Hey, folks, welcome to a special crossover episode of The Projection Booth and
the Cold Check Tapes. Yes, adding one more log to the fire of
Carl Colchack, we are talking about cole Check. The Night Stalker, a
brand new book by Professor Kendall R. Phillips. It is available now as
part of Wayne State University's TV Milestone series. Check out the series. They've
been doing a lot of great work. I have to recommend a lot of
the books that they've done, especially the Twin Peaks one, But this book
about Cole Check fantastic, as Professor Phillips says, it's a really good start
point for why people like Cole Chack. So, if you haven't experienced Colchack,
if you're listening to the Coal Chack Tapes, I know you have.
If you're listening to The Projection Booth, maybe I haven't, but you know
it was enough that Chris and I put together a whole long series talking all
about the nights Stalker. So enjoy that, and enjoy this book, and
enjoy this interview. Can you tell me a little bit about you how you
got into academia. I'm not even sure I remember anymore. I've been a
professor for an awful long time. I am a professor of Communication and rhetorical
Studies at Syracuse University. I've been on the faculty here for twenty three years.
Previously taught at the University of Central Missouri for a few years, so
it's it's been a little while. I am first generation college so this is
kind of a new thing for my family. I grew up in Texas studying
communication and culture, but just a fascinating way of trying to understand how people
sort of make sense of the world. And it's been an interesting ride.
And somehow it took me down lots of dark alleyways to meet lots of monsters.
So well, yeah, I see the picture of Frankenstein behind you,
I mean, big monster guy. It looks like yeah. So you know.
I've been studying horror for probably all those twenty three years and a bit
more, mainly in horror films, but increasingly, as with the Cold Check
project, interested in horror narratives and other media. So looking at television,
actually currently looking at a project about horror on the radio. So it is
interesting to look at the pervasiveness of these stories we tell to scare ourselves now
was the Cold Check Book? Was that your first published book? No,
actually, it's it's my eleventh. If I write a good one, I'll
stop about five or six of those. I probably should know the number are
related to horror. So a few years back I wrote a book called Projected
Fears, Horror, Films and American Culture that looked at the broad history of
horror from nineteen thirty one until at the time the present, which was around
two thousand. I've written a book called A Place of Darkness that looks at
a horror and very early cinema, so eighteen ninety six to nineteen thirty one,
so the kind of the front end of that, And just recently had
a book called A Cinema of Hopelessness that looks at horror and other genres in
the current era, sort of the twenty first century, and asking why we're
so angry and depressed? So do you know why we're so angry and depressed?
No, but I wrote a book about it, So you know,
I guess, I guess maybe there was an answer in that. But yeah,
I mean the nutshell of the book is, you know that we are
at a point in I think Western culture, at least certainly American cold where
there's a kind of fantasy that the system is not working, you know,
and that it has failed us. And we've seen that in you know,
on the right, we certainly saw that with the January sixth riots and kind
of insurrection the Tea Party. I would say a lot of the Trump presidency
was around you know, the system doesn't work, it's a swamp. It
has to be drained, it has to be torn apart. But the same
from the left right, you certainly so Occupy Wall Street, and so there's
this kind of circulation of narratives of why can't we just burn the whole thing
down, let's quit, right, And so for me in horror Cabin in
the Woods was a great example of that. Who people have seen that film.
No, it's all about this evil system, and in the end the
people say, you know what, screw it. If this is the way
the world works, let it burn. Same with The Purge, which I
think is a fascinating series of films all about this kind of system that is
so evil and we just want out of it. We can't seem to get
out. So that's my nutshell answer to that question. So I'm already fascinated
by the radio project that you're starting to work out, because radio was such
a great place for horror stories and just I remember having the bit Jesus scared
out of me listening to Horror Radio one. I think it was AM five
sixty when I was a kid, and it's just like wow, having its
roots there going into television, I mean television. You point out a lot
of great things in the Cold Check book, the whole idea of Twilight Zone
and Outer Limits and just taking horror home and making it more of a domestic
thing than an outer space thing. Certainly about the radio side of it.
