one of my absolute favorites!

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

Generally speaking, the 1970s had some good made for TV horror, mysteries and thrillers - I love a few of them. But this I really don't understand the hype over this one. I realize it's a pilot for a short lived series and it's about a vampire but I found it rather boring. Too much washed up reporter trying to get his name back and not enough vampire throughout most of the movie. It does get a little interesting at about 50 minutes into the movie - for me.I was just rather bored with it and had to fast forward to get to the reason I'm watching the film. I wanted to enjoy this film but I did not.I'm giving it a 3 out of 10 for the idea of using a vampire in a pilot TV series.3/10

This 1972 TV film introduced audiences to Carl Kolchack, played indelibly by Darren McGavin, who here investigates a series of brutal murders he discovers to be the work of a vampire! Great supporting cast of guest actors include Carol Lynley, Claude Akins, Kent Smith, Elisha Cook Jr. and Simon Oakland, who would become a regular with McGavin in the sequel "The Night Strangler" and subsequent series.A wonderful blend of humor and horror, this film cast Barry Atwater as an evil vampire preying on women in Las Vegas, and Carl's frustrating attempts to convince the police that the vampire is real; they do believe him, but are afraid of the bad publicity such a discovery to the public would mean for the city, so... Don't wait for me to tell you, watch this film to find out!A classic TV film is one of the best ever made; A must see for horror fans!

It's hard to imagine now, but by the early 1970s the vampire was, cinematically speaking, something of a dead issue. (Rimshot.) True, the UK's Hammer Studios were still plugging along with their Dracula Variations, starring Christopher Lee and a parade of bosoms in period costume, to increasingly musty effect. Attempts to modernize the concept, as in Dracula AD 1972, did not exactly catch fire.New motifs dominated the scene. Hitchcock's Psycho kickstarted the enormously profitable psychopath industry, Romero's irony-laced Night of the Living Dead established a taste for gore with social awareness. Polanski's Rosemary's Baby made even the presence of the Devil as imminent as a neighbor ringing the bell. The crux was immediacy -- vampires wore capes and came from the Old World. They were just so 19th century. Who would be scared?Curiously enough Richard Matheson, one of the industry's most prolific pros, had both reinvented and doomed the vampire as a credible agent of horror in 1954, by writing the novel I Am Legend. An tale of a lone human in a world taken over by vampires, it changed the field by making vampirism a scientific phenomenon instead of a supernatural one, and directly paved the way for Romero's visceral apocalypse. When the novel was filmed as The Omega Man in 1971, that hokey v-word had been taken out entirely; they weren't Nosferatu, just mutants.So it makes poetic sense that Matheson should help rescue the genre by scripting one of its modern classics: The Night Stalker. Adapted from an unpublished story by Jeff Rice, this whipsmart TV movie recharged the batteries by keeping it real.In a modern (1970s modern, that is) and believably seedy Las Vegas, a series of odd murders begins. The police call it the work of a serial killer. But as the anomalies pile up, our protagonist, a down-on-his-luck reporter named Carl Kolchak, forms a different opinion. "I hate to say it," he informs the chagrined authorities (and he doesn't hate to say it either; he's sitting on the scoop of the century and he's grinning like a Cheshire Cat) "But it looks like we've got a real, live vampire on our hands."Kolchak, as played by the wonderful Darren McGavin, is a masterstroke of characterization. With his cheap suit and outsize ego he's a walking irritant, and his exchanges with the police and his weary editor Anthony Vincenzo (Simon Oakland) are rich with comic detail. (The sheriff informs Carl that he is present by "the mutual suffrage of us all." "Sufferance," corrects Kolchak.) He makes the perfect hero here by having almost nothing of the heroic about him, except a certain hard-headedness that serves for courage. He *knows* he's right, and he might just get himself killed to prove it.Terrifically entertaining, The Night Stalker became the highest-rated TV movie of its time, spawning a sequel and a short-lived but quite fun series with a disproportionately large footprint. The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Supernatural, Fringe-- all these shows can count themselves as Kolchak's progeny.For better or worse (generally for worse, although see Let the Right One In) vampires now crowd the screens again, and through inflation are once again a devalued commodity. In movies like Blade or From Dusk till Dawn or 30 Days of Night they appear in hordes. But as The Night Stalker reminds us, one vampire ought to be enough for anybody.

This.....THIS film is the reason that an eight year old kid lost a lot of sleep in the '70's. I used to sleep with all the blankets tucked under my chin in case the Vampire came at me in the night....he'd have a hard time biting through all that cloth. The great thing about Darren McGavin's Kolchak is that he is a stubborn, obsessed reporter in dogged pursuit of the truth, but once he finds it, he's scared to death. Barry Atwater makes a chilling vampire, totally silent until the moment he opens that closet door and all hell breaks loose! I remember three-quarters of the way through this movie in 1972, my father asking me: "What's wrong son"? "I have to go pee Daddy." "Then why don't you go upstairs and go to the bathroom"? "Are you CRAZY??" The realistic way that this movie ends is with these now classic lines: "Judge for yourself its believability, and then try to tell yourself, wherever you may be, it couldn't happen here."