While I was attending university I didn’t watch a lot of TV. I didn’t even own a TV until my senior year (and that wasn’t mine, but my roommates). I went to the movies every weekend, but I just wasn’t interested in whatever was going on in television at the time.

Because of this, I missed a lot of seminal shows including Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The X-Files. Luckily I have a wife who is a nerd and she’s turned me on to such things.

This year marks 30 years since The X-Files first premiered and so my wife wanted to start rewatching it. I haven’t watched it in over a decade so it has been fun going through it again.

I was recently reminded that one of the great inspirations for The X-Files was Kolchak: The Night Stalker. It started out as a TV movie from 1972 entitled The Night Stalker, which was followed by a sequel in 1973 entitled The Night Strangler, and then a television series that ran from 1974-1975 which was entitled Kolchak: The Night Stalker. They tried to revitalize it in 2005 but it was cancelled after ten episodes.

I watched The Night Stalker a few nights ago and I will most likely be watching the others (well, probably not the remake) in the near future.

Kolchak (Darren McGavin) is a reporter who has been fired from nearly every major newspaper in the country. He’s a good reporter, but he has a loose and sarcastic mouth that gets him into trouble. He’s currently working at a low-rent paper in Las Vegas, where he is asked to cover some recent murders in which the victim’s bodies have all been drained of blood.

He eventually comes to believe that the killer is a vampire and collects enough evidence to prove this. But he is thwarted at every turn by the police, the politicians, and even his own boss.

You can see already how this influenced The X-Files, though McGavin’s performance and the overall low-fi vibe of the show seems more in line with the funny episodes of The X-Files than the serious ones. I’ll be interested in seeing how the sequel and the series fare.

It is very much an early 1970s TV movie. The budget was clearly very limited – there is hardly any set design, or lighting design, or any design of any kind. The violence is mostly off-screen. There are a few tussles and quite a few cops shooting blanks at the killer (they don’t even bother with squibs), but nothing particularly visually interesting. The plot plays pretty fast and loose with anything close to how things would actually go. Even though the police and politicians hate Kolchak they keep inviting them to their private meetings to discuss the case and then ask everyone to keep quiet about it. As if a reporter, especially one as nutty as Kolchack, will keep quiet about a serial killer.

I did enjoy that it was shot in Las Vegas and there are a lot of exterior scenes. I love getting glimpses of a city from years gone by. Every time they drove by the Stardust Casino I wondered if Lefty Rosenthal (portrayed by Robert DeNiro in Casino) was there.

Despite all of this, I really rather enjoyed it. McGavin is a lot of fun to watch and it all plays out with this goofy kind of joy to it.