September 8, 2022 • 32 mins
Professor Kendall R. Phillips discusses his work, focusing on his latest book, Kolchak: The Night Stalker from Wayne State University's TV Milestones series. The book discusses the origins and impact of the short-lived TV series and its landmark TV movies.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
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(00:45):
Hey, folks, welcome to aspecial 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 aboutcole 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 Milestoneseries. Check out the series. They've
(01:10):
been doing a lot of great work. I have to recommend a lot of
the books that they've done, especiallythe Twin Peaks one, But this book
about Cole Check fantastic, as ProfessorPhillips 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 ChackTapes, I know you have.
If you're listening to The Projection Booth, maybe I haven't, but you know
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it was enough that Chris and Iput together a whole long series talking all
about the nights Stalker. So enjoythat, and enjoy this book, and
enjoy this interview. Can you tellme a little bit about you how you
got into academia. I'm not evensure I remember anymore. I've been a
professor for an awful long time.I am a professor of Communication and rhetorical
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Studies at Syracuse University. I've beenon the faculty here for twenty three years.
Previously taught at the University of CentralMissouri 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 myfamily. I grew up in Texas studying
communication and culture, but just afascinating way of trying to understand how people
(02:16):
sort of make sense of the world. And it's been an interesting ride.
And somehow it took me down lotsof dark alleyways to meet lots of monsters.
So well, yeah, I seethe picture of Frankenstein behind you,
I mean, big monster guy.It looks like yeah. So you know.
I've been studying horror for probably allthose twenty three years and a bit
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more, mainly in horror films,but increasingly, as with the Cold Check
project, interested in horror narratives andother media. So looking at television,
actually currently looking at a project abouthorror on the radio. So it is
interesting to look at the pervasiveness ofthese stories we tell to scare ourselves now
(02:59):
was the Cold Check Book? Wasthat 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 fewyears back I wrote a book called Projected
Fears, Horror, Films and AmericanCulture that looked at the broad history of
horror from nineteen thirty one until atthe time the present, which was around
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two thousand. I've written a bookcalled 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 endof that, And just recently had
a book called A Cinema of Hopelessnessthat looks at horror and other genres in
the current era, sort of thetwenty first century, and asking why we're
so angry and depressed? So doyou know why we're so angry and depressed?
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No, but I wrote a bookabout it, So you know,
I guess, I guess maybe therewas an answer in that. But yeah,
I mean the nutshell of the bookis, you know that we are
at a point in I think Westernculture, at least certainly American cold where
there's a kind of fantasy that thesystem is not working, you know,
and that it has failed us.And we've seen that in you know,
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on the right, we certainly sawthat with the January sixth riots and kind
of insurrection the Tea Party. Iwould say a lot of the Trump presidency
was around you know, the systemdoesn't work, it's a swamp. It
has to be drained, it hasto be torn apart. But the same
from the left right, you certainlyso Occupy Wall Street, and so there's
this kind of circulation of narratives ofwhy can't we just burn the whole thing
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down, let's quit, right,And so for me in horror Cabin in
the Woods was a great example ofthat. Who people have seen that film.
No, it's all about this evilsystem, 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 filmsall about this kind of system that is
so evil and we just want outof it. We can't seem to get
(04:51):
out. So that's my nutshell answerto that question. So I'm already fascinated
by the radio project that you're startingto work out, because radio was such
a great place for horror stories andjust I remember having the bit Jesus scared
out of me listening to Horror Radioone. I think it was AM five
sixty when I was a kid,and it's just like wow, having its
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roots there going into television, Imean television. You point out a lot
of great things in the Cold Checkbook, the whole idea of Twilight Zone
and Outer Limits and just taking horrorhome 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
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really through film, Like in aroundnineteen thirty one, after the popularity of
Draculin Frankenstein, you start getting theadvent of these anthology series The Witch,
the Witches, Cauldron, you knowthat blanking on other names because I was
thinking about Cold Check today, butyou get a lot of these sort of
anthology horror that are all like separate, little individual stories, a little like
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Twilight Zone or Outer Limits. Infact, that that format would be the
way that that horror would enter televisionbecause several of those shows, there were
very popular radio shows in the nineteenthirties would reformat and become television like you
know, the you know, theGeneral Motors theater sort of thing, right,
So they would have these little um, you know, vignette again,
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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 allthe major studios like quit it, shift
to science fiction, shift to somethingelse, get away from ghosts and demons
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and curses and things like that.And the same was happening with the radio.
So some of the very first reallyserious efforts to censor radio in the
mid thirties and actually set up theFCC as a full on censorship board,
not just a licensing board, weredriven by people who were worried about horror.
