AG Monday
This week, the 70s TV movies, the Night Stalker and the Night Strangler.
In the early 1970s, the most popular TV movie was The Night Stalker, the story of a scruffy, disreputable reporter chasing a vampire across Las Vegas. A sequel, The Night Strangler, came a year later. Produced and directed by a producer/director with a penchant for supernatural stories (Dark Shadows, Trilogy Of Terror, Burnt Offerings), and written by Richard Matheson (Twilight Zone, Night Gallery, Star Trek, and more), these made-for-television movies had a fine geek pedigree, and it showed. The basis for a later television series with the same intrepid journalists, and a monster of the week, these were the inspiration for The X-Files.
A vampire preying on showgirls! Hostile city officials! An underground city! A strangling fiend! A blustering editor! Publishers who can’t be trusted! It’s all here.
Ancient Geeks is a podcast about two geeks of a certain age re-visiting their youth. We were there when things like science fiction, fantasy, Tolkien, Star Trek, Star Wars, D&D, Marvel and DC comics, Doctor Who, and many, many other threads of modern geek culture were still on the fringes of culture. We were geeks before it was chic!
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Never heard of either. But it’s a holiday here, and I’m cooking. So, I’ll listen to this ep later today.
What’s funny is that we watched all those shows, but I had somehow forgotten the supernatural part of the plotline and just lumped them in with all of the cop shows from that era.
EDITED TO ADD: There was also the short-lived Kolchak: The Night Stalker series.
I enjoyed the movies, particularly the first one. The Darren McGavin character was good.
Loved The Night Stalker as kid, both the movie and the show. And I think that was the first time I learned that my home town of Chicago really did have a secret underground city!
@MarkedMan:
Doesn’t the movie take place in Seattle and feature their underground city?
Nearly done.
I may write later (too lazy today) on why I find vampires frustrating. For now, I just want to point out that the vampire shares a name with a real SS office, Otto Skorzeny, a particularly despicable person.
@CSK: My memory is that it was Chicago, but I wouldn’t bet much on my memory! I did find this though.
@MarkedMan: Should have started with Wiki. It turns out the show and movies were set in Chicago, but the second movie did feature Seattle’s underground