Danse Macabre   ::   Кинг Стивен

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.

They hadn't; perhaps only Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea , the launching pad for that apostle of disaster, Irwin Allen, can compete with Kolchak for total collapse. Yet we should remember that not even Seabury Quinn, with his Jules de Grandin series in Weird Tales , was able to keep the continuing-character format rolling very successfully, and Quinn was one of the most talented writers of the pulp era.