There's a senator from IOWAA, ClydeHarry, who was one of the
champions of this, who wrote anentire op ed about Boris Karloff reading an
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Edgar Allan Poe poem on a verypopular kind of variety radio show and saying
that this was inappropriate. It wasterrifying children, it was bringing evil things
into the homes, and of coursethe same was true with television. You
know, I know so much aboutmore of the comic book industry and how
that was censored. I never thoughtabout the radio industry. Yeah, it's
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it's a fascinating moment. And actually, so this is completely off topic,
but hey, we're chatting. Oneof the interesting thing about the history of
radio censorship was the big moment whenit probably would have happened if it was
going to happen in terms of areally full throated federal censorship system. The
FCC does have regulations, but it'snot a full blown censorship structure. Was
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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. Butif you just tuned in late, which
a lot of people did, itsounds like a real radio program and they're
giving you real news reports in betweena jazz show, and they're aliens and
Hackensack or whoever. It was inNew Jersey. People freaked out, and
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there's a big kind of public moment, and so a lot of the folks
who were worried about horror, andthey were also worried about sexuality in Maywest
and humor, but they were worriedabout 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 ofthe World's proves is how powerful radio is,
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and that radio, in the wronghands, radio could be used to
incite riots, or incite panic,or get people to run for their homes
and shoot at water towers, whichis exactly what it did. Oh again,
we would see later in the thirtiesNazi Germany using radio for exactly the
purposes. So a lot of peoplesaid, that's exactly why the government should
not have control of the airways,because the government should not have control of
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this really powerful weapon. So it'sfascinating 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 FrederickWortham starts testifying. He writes a book
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called The Seduction of Innocence where hesays, you know, comic books are
destroying morals and creating homosexuality and teachingpeople to be criminals and all kinds of
quote horrible things. And that's whatled to the Comics Code, the elimination
of horror comics. You know,huge, huge impact. But it happened
even then. It happened at theindustrial level because it was the comic book
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creators agreeing to this kind of internalfear. 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 gettinginto the home. Right. It was
in the theater that was that wasa problem. But if it got into
the home through ray, ideo,through pulp novels, through comic books lated
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through television, now that was toomuch. That's where people wanted to draw
the line and say you can't sendthat 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 earlynineteen seventies to allow something like The Nightstalker
to happen. I think it's afascinating period, and it really is this
ongoing it's a funny, the ongoingkind of sibling tension between motion pictures and
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television. Right. So, youknow, 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 watchit for free. Why would it go
out? So that starts to pushHollywood to get rid of the production code
and bring in a lot of technologicalinnovations like three D and surround sound and
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stereoscope and all that sort of technologicalbut really to start pushing the boundaries and
say we can show you things thatthe government's not gonna let put on television.
The flip side by the time youget to the seventies is a particularly
in relation to horror. That periodfrom about nineteen sixty eight to nineteen eighty
two is what some of us callthe second Golden Age of horror. For
me, it really starts with GeorgeMerrow's Night Living Dead as the kind of
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indie, ugly dirty film at theexploitation cinema, and then Rosemary's Baby the
respectable film. But both of thosewere really pushing the boundaries of what people
had thought of as horror, likethey were really kind of going beyond what
expectations were. But you'd also hadthe 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
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nineteen eighty two, you get allof your iconic films, right, not
only the franchises like Halloween and TheThirteenth but the kind of gritty like Last
House on the Left and I Spiton Your Grave and Texas Chainsaw Massacre,
etc. Right, these films thatare really like pushing the edges of what
you know can be considered acceptable insociety. So there you get Network television
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had been abbling in horror, right. You certainly had a lot of comedy
horror, so like Bewitched and TheMunsters and the Adams Family, and he
had little anthology, you know,kind of morality tales from Rod Serling.
A daytime television of course, hadDark Shadows, which was a really progressive,
innovative show. But none of thosewere really like the horror films that
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in nineteen seventies. None of themwere like bringing the horror Home. The
horror film I remember being. Thefirst thing that really hit me was Halloween.
So I saw that in nineteen seventyeight, and what terrified me was
not just the maniac with the maskand the knife. Okay, that was
scary. What terrified me was itwas set in the suburbs, right.
