Danse Macabre (38 page)

The cancellation of
The Outer Limits
was more due to stupid programming on the part of its parent network, ABC, than to any real lack of interest, even though the show had become slightly flabby in the second season following Stefano's departure. To some extent it could be said that when Stefano left, he took all the good bears with him. The series was never quite the same. Still, a good many programs have been able to endure a flabby stretch without cancellation (TV is, after all, a pretty flabby medium). But when ABC switched
The Outer Limits
from its Monday-night time slot, where it was up against two fading game shows, to Saturday night—a night when the younger audience
The Outer Limits
was aimed at was either at the movies or just out cruising—it faded quietly from the scene.

We have mentioned syndication briefly, but the only fantasy program which can be seen regularly on the independent TV stations is
The Twilight Zone
, which was, by and large, nonviolent. Thriller can be seen late at night in certain big-city markets that have one or more of those independent stations, but a run of
The Outer Limits
is a much rarer catch. Although it was presented, during its first run, in what is now considered "the family hour," a change in mores has made it one of those "iffy" programs for the independents, who feel safer running sitcoms, game shows, and movies (not to mention the old put-yourhands-on-your-TV-set-brother-and-you-will-be-
healed
! bit). And by the way, if you get it in your area, warm up the old Betamax and send me the complete catalogue by way of the publisher. On second thought, you better not. It's probably illegal. But treasure the run while you've got it; like
Thriller
, the like of
The Outer Limits
will not be seen again. Even
The Wonderful World of Disney
is going off the air after a twenty-six-year run.

*For much of this material I am indebted to the entry on
The Outer Limits in The Science Fiction Handbook
, published by Doubleday (New York: 1979). The entry (p. 441 of this huge volume) was written by John Brosnan and Peter Nicholls.

4

We'll not say from the sublime to the ridiculous, because TV rarely produces the sublime, and series TV has never produced it; let us instead say from the workmanlike to the atrocious.
The Night Stalker
.

Earlier on in this chapter I said that television was too homogenized to cough up anything that was really charmingly awful; ABC-TV's
The Night Stalker
series is the exception that proves the rule.

It's not the movie that I'm talking about, remember. The film of
The Night Stalker
was one of the best movies ever made for TV. It was based on an abysmal horror novel,
The Kolchak
Tapes
, by Jeff Rice—the novel was issued as a paperback after the unpublished manuscript landed on producer Dan Curtis's desk and became the basis of the film.

A short side trip here, if you don't mind too much. Dan Curtis became associated with the horror field as producer of what must have been the strangest soap opera ever to run on the tube; it was called
Dark Shadows. Shadows
became something of a nine-days' wonder during the last two years of its run. Originally conceived as a soft-focus ladies' gothic of the type then so popular in paperback (they have now been largely replaced by those sweet/savage love stories a la Rosemary Rogers, Katherine Woodiwiss, and Laurie McBain), it eventually mutated—like
Thriller
—into something quite different from what had first been intended.
Dark
Shadows
, under Curtis's inspired hand, became a kind of supernatural mad hatters' tea party (it even came on the air at the traditional hour for tea, four in the afternoon), and hypnotized viewers were treated to a seriocomic panorama of hell—a weirdly evocative combination of Dante's ninth circle and Spike Jones. One member of the put-upon Collins family, Barnabas Collins, was a vampire. He was played by Jonathan Frid, who became an overnight celebrity. His celebrity, unfortunately, was every bit as lasting as Vaughan Meader's (and if you don't remember Vaughan Meader, send me a stamped, self-addressed postcard and I will enlighten you).