What I'm really fascinated by right now, were you know, horror inters radio
really through film, Like in around nineteen thirty one, after the popularity of
Draculin Frankenstein, you start getting the advent of these anthology series The Witch,
the Witches, Cauldron, you know that blanking on other names because I was
thinking about Cold Check today, but you get a lot of these sort of
anthology horror that are all like separate, little individual stories, a little like
Twilight Zone or Outer Limits. In fact, that that format would be the
way that that horror would enter television because several of those shows, there were
very popular radio shows in the nineteen thirties would reformat and become television like you
know, the you know, the General Motors theater sort of thing, right,
So they would have these little um, you know, vignette again,
like the twilight zone or outer limits. What I'm interested in radio is that
in the late sort of mid thirties, around thirty six thirty seven, there's
a kind of backlash against horror films. The Production Code was really trying to
eliminate horror. They were telling all the major studios like quit it, shift
to science fiction, shift to something else, get away from ghosts and demons
and curses and things like that. And the same was happening with the radio.
So some of the very first really serious efforts to censor radio in the
mid thirties and actually set up the FCC as a full on censorship board,
not just a licensing board, were driven by people who were worried about horror.
There's a senator from IOWAA, Clyde Harry, who was one of the
champions of this, who wrote an entire op ed about Boris Karloff reading an
Edgar Allan Poe poem on a very popular kind of variety radio show and saying
that this was inappropriate. It was terrifying children, it was bringing evil things
into the homes, and of course the same was true with television. You
know, I know so much about more of the comic book industry and how
that was censored. I never thought about the radio industry. Yeah, it's
it's a fascinating moment. And actually, so this is completely off topic,
but hey, we're chatting. One of the interesting thing about the history of
radio censorship was the big moment when it probably would have happened if it was
going to happen in terms of a really full throated federal censorship system. The
FCC does have regulations, but it's not a full blown censorship structure. Was
after War of the World. So, you know, as everybody knows Orson
Wells produces the HG. Wells, it's framed as here's Mercury theater players kind
of giving you this thing. But if you just tuned in late, which
a lot of people did, it sounds like a real radio program and they're
giving you real news reports in between a jazz show, and they're aliens and
Hackensack or whoever. It was in New Jersey. People freaked out, and
there's a big kind of public moment, and so a lot of the folks
who were worried about horror, and they were also worried about sexuality in Maywest
and humor, but they were worried about horror. So here you have war
the worlds is kind of like, okay, that's the example. They wanted
to use that to justify censorship, but folks on the other side said,
wait a minute. What War of the World's proves is how powerful radio is,
and that radio, in the wrong hands, radio could be used to
incite riots, or incite panic, or get people to run for their homes
and shoot at water towers, which is exactly what it did. Oh again,
we would see later in the thirties Nazi Germany using radio for exactly the
purposes. So a lot of people said, that's exactly why the government should
not have control of the airways, because the government should not have control of
this really powerful weapon. So it's fascinating moment of this anxiety, idea and
concern, and that would bleed out, you know, and you'd see the
echo of that into the nineteen fifties, with the concern about young people and
the broad Senate hearings about juvenile delinquency, which is where the comic book issue
comes up. A psychiatrist named Frederick Wortham starts testifying. He writes a book
called The Seduction of Innocence where he says, you know, comic books are
destroying morals and creating homosexuality and teaching people to be criminals and all kinds of
quote horrible things. And that's what led to the Comics Code, the elimination
of horror comics. You know, huge, huge impact. But it happened
even then. It happened at the industrial level because it was the comic book
creators agreeing to this kind of internal fear. But all of that, as
you go, as you say, it goes back to this overarching concern of
that kind of scary media, right, those feelings of fear and that kind
of superstition or those dangerous things getting into the home. Right. It was
in the theater that was that was a problem. But if it got into
the home through ray, ideo, through pulp novels, through comic books lated
through television, now that was too much. That's where people wanted to draw
the line and say you can't send that stuff into our homes because it can
get to us, and more importantly, it can get to our children.
So where were we in the early nineteen seventies to allow something like The Nightstalker
to happen. I think it's a fascinating period, and it really is this
ongoing it's a funny, the ongoing kind of sibling tension between motion pictures and
television. Right. So, you know, when television first comes out,
motion pictures are scared because people say, hey, wait a minute, I
don't have to pay, you know, thirty five cents to go out.
I can sit at home and watch it for free. Why would it go
out? So that starts to push Hollywood to get rid of the production code
and bring in a lot of technological innovations like three D and surround sound and
stereoscope and all that sort of technological but really to start pushing the boundaries and
say we can show you things that the government's not gonna let put on television.