It was a neighborhood, not thatyou know, my neighborhood was not that
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affluent, but you know, it'sstill. When you know, Laurie is
running from J Michael and she's bangingon the neighbor's doors and they look out
and they closed the shutters and turnoff 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 inthe US suburb where I lived. It
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was following my school bus and thatwas like, ah, right, So
what I think cold Check did.One of the reasons I think that that
original nineteen seventy two television movie andthen the second movie in the series really
cemented itself into pop culture was coldCheck was able and that was why Dan
Curtis, who had done Dark Shadows, was able to take scary monsters that
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would have been in sort of blackand white B movies over there and bring
them here. And that was terrifying. And again, as some folks probably
know, many of your listeners willknow that first January nineteen seventy two screening
or airing of the night Stalker moviewas the most watched television movie in history
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for many years, even after thateventually got Eclipse, but it was a
any event. People were calling peopleand saying, oh my god, are
you watching the show? It's soAnd I think one of the things that
really made it, back to yourpoint, was horror wasn't out there or
over there or back then. Horrorwas in an alleyway in Las Vegas with
an autopsy with police, like inthe world we live in, and that
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that was quite terrified. I'm gladtoo that you brought up the whole idea
of the importance of the investigative reporteras well, and especially in the early
seventies. I'm trying to remember thiswas before Nixon put in this right signation,
but this has got to be rightaround 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
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you know, when you write abook, you write it, you finish
it, you sent it off.It goes into mysterious things and that eventually
comes back, and sometimes my brainloses some details. But one of the
really iconic for me Cold Check theseries episodes is the Devil's Platform, which
people might remember is the senatorial candidatewho's made a deal with the devil and
turns into a dog. Somehow itmade sense, but anyway, trust me,
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folks, is what happens. Thatcame actually only a few weeks,
maybe five or six weeks after theWatergate resignation, so this was right there.
But even the initial choice, andI think you're exactly right the choice
too. I think two really thinginnovative things about Cold Check the choice to
make it about the monster hunter rightto focus on the investigator. So we're
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not following the monster as we didcomedically 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 followingthis investigator. It's kind of and the
great thing about it. The secondthing is what cold check in many ways
is a police procedure. Right ifyou just take out the reporter part,
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if he's not an ions and he'snot hunting for monsters. This is every
you know Rockford, Mannex, BigMillin and Wife, pick any of your
nineteen seventies police proceduals. It's thatsame sort of step by step procedural outline.
But people should also remember that inthe early nineteen seventies, maybe a
little bit like for some folks thesedays, police was not an automatically good
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term. We had had the civilrights demonstrations, the violence, particularly in
the South, Bull Connor unleashing dogson peaceful protesters in Selma. We had
had the police response, the veryviolent Chicago police response to the Democratic National
Convention protests in nineteen sixty eight.So the uniform was not automatically, Oh,
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they're here to save us, right, there was something a little bit
frightening. So Cold Check is likea number of series in the nineteen seventies
of sort of finding a different kindof hero, and the journalist, as
you rightly point out, was aperfect example. We had not yet had
Watergate by the time you get thefirst Cold Check movie, but we had
had the Pentagon Papers, and wealso had a long history of both in
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reality and in popular culture, ofgroundbreaking investigative journalists. So the journalist is
a kind of natural for stories ineither television or film. And so by
take the traditional gothic monster, puttingit into the current age, focusing on
an investigator and making him a reporter, it was just the perfect formula for
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that early nineteen seventies audience. Yeah, and that antagonism between he and the
police always played such a great roleas well. Absolutely, and had to
feel, you know, a gettingcontemporary to people who were watching questionable practices
by the police and then seeing thatkind of antagonism aimed at our hero Cold
Check. So again, you knowthat that early nineteen seventies anti establishment was
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you know, kind of part ofthe zeitgeist, right, the hippie movement,
the civil rights movement, the earlystages of the lgbt HU movement,
but all pushing back. In allof those movements, Women's liberation, etc.
The police and the authorities were theenemy, 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,
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but he could connect with that youngerviewer in nineteen seventy because he was
anti establishment. Colcheck was always rubbingthe police, the politicians, the wealthy,
the business owners, anybody authority.The minute Colchack to walk in,
you can see their face drop becauseno one wanted to see Carl walk into
the diamondoction or the hotel administrator's office, or you know, any of those
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sort of places. Though, So, how did you come to write this
book about Colcheck? Now? Iwas not I'm not quite old enough to
have watched the series when it firstcame 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, whichI think a lot of folks found it
on the CBS reruns. And Ithink actually this was probably the thing,
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if there's anything that helped to imprintColcheck on not only the culture, but
a whole generation of horror fans andhorror creators, people like Chris Carter and
others who saw colcheck a real modelof telling horror stories. I think probably
the pure happenstance moment was CBS purchasingthe rights to rerun the night Stalker TV
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series in seventy eight, seventy nine, eighty eighty one in their CBS late
night programming and so that's where Idiscovered it. And so it had always
been in my head as an iconichorror narrative, but I think for me,
I had always kept it as like, well, that was television,
and so I think for my ownkind of academic development, you know,
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spending most of my time looking inthe history of film, it took a
moment. And part of it wastalking with folks at Wayne State who said,
hey, what are you doing,etc. Part of it, honestly
was also COVID because a lot ofmy work involves going to film archives and
it's hard to go to an archivewhen you can't get on a plane or
leave your house. And so itwas kind of in that moment of saying,
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wait a minute, that series wasn'tjust something I watched as a kid.