One turned in to
Dark Shadows
every day, convinced that things could become no more lunatic . . . and yet somehow they did. At one point the entire cast of characters was transported back into the seventeenth century for a six -week turn in fancy dress. Barnabas had a cousin who was a werewolf. Another cousin was a combination witch-succubus. Other soap operas have always, of course, practiced their own bemusing forms of madness; my own favorite has always been the Kid Trick. The way the Kid Trick works is this: one of the characters on a soap opera will have a baby in March. By July it will be two; in November it will be six; the following February it will be lying in the hospital, comatose, after being hit by a car while returning home from the sixth, grade; and by the March following its birth, the child will be eighteen and ready to begin really joining in the fun by getting the girl next door pregnant, or turning suicidal, or possibly by announcing to his horrified parents that he's a homosexual. The Kid Trick is worthy of a Robert Sheckley alternate-world story, but at least the characters on most soap operas stay dead once their life-support machinery is turned off (following which there will be a four-month trial with the turner-offer in the dock for mercy killing). The actors and actresses who "died" picked up their final checks and went job hunting again. Not so on
Dark Shadows
. The dead simply came back as ghosts. It was
better
than the Kid Trick. Dan Curtis went on to make two theatrical films based on the
Dark Shadows
plot and using its cast of undead characters—such a jump from TV to the movies is not unheard-of (
The Lone
Ranger
is a case where it also happened), but it's rare, and the films, while not great, were certainly viewable. They were done with style, wit, and all those buckets of gore Curtis couldn't use on TV. They were also made with tremendous energy . . . a trait which helped to make
The Night Stalker
film the highest-rated made-for-TV movie ever telecast up until that time. (It has since been surpassed in the ratings eight or nine times, and one of the films that has outpointed it was the pilot film for—choke!—
The Love Boat
.)

Curtis himself is a remarkable, almost hypnotic man, friendly in a brusque, almost abrasive way, apt to hog the credit for his enterprises, but in such an engaging way that nobody really seems to mind. A throwback to an older and perhaps tougher breed of Hollywood filmmakers, Curtis has never had any noticable problems in deciding where to plant his feet. If he likes you, he stands up for you. If he doesn't, you're a "no-talent sonofabitch" (a phrase that has always pleased me a great deal, and after reading this passage, Curtis may well call me up and use it on me). He would be notable if for no other reason than he may be the only producer in Hollywood effectively able to make a picture as frankly scary as
The Night Stalker
. The film was scripted by Richard Matheson, who has written for TV with better pace and more dramatic flair than anyone since Reginald Rose, perhaps. Curtis went on to make another picture with Matheson and William F. Nolan which fans still talk about—
Trilogy of Terror
, with Karen Black. The segment of this trio of stories most frequently mentioned was the final one, based

on Matheson's short story "Prey." In it, Ms. Black gives a tour-de-force solo performance as a woman pursued by a tiny devil-doll with a spear. It is a bloody, gripping, scary fifteen minutes, and it perhaps most clearly sums up what I'm trying to say about Dan Curtis: he has an unerring, crude talent for finding the terror place inside you and squeezing it with a cold hand.
The Night Stalker
dealt with a pragmatic reporter named Carl Kolchak who works the Las Vegas beat. Played by Darren McGavin, his face somehow simultaneously tired, awed, cynical, and wiseacre beneath his battered straw fedora, Kolchak is a believable enough character, more Lew Archer than Clark Kent, dedicated above all else to making a buck in Casino City.

He stumbles upon a string of murders that have apparently been committed by a vampire, and follows a series of leads deeper and deeper into the supernatural, engaging at the same time in a war of words with the Powers That Be in Vegas. In the end he tracks the vampire to the old house which has become its abode and drives a stake through its heart. The final twist is predictable but nonetheless satisfying: Kolchak is discredited and fired, cut loose from an establishment that has no room for vampires in either its philosophy or its public relations; he is able to dispatch the bloodsucker (Barry Atwater), but the final victor is Las Vegas boosterism. McGavin, a talented actor, has rarely been as good—as
believable
—as he was in
The Night
Stalker
movie.* It is his very pragmatism that enables us to believe in the vampire; if a hardnose like Carl Kolchak can believe it, the film suggests convincingly, then it must be so.

