horror tv series
 

Does anyone here remember the tv series Kolchak: The Night Stalker? it could be pretty bad. It's one of the tv series Stephen King discusses in his book Danse Macabre.

The star, Darren McGavin, still delights us in reruns of A Christmas Story, as Ralph's Old Man.

I watched the series on TV. They eps did vary in quality of course, but I remember them being pretty good. The made-for-TV movie The Night Stalker is really good. It's a cool take on the vampire genre, were you have a hot shot newpaper reporter who discovers a vampire, but nobody believes in vampires. It's also a cool period piece, being 1972.

it got high ratings
 

When the Night Stalker came out, I read in Famous Monsters of Filmland that it got the highest ratings of any tv movie up to that time.

The sequel, The Night Strangler, wasn't as good.

Making it into a series raises the question raised by all the Die Hard movies. The reporter encounters a monster, that's unusual. Twice, could be a coincidence. But over and over and over?

I didn't know it was so popular. I guess it really hit a nerve.

Yes and no. ::big grin::

There's a concept that I think is true, how far it goes is really debatable or otherwise just different in any particular case... but it goes something like this: once someone starts to see something they hadn't noticed before, they will start to see it everywhere, and maybe few to none also see it. The ole Plato's Allegory of the cave.

As fiction, the Kolchak show works with that general axiom, only Kolchak believes in monsters, and he's an observant beat reporter with mad newsbeat skills. The idea is monsters are everywhere, so now that he believes, he's going to see them all. The volume of monsters in a city probably isn't less believable than the existence of monsters to begin with.

Kolchak was ACE. I recall a furry monster that projects an image in the minds of its victims of a friend, then it comes at them with open arms as if to hug but it kills them.

Huge fan of the series, Darren McGavin is amazing in the role... It was a big influence on the creators of X Files. Not a fan of the remake though