The flip side by the time you get to the seventies is a particularly
in relation to horror. That period from about nineteen sixty eight to nineteen eighty
two is what some of us call the second Golden Age of horror. For
me, it really starts with George Merrow's Night Living Dead as the kind of
indie, ugly dirty film at the exploitation cinema, and then Rosemary's Baby the
respectable film. But both of those were really pushing the boundaries of what people
had thought of as horror, like they were really kind of going beyond what
expectations were. But you'd also had the production code was gone by sixty eight,
the rating system was a lot looser. And so you look at that
period from sixty eight until you know, the mid late seventies, let's say
nineteen eighty two, you get all of your iconic films, right, not
only the franchises like Halloween and The Thirteenth but the kind of gritty like Last
House on the Left and I Spit on Your Grave and Texas Chainsaw Massacre,
etc. Right, these films that are really like pushing the edges of what
you know can be considered acceptable in society. So there you get Network television
had been abbling in horror, right. You certainly had a lot of comedy
horror, so like Bewitched and The Munsters and the Adams Family, and he
had little anthology, you know, kind of morality tales from Rod Serling.
A daytime television of course, had Dark Shadows, which was a really progressive,
innovative show. But none of those were really like the horror films that
in nineteen seventies. None of them were like bringing the horror Home. The
horror film I remember being. The first thing that really hit me was Halloween.
So I saw that in nineteen seventy eight, and what terrified me was
not just the maniac with the mask and the knife. Okay, that was
scary. What terrified me was it was set in the suburbs, right.
It was a neighborhood, not that you know, my neighborhood was not that
affluent, but you know, it's still. When you know, Laurie is
running from J Michael and she's banging on the neighbor's doors and they look out
and they closed the shutters and turn off the lights, I thought, oh
my god, that would be me. And that felt like the horror was
here. It wasn't in Transylvania, it wasn't outer space, it wasn't in
the eighteenth century. It was in the US suburb where I lived. It
was following my school bus and that was like, ah, right, So
what I think cold Check did. One of the reasons I think that that
original nineteen seventy two television movie and then the second movie in the series really
cemented itself into pop culture was cold Check was able and that was why Dan
Curtis, who had done Dark Shadows, was able to take scary monsters that
would have been in sort of black and white B movies over there and bring
them here. And that was terrifying. And again, as some folks probably
know, many of your listeners will know that first January nineteen seventy two screening
or airing of the night Stalker movie was the most watched television movie in history
for many years, even after that eventually got Eclipse, but it was a
any event. People were calling people and saying, oh my god, are
you watching the show? It's so And I think one of the things that
really made it, back to your point, was horror wasn't out there or
over there or back then. Horror was in an alleyway in Las Vegas with
an autopsy with police, like in the world we live in, and that
that was quite terrified. I'm glad too that you brought up the whole idea
of the importance of the investigative reporter as well, and especially in the early
seventies. I'm trying to remember this was before Nixon put in this right signation,
but this has got to be right around the time of Watergate. So
having this hero reporter so timely. Yeah, well, it's what's interesting is
and I won't remember the exact timing, So forgive me for folks, who
you know, when you write a book, you write it, you finish
it, you sent it off. It goes into mysterious things and that eventually
comes back, and sometimes my brain loses some details. But one of the
really iconic for me Cold Check the series episodes is the Devil's Platform, which
people might remember is the senatorial candidate who's made a deal with the devil and
turns into a dog. Somehow it made sense, but anyway, trust me,
folks, is what happens. That came actually only a few weeks,
maybe five or six weeks after the Watergate resignation, so this was right there.
But even the initial choice, and I think you're exactly right the choice
too. I think two really thing innovative things about Cold Check the choice to
make it about the monster hunter right to focus on the investigator. So we're
not following the monster as we did comedically in Bowicht or the Monsters the Adams
family. We're not following the victims. We're not located in a particular place
like in Dark Shadows. We're following this investigator. It's kind of and the
great thing about it. The second thing is what cold check in many ways
is a police procedure. Right if you just take out the reporter part,
if he's not an ions and he's not hunting for monsters. This is every
you know Rockford, Mannex, Big Millin and Wife, pick any of your
nineteen seventies police proceduals. It's that same sort of step by step procedural outline.
