• Kolchak The Night Stalker 1972
• The Night Stalker 1972 Cast

Kolchak The Night Stalker 1972

The Night Stalker is a television film which aired on ABC on January 11, 1972. In it an investigative reporter, played by Darren McGavin, comes to suspect that a serial killer in the Las Vegas area is in fact a vampire.It was based on the then-unpublished novel by Jeff Rice titled The Kolchak Papers. Rice said he wrote the novel because, 'I'd always wanted to write a vampire story, but more because I wanted to write something that involved Las Vegas.'

The Night Stalker 1972 Cast

Rice had difficulty finding a publisher willing to buy the manuscript until agent Rick Ray read the manuscript and realized the novel would make a good movie. The 1973 novel (renamed The Night Stalker) wasn't published until after the TV movie had already aired, and was delayed according to Rice because the publisher wanted both Rice's original novel and the 1974 sequel The Night Strangler (written by Rice but based on the screenplay by author Richard Matheson) so 'they could be placed on the top of the publisher's list in the 1 and 2 positions for 1974.'