Harry Dobermann
Kolchak-the night stalker..."Horror in the Heights"
Recently I've been watching "Horror in the Heights", an episode of the 1974 US TV series "Kolchak:The Night Stalker". Starring Darren McGavin as reporter Carl Kolchak, this episode features Phil Silvers as one of the elderly residents preyed upon by a supernatural menace in a decaying section of Chicago. As Kolchak outlines in his introductory voice-over, old people tend to get left behind when the energy moves out of a neighbourhood. All their friends live nearby, the familiar shops are close, and most importantly they don't have the money to move.
"Horror of the Heights"was written by Jimmy Sangster (Hammer's Curse of Frankenstein and Horror of Dracula), then-recently established as a scriptwriter for American TV. Sangster was equally at home writing straightforward thrillers such as "Face of a Stranger" for the Edgar Wallace Mysteries, or "Foreign Exchange" starring Robert Horton. Not surprisingly, the detective element of "Horror in the Heights" is solidly plotted.
Kolchak (memorably described by Richard Matheson as looking like he belongs in a road company production of "The Front Page") is a living embodiment of the mythical hard-nosed, headline-hunting reporter ("Son, I've seen more dead bodies than you've had TV dinners"). Employed by a wire service run by his long-suffering friend Tony Vincenzo (Simon Oakland), Kolchak encounters a bewildering array of supernatural menaces without ever getting the proof he needs to nail a Pulitzer Prize-winning exclusive.
"Horror in the Heights" takes Kolchak to a moribund district which is being preyed upon by an flesh-eating Indian ghoul called a Rakshasa, which beguiles its victims by taking on the guise of the person they trust most. The original "Night Stalker" TV movies had hidden their supernatural menaces among the brash night economies of thriving modern cities. Sangster turned the premise around by having the Rakshasa prey on the redundant sectors of Chicago.
Phil Silvers makes a lively guest appearance as one of the disappointed residents whose troubles are compounds by "Rats that eat you before you can get a decent Jewish burial." There's a little bit of Bilko-esque banter and body-language in the opening scene where four old pals bicker over a card-game in an unsanitary meat-packing factory for which one of them is a watchman. But for the most part, Silvers is low-key, playing off McGavin and reflecting the mood of defiant melancholy which permeates the episode.
Silvers gives Kolchak some of the pieces of the puzzle, even though he's assembled them in the wrong order. Silvers suspects that an Indian restaurant newly opened in the solidly Jewish sector, is connected to the murders and plague of swastikas which have sprung up in the area. It's a macabre twist on the stork fallacy and Kolchak is only able to get cause and effect in the right order after he's dined at the deserted restaurant which promises "the flaming sword dance in your colon".
"Kolchak:The Night Stalker" was unfortunately trapped in a bid to repeat the basic elements of the original Tv movie, making the plots somewhat repetitive. But "Horror in the Heights" plumps up the story with a number of amusing character moments - Murray Matheson as an antiques dealer who relates the origins of the Rakshasa race and tells how they send emissaries out into the world from their "timeless limbo" to see if the time is right to invade - Eric Server as the disinterested policeman who ascribes the deaths to rats and invests a line like "Anything else you need to know?Fine, have a nice day." with firm professional politeness. Kolchak's editor Vincenzo orders him to remove the word "tragic" from his report saying, "We don't want to imply we're throwing brickbats at the sanitation department or anything."
Even the climax is inventive, logically setting up a convincing situation in which Kolchak can be stalked in the shadows by the Rakshasa with a credible hope of defeating the flesh-eating beast. But don't take my word for it. You can read a recent review here