But people should also remember that in the early nineteen seventies, maybe a
little bit like for some folks these days, police was not an automatically good
term. We had had the civil rights demonstrations, the violence, particularly in
the South, Bull Connor unleashing dogs on peaceful protesters in Selma. We had
had the police response, the very violent Chicago police response to the Democratic National
Convention protests in nineteen sixty eight. So the uniform was not automatically, Oh,
they're here to save us, right, there was something a little bit
frightening. So Cold Check is like a number of series in the nineteen seventies
of sort of finding a different kind of hero, and the journalist, as
you rightly point out, was a perfect example. We had not yet had
Watergate by the time you get the first Cold Check movie, but we had
had the Pentagon Papers, and we also had a long history of both in
reality and in popular culture, of groundbreaking investigative journalists. So the journalist is
a kind of natural for stories in either television or film. And so by
take the traditional gothic monster, putting it into the current age, focusing on
an investigator and making him a reporter, it was just the perfect formula for
that early nineteen seventies audience. Yeah, and that antagonism between he and the
police always played such a great role as well. Absolutely, and had to
feel, you know, a getting contemporary to people who were watching questionable practices
by the police and then seeing that kind of antagonism aimed at our hero Cold
Check. So again, you know that that early nineteen seventies anti establishment was
you know, kind of part of the zeitgeist, right, the hippie movement,
the civil rights movement, the early stages of the lgbt HU movement,
but all pushing back. In all of those movements, Women's liberation, etc.
The police and the authorities were the enemy, and so here he had
Cold Check. Certainly not a hippie, right. No one looked at Colcheck
and said peace out man. Right. He was clearly a very establishment figure,
but he could connect with that younger viewer in nineteen seventy because he was
anti establishment. Colcheck was always rubbing the police, the politicians, the wealthy,
the business owners, anybody authority. The minute Colchack to walk in,
you can see their face drop because no one wanted to see Carl walk into
the diamondoction or the hotel administrator's office, or you know, any of those
sort of places. Though, So, how did you come to write this
book about Colcheck? Now? I was not I'm not quite old enough to
have watched the series when it first came out. I was a little too
young. I don't recall it, but I did find it when I was
about an eight or nine, which I think a lot of folks found it
on the CBS reruns. And I think actually this was probably the thing,
if there's anything that helped to imprint Colcheck on not only the culture, but
a whole generation of horror fans and horror creators, people like Chris Carter and
others who saw colcheck a real model of telling horror stories. I think probably
the pure happenstance moment was CBS purchasing the rights to rerun the night Stalker TV
series in seventy eight, seventy nine, eighty eighty one in their CBS late
night programming and so that's where I discovered it. And so it had always
been in my head as an iconic horror narrative, but I think for me,
I had always kept it as like, well, that was television,
and so I think for my own kind of academic development, you know,
spending most of my time looking in the history of film, it took a
moment. And part of it was talking with folks at Wayne State who said,
hey, what are you doing, etc. Part of it, honestly
was also COVID because a lot of my work involves going to film archives and
it's hard to go to an archive when you can't get on a plane or
leave your house. And so it was kind of in that moment of saying,
wait a minute, that series wasn't just something I watched as a kid.
It was a major moment in American culture at exactly this moment, right
exactly that time in the early nineteen seventies when horror is exploding, and you
know, it's certainly in the movies you get massive success of like The Exorcist
and Rosemary's Baby and Alien, but just in culture generally, like people,
it's all I was running across that. I think it's the year that The
Night Stocker came out. Alice Cooper had two hits to two albums in the
kind of top forty, right. I mean, so you had shock rock
and horror rock and all this sort of thing is happening, and incomes Cold
Check, and I started saying, how did that fit into that broader moment
in culture? And so the book kind of came from that. What were
some of the challenges of writing this other than COVID? COVID was a big
challenge. I think the other big challenge for me was figuring out kind of
how to position myself. But I do want to be very clear. Mark
Dwidziak is both a the undisputed King of knowledge of coal check and probably everything
else about television. So I want to be clear to anybody listening saying,
are you trying to get in Mark duds? No, No, Mark is
the King. I bow to it. In fact, he was actually very
gracious when I was working on this book. I sent him some questions,
really assault to the earth, most absolutely lovely person. Even now as I'm
promoting it, he's often the first person to like things on social media or
say congratulations. So absolutely a prince. So I knew I couldn't do Marx
book because a Mark had written it. It was definitive. He had done
the interviews, he'd done the archive, he did all the stuff that I
think I did not need to do. So for me, the question was
what's my angle? And that was where working with the folks at Wayne State
was really a Wayne State University Press who's the publisher, was very helpful.
