by Jeff Rice. Matheson and Rice collaborated on the sequel The Night Strangler but Rice, who often felt marginalized, then faded into obscurity, dying in 2015 at the age of 71.

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Trivia Corner:

Producer Chris Carter is such a fan of Kolchak that he cast Darren McGavin in the X Files. The original plan was to have him play Kolchak thirty years on, but McGavin elected not to and the role was re-written to make him Arthur Dale, ‘Father of the X Files.’