CBS LATE MOVIE MONTH: Kolchak: The Night Stalker recap

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After The Night Stalker and The Night Strangler, Carl Kolchak was so popular with TV viewers that a TV series had to follow. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been going through those episodes as part of CBS Late Movie Month. I can’t even explain the sheer excitement that would happen every time Kolchak would be part of the late night series. Sure, McCloud is good, but a newspaper writer battling a lizardman in the sewers? That’s the kind of thing that made my kid brain explode in sheer mania.

Here are the episodes:

Sadly, the third TV movie about android duplicates — The Night Killers — was canceled in favor of the series.

There were also originally twenty-six episodes in the show — only twenty were filmed — and a few of the unproduced scripts include “Eve of Terror,” written by Stephen Lord (Kolchak says in this story, “What if I told you that a deranged feminist murdered a Casanova lab technician, a sex goddess, and her purveyor?”); “The Get of Belial,” written by Donn Mullally (Kolchak covers a miner’s strike in West Virginia and meets a family that has an inbred monster) and “The Executioners,” written by Max Hodge (Kolchak is demoted to the arts section and discovers that a series of murders are tied to a painting).

In 2005, a new Night Stalker series aired on ABC. Although creator Jeff Rice has the rights to any written Kolchak stories and Universal Studios owns the rights to the TV series, ABC owned the dramatic rights to the character and two TV movies. That’s how this show got made, with Carl Kolchak portrayed by Stuart Townsend. Despite a digital cameo by McGavin and the episode “Timeless” being a remake of The Night Strangler, the new show felt joyless and only lasted six episodes while ten were filmed. 

Author Mark Dawidziak was authorized by Rice to write a new novel, Grave Secrets, in which Kolchak moves to Los Angeles to work for the Hollywood Dispatch and investigates a ghost that is killing people who are destroying the cemetery where its body is interred. His book on the show, Night Stalking, details the show and as part of the Night Stalker Companion: A 30th Anniversary Tribute, the scripts for The Night Stalker, The Night Strangler and the unfilmed The Night Killers were published.

Moonstone Comics also published Moonstone published several Night Stalker books, such as The Lovecraftian Horror, The Lovecraftian Damnation, The Lovecraftian Gambit, A Black and Evil Truth, The Lost World and adaptions of two of the unfilmed episodes, “The Get of Belial” and “Eve of Terror” amongst many others.

Kino Lorber released the two films on blu ray, but they are out of print. However, the complete series is available from them. It’s packed with extras, including 21 commentary tracks and 14 original TV commercials for the show.

You can also watch the episodes on NBC or their Peacock app. They’re also available on Apple TV and Amazon Prime.

While there have been rumors of a movie, nothing has ever happened. Perhaps that’s for the best. We’ll always have two TV movies and twenty episodes of a show that everyone was exhausted of while making and no one watched while it was on the air, yet I am still writing Kolchak fifty years later.

Sometimes, as a writer today, I wonder how much of my life was inspired by Carl. I think it was a whole hell of a lot, as I always saw him as a lonely man pounding on the keys trying to get the world to see a truth that they would never truly be able to view.

There’s something beautiful and sad in that.