They had this series that people should check out beyond just my book called TV
Milestones. They're very short and cheap. Yeah, we like cheap monographs about
television show series that people are kind of arguing what this matter? Like,
this is a milestone, so you know all your classics, like I Love
Lucy, The Honeymooners, more contemporary things like twin Peaks, The X Files,
Twilight Zone, like all those kind of films. You'd say, if
you had the pantheon of iconic TV series, these would be the series.
And it occurred to me that was so I felt like my job was to
go in and say, hey, television world, television fan world, even
if you might not have heard of this series, because again it doesn't have
quite the immediate name recognition as say I Love Lucy or The Honeymooners or Mashed.
I'd say, even if you haven't heard of this series, it changed
the course of television history. And that was so I felt my job.
So I guess part of the challenge was finding out what I'm trying to do.
But once that made sense that I could take what Mark had done and
a lot of other great scholars and historians in sort of getting the history of
cold Check. I could borrow from them, citing them, of course,
you know, a barrow from them. I could climb up on their shoulders
and have a little megaphone to say, hey, people, if you haven't
heard of cold Check, let me tell you why he met. It's such
a strange show, this whole idea of the two TV movies. And then
the show comes out and the show doesn't succeed. It doesn't run the full
twenty two episodes. It gets canceled after what twenty or nineteen, I can't
remember. It makes twenty and then there are a couple in the scripts that
never get made. And it was a race the other party is and I
see a lot of discussion on you know, the various Cold Check social media
groups, and there are a lot of reasons it got pulled. Darren McGavin
was very unhappy. There were production problems, it had gone through some producers.
There were changes at ABC, big big changes at the top, so
clearly things were up, you know. And also ABC was running deeply third
getting killed by NBC and CBS. But it's also worth remembering Cold Check.
The series never had good ratings never. In fact, I think it tied
for sixty fifth for its season with The Sunny Bono Show. And this was
not Sonny and Share. This is post divorced Sonny by himself show which did
not last very long, so it did not attract an audience. And I
think there are you know, I think there are some good reasons it didn't
attract an audience. And indeed, one of the things I try to argue
for or kind of make the point of in the book. I think what
cold Check did right influenced TV history, But I think also what Cold Check
the series did wrong really influenced the history, so that people like Chris Carter,
who really did use the X Files to say or used Colcheck to launch
the X Files twin peaks, was the cold Check was used to say,
Oh, this is like cold Check. Certainly, Eric Kripkey Supernatural. Kripkey
basically admits I wanted to do Cold Check, and when I realized the idea
I had was so close to cold Check that it would give me in trouble,
I changed them from being you know, reporters to brothers, and thus
launched one of the longest running, you know, horror television shows in history.
So I think learning. I think a lot of those creators saw in
Cold Check what worked, but also learned from its mistakes. Yeah, there's
no miss Emily character on Supernatural, No no, But what Supernatural gets right?
And I think, you know, to me, the biggest failing of
the show. And again I say this lightly as as a fan. This
time, I can honestly say I'm genuinely Sometimes I write about films I'm not
a big fan of just because they're interesting. But Cold Check is. I
would break curfew when I was nine and sneak to the living room and put
the TV on really low and lay in my little sleeping bag right by the
you know, back of the days when you didn't have you know, all
the stuff we have now, and turn the channel really quietly so no one
will wake up and watch Cold Check and be terrified. So I love this
series, but the biggest failing is that it never became a proper series in
the sense that there's no memory, right, there's no continuity. Karl keeps
fighting monsters, he gets, he handles them, and then you know,
at the end of every episode the photos were blurry, or the camera was
confiscated, or all the evidence disappeared, or it was always suppressed, but
there was never the build up. So you know, you look at the
X Files, which is kind of the next generation of Check. They learned
from that mistake. They did have one off episodes, but they had a
bigger narrative. There were consequences to actions. We did have this broader conspiracy
of why things keep getting suppressed, but that became part of the story.
