The “atrocious” TV show Stephen King hated with a passion: “It was an abysmal flop”
It might feel like the film and television industries being caught in a constant cycle of reboots, remakes, and sequels is a relatively modern phenomenon, but it’s been going on longer than some might think. Stephen King has become trapped in its maw, making it ironic that he hated a TV show of similar origins.
Hollywood has become so obsessed with mining the author’s back catalogue that audiences have had multiple versions of the same story thrust upon them. There’s a Carrie TV series in the works, which will be the third adaptation of the novel, following Brian De Palma’s classic and the largely forgotten remake.
Mike Flanagan’s Dark Tower is at least guaranteed to be a damn sight better than the awful film, while Firestarter, The Stand, It, Pet Sematary, The Shining, The Running Man, The Mist, The Dead Zone, and Salem’s Lot are some of the other titles to have been made at least twice across movies and TV.
Having been raised on a steady diet of onscreen scary stories, King was of the opinion that director John Llewellyn Moxey’s 1972 chiller The Night Stalker, which aired as part of ABC’s Movie of the Week anthology, was “one of the best movies ever made for TV,” and it gradually gained cult classic status.
The story follows Darren McGavin’s investigative journalist, who stumbles upon a trail of dead bodies with bite marks on their necks. Realising that he may have stumbled onto the story of a lifetime, Carl Kolchak sets out to prove that a real-life vampire is running amok on the streets of Las Vegas.
To add another layer of irony, The Night Stalker was based on Jeff Rice’s eponymous book, which King called “an abysmal horror novel.” He enjoyed the TV movie, though, even if his kindness didn’t extend to its episodic sequel, Kolchak: The Night Stalker, which premiered in 1974 and saw McGavin reprise his role in a monster-of-the-week-style procedural that Chris Carter admitted was a massive influence for The X-Files.
It was McGavin’s third time playing the part after he first returned in The Night Strangler, a follow-up rushed into production to capitalise on The Night Stalker‘s ratings success that found Kolchak up against a murderous immortal with superhuman abilities, but it was the TV series King abhorred.
Calling it “atrocious,” he even retracted his belief that “television was too homogenised to cough up anything that was really charmingly awful,” describing The Night Stalker as “the exception that proves the rule.” It only lasted for 20 episodes before getting the axe, or as King remembered it: “The series limped through one season, and it was an abysmal flop.”
Because everything that’s old is eventually new again, much like many of King’s books, The Night Stalker was dusted off in 2006 with Stuart Townsend inheriting Kolchak’s mantle, only to be cancelled after six of its ten episodes had aired. A novel King hated became a movie he loved and was subsequently spun off into a TV show he also hated before being rebooted three decades later, which is Hollywood in a nutshell.