The success of
The Night Stalker
did not go unnoticed at ABC, which was perennially hit-hungry in those days before Mork, the Fonz, and all those other great characters made their way into the lineup. So a sequel,
The Night Strangler
, quickly followed. This time the murders were being committed by a doctor who had discovered the secret of eternal life-always provided he could slay five victims every five years or so to make up a new batch of elixir. In this one (set in Seattle), pathologists were covering up the fact that bits of decayed human flesh had been found on the necks of the strangulation victims—the doctor, you see, always began to get a little ripe as his five-year cycle neared its end.

*The part is really only a refinement of the part of David Ross, a private eye McGavin played in a wonderful (if short-lived) NBC series called
The Outsider
. Probably only the late David Janssen as Harry Orwell and Brian Keith as Lew Archer (in a series that only lasted three weeks—if you blinked, you missed it) can compare with McGavin's performance as a private eye.

Kolchak uncovered the cover-up and tracked the monster to its lair in Seattle's so-called "secret city," an underground section of old Seattle which Matheson visited on a vacation trip in 1970.* And, needless to say, Kolchak managed to dispatch the zombie medico. ABC decided it wanted to make a series out of Kolchak's continuing adventures, and such a series, predictably titled
Kolchak: The Night Stalker
, premiered on Friday, September 13th, 1974. The series limped through one season, and it was an abysmal flop. There were production problems from the beginning; Dan Curtis, who had been the guiding force behind the two successful TV-movies, had nothing to do with the series (no one I queried seems to really know why). Matheson, who had written the two original movies, never turned in a single script for the series. Paul Playden, the original producer, resigned his post before the series began its run and was replaced by Cy Chermak. Most of the

*For much of the material on
The Night Stalker
, I am indebted to Berthe Roeger's comprehensive analysis of both the two movies and the series, published in
Fangoria
magazine (issue #3, December 1979). The same issue contains an invaluable episode-by-episode chronology of the series' run. directors were forgettable; special effects were done on a shoestring. One of my favorite effects, which at least comes close to the fur-covered VW in
The Giant Spider Invasion
, was on view in an episode entitled "The Spanish Moss Murders." In this one, Richard Kiel—who would become famous as jaws in the last two James Bond pictures—cavorted through a number of Chicago back alleys with a not-very-well-concealed zipper running up the back of his Swamp Monster suit.

But the basic problem with the
Night Stalker
series was the problem which dogs any nonanthology series dealing with the supernatural or the occult: a complete breakdown in the ability to suspend disbelief. We could believe Kolchak once, as he tracked the vampire down in Vegas; with some added effort we could even believe in him twice, tracking down the undead doc in Seattle. Once the series got going, it was harder. Kolchak goes out to cover the last cruise of a fine old luxury liner and discovers that one of his fellow passengers is a werewolf. He sets out to cover an up-and-coming politician's campaign for the Senate and discovers the candidate has sold his soul to the devil (and considering Watergate and Abscam, I hardly find this supernatural or unusual). Kolchak also stumbles across a prehistoric reptile in Chicago's sewer system ("The Sentry"); a succubus ("Legacy of Terror") ; a coven of witches ("The Trevi Collection"); and in one of the most tasteless programs ever done for network TV, a headless motorcyclist ("Chopper" ) . Eventually, suspension of disbelief becomes utterly impossible—even, one suspects, for the production staff, which began to play poor Kolchak more and more for laughs. In a sense, what we saw in this series was a speeded-up version of the Universal Syndrome: from horror to humor. But it took the Universal Pictures monsters some eighteen years to get from one state to the other; it only took The Night Stalker twenty episodes. As Berthe Roeger points out,
Kolchak: The Night Stalker
enjoyed a brief and quite successful revival when the series was rerun as part of CBS's late-night program of oldies. Roeger's conclusion, however, that its success was due to any merit in the series itself seems off the mark to me. If the tune-in was large, I suspect it was for the same reason that the theater always fills up at midnight for
Reefer Madness
. I've mentioned the siren song of crap before, and here it is again. I suspect that people tuned in once, couldn't believe how bad this thing was, and kept tuning in on successive nights to make sure that their eyes had not deceived them.