Kolchak

The Night Stalker premiered fifty years ago tonight, adapted from The Kolchak Papers and introducing Darren McGavin as Carl Kolchak, a cynical reporter really not equipped to hunt vampires. The film was a classic, and the follow-up The Night Strangler worked, and the character still gets enough love to get a lineup like this for an anniversary anthology, while the series that followed was an inspiration for later supernatural investigations like The X Files, while also showing that a serious take on the monster-of-the-week genre with someone who keeps accidentally stumbling across the supernatural while looking for something else isn’t really sustainable.