The Night Strangler (film)
| The Night Strangler | |
|---|---|
Jo Ann Pflug and Darren McGavin in The Night Strangler
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| Genre | Crime Horror Mystery Thriller |
| Written by | Richard Matheson |
| Directed by | Dan Curtis |
| Starring |
Darren McGavin Simon Oakland Jo Ann Pflug Richard Anderson |
| Music by | Bob Cobert |
| Country of origin | United States |
| Production | |
| Producer(s) | Dan Curtis Robert Singer (associate producer) |
| Cinematography | Robert B. Hauser |
| Editor(s) | Folmar Blangsted |
| Running time | 74 minutes (TV Premiere) |
| Production company(s) | ABC Circle Films |
| Release | |
| Original network | ABC |
| Original release | January 16, 1973 |
| Chronology | |
| Preceded by | The Night Stalker |
| Followed by | Kolchak: The Night Stalker |
The Night Strangler is a television film which first aired on ABC on January 16, 1973 as a sequel to The Night Stalker.
The Night Strangler proved almost as popular as its predecessor garnering strong ratings and eventually prompting ABC to order a TV series (neither writer Richard Matheson nor producer/director Dan Curtis was involved in the TV series). In the United States the TV movie ran (without commercials) approximately 74 minutes. ABC planned to release the film overseas as a theatrical release and had additional footage shot rounding out the movie to 90 minutes.
In 1973, reporter Carl Kolchak (Darren McGavin), now in Seattle, Washington (having been run out of Las Vegas at the end of the last film), is hired by his former editor, Tony Vincenzo (Simon Oakland) to cover a series of killings in which the victims, all exotic dancers, are strangled, have their necks crushed and are then drained of a few ounces of blood. A coroner's report also reveals that the victims all had traces of rotting flesh on their necks.
Researcher Titus Berry (Wally Cox) discovers that there was a similar rash of killings in 1952, setting Kolchak on the trail of another unbelievable story. Kolchak is stonewalled by the police, who want to have certain details of the murders kept secret. Out of "burning curiosity," Berry researches further back, and learns of another series of murders in 1931. Berry and Kolchak discover that similar murders have been occurring every 21 years since 1889, with each series of murders taking place over a period of 18 days. Kolchak determines that the killer needs the blood for a kind of elixir of life which keeps him alive for 21 years at a time. Of course, no one believes Kolchak, and the powers that be want to silence him.
Berry uncovers further clues in an old interview with Mark Twain leading to a Dr. Richard Malcolm, a surgeon in the Union Army during the Civil War, who was one of the original staff at the Westside Mercy Hospital. Though the hospital is long gone, Kolchak goes to the clinic standing on the site, in the hope that it might still have the hospital's old records, but he finds something far more important just inside the front door: a painting of the clinic's founder, a Dr. Malcolm Richards, who is the spitting image of Richard Malcolm.
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Wikipedia