And so you could go and watch a single X Files episode, but you
would also see something that would make you want to come back the next week
and the next week. And Cold Check just never developed that never developed that
through line of oh my goodness, what's going to happen next? Which is
ironic because the reboot of Cold Check trying to do that a little but just
didn't do it maybe enough. There was that whole the mark and this and
then the other. And I remember right towards the end because again another canceled
series, but right towards the end there were I think two episodes that started
to play into the mythology and they it just went away just could I mean,
the reboot is interesting. I think you're right. The reboot said,
ah, we can fix the seriality, will make this all about this,
you know a little bit of borrowing from the fugitive. His wife has been
murdered and he's the suspect and he's going to find out and has something to
do with some supernatural conspiracy. But you know, the flip side was they
didn't learn from what Kolchak did well, which was the charm of Darren McGavin.
I mean, he's just as irascible and grumpy old guy, but you
just want to hear the next wise crack that's going to come out of his
mouth. And the reboot was charmless, let's just say it that way.
And they also lost the humor. And I think one of the things that
made the TV movies work so well, and you know, when the series
worked, it was that balance between scary stuff. And there's some genuinely scary
moments in the series and certainly in the TV movies, with that humor,
you know, it's it's making fun of Updike, or it's Miss Emily talking
about her sex life, or it's you know, Tony and Carl having these
big blowouts. That ability to balance scary and funny. I mean, that's
really the history of a lot of horror and certainly you know, I just
just watch Nope, the new Jordan Peel film, and I think that's one
of the great things that Jordan Peel is really expert as a filmmaker, is
balancing Okay, this is scary and a little political and a little unsettling,
but here's some funny bits to kind of kind of make that mix work.
And when cold check worked well, it got that balance. When it didn't
work well, then maybe it didn't any I do appreciate that the book is
short, but I think it's a little too short. I wish that it
went on for more because I enjoyed it so much. Thank you. Unfortunately,
Wayne State has a really strict word limit, So yeah, I felt
the same way I said, I feel like I I you know, I
would have loved I do think, you know, for people that love the
series, you know, I hope people will consider looking at my book.
But I definitely think this book, in combination with Mark's book, The Nice
Talker Companion, which is I understand it from from Mark, is coming back.
It's out of print right now, but they are coming back with an
updated edition. It's going to have a whole lot of additional information. So
I definitely would say, if you want more, Mark is the more guy.
I think mine is the short book. When you're a friend of here
says why do you like the stupid series? You hand in my book.
If they buy my argument, then they go read Mark's book and they get
this really rich, full beautiful history. I'm so glad to hear that Mark's
book is being reissued. It took so long to find that original col check
companion. Yeah, I don't want to I don't even want to remember how
much I paid some back alleyway or something, but it was invaluable and it's
wonderful. And Mark is an amazing reporter and TV historian and again just an
absolutely lovely individual, gracious and kind. Some people, you know, when
they've written about something, they then want to lay a fence around it and
say mine, nobody can come near it. Mark is the exact opposite,
just a scholar and a gentleman in every good sense of that word. And
so yes, I think I'm not sure exactly can Mark can come on and
tell you exactly when the book is coming out, But I've heard him say
that now, so I believe that's happening. And again, I think that
is really the definitive look at me selling Marx book I've got. But if
you have a few pennies left over, you know, pick up my little
missive on the Nightstalker and maybe together they're they're the perfect gift. I think
where's the best place for people to keep up with you in all your projects.
I would definitely encourage people to follow me on Twitter. That's where I
put out most stuff I am. My Twitter handle is at Dark Projections,
a combination of a book I wrote called Dark Directions and a book I wrote
called Projected Fear So Dark Projections. I would also say, if people are
interested in hearing my melodious voice, I can't imagine why you would be.
But I also host a podcast produced here in Syracuse at WAAR and going out
through National Public Radio. The podcast is called pop Life, and we occasionally
do horror episodes, but we do a lot of general pop culture things.
So please feel free and look up pop Life at WAR and tune in and
give us a listen. Professor Phillips, thank you so much for your time.
This is great, really an honor to be here. I love I
love the Podcas Gust really great talk to you. Thank you. M h m hm