It was a major moment in Americanculture at exactly this moment, right
exactly that time in the early nineteenseventies when horror is exploding, and you
know, it's certainly in the moviesyou get massive success of like The Exorcist
and Rosemary's Baby and Alien, butjust in culture generally, like people,
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it's all I was running across that. I think it's the year that The
Night Stocker came out. Alice Cooperhad 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 sortof thing is happening, and incomes Cold
Check, and I started saying,how did that fit into that broader moment
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in culture? And so the bookkind of came from that. What were
some of the challenges of writing thisother than COVID? COVID was a big
challenge. I think the other bigchallenge for me was figuring out kind of
how to position myself. But Ido want to be very clear. Mark
Dwidziak is both a the undisputed Kingof knowledge of coal check and probably everything
else about television. So I wantto be clear to anybody listening saying,
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are you trying to get in Markduds? No, No, Mark is
the King. I bow to it. In fact, he was actually very
gracious when I was working on thisbook. I sent him some questions,
really assault to the earth, mostabsolutely lovely person. Even now as I'm
promoting it, he's often the firstperson to like things on social media or
say congratulations. So absolutely a prince. So I knew I couldn't do Marx
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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 waswhere working with the folks at Wayne State
was really a Wayne State University Presswho's the publisher, was very helpful.
They had this series that people shouldcheck out beyond just my book called TV
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Milestones. They're very short and cheap. Yeah, we like cheap monographs about
television show series that people are kindof arguing what this matter? Like,
this is a milestone, so youknow all your classics, like I Love
Lucy, The Honeymooners, more contemporarythings like twin Peaks, The X Files,
Twilight Zone, like all those kindof films. You'd say, if
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you had the pantheon of iconic TVseries, these would be the series.
And it occurred to me that wasso I felt like my job was to
go in and say, hey,television world, television fan world, even
if you might not have heard ofthis series, because again it doesn't have
quite the immediate name recognition as sayI Love Lucy or The Honeymooners or Mashed.
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I'd say, even if you haven'theard of this series, it changed
the course of television history. Andthat was so I felt my job.
So I guess part of the challengewas finding out what I'm trying to do.
But once that made sense that Icould take what Mark had done and
a lot of other great scholars andhistorians in sort of getting the history of
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cold Check. I could borrow fromthem, 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 metell you why he met. It's such
a strange show, this whole ideaof the two TV movies. And then
the show comes out and the showdoesn't succeed. It doesn't run the full
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twenty two episodes. It gets canceledafter what twenty or nineteen, I can't
remember. It makes twenty and thenthere are a couple in the scripts that
never get made. And it wasa race the other party is and I
see a lot of discussion on youknow, the various Cold Check social media
groups, and there are a lotof reasons it got pulled. Darren McGavin
was very unhappy. There were productionproblems, it had gone through some producers.
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There were changes at ABC, bigbig 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 withThe Sunny Bono Show. And this was
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not Sonny and Share. This ispost divorced Sonny by himself show which did
not last very long, so itdid not attract an audience. And I
think there are you know, Ithink 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 pointof in the book. I think what
cold Check did right influenced TV history, But I think also what Cold Check
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the series did wrong really influenced thehistory, so that people like Chris Carter,
who really did use the X Filesto say or used Colcheck to launch
the X Files twin peaks, wasthe cold Check was used to say,
Oh, this is like cold Check. Certainly, Eric Kripkey Supernatural. Kripkey
basically admits I wanted to do ColdCheck, and when I realized the idea
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I had was so close to coldCheck 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 thinka lot of those creators saw in
Cold Check what worked, but alsolearned from its mistakes. Yeah, there's
no miss Emily character on Supernatural,No no, But what Supernatural gets right?
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And I think, you know,to me, the biggest failing of
the show. And again I saythis lightly as as a fan. This
time, I can honestly say I'mgenuinely Sometimes I write about films I'm not
a big fan of just because they'reinteresting. But Cold Check is. I
would break curfew when I was nineand sneak to the living room and put
the TV on really low and layin my little sleeping bag right by the
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you know, back of the dayswhen you didn't have you know, all
the stuff we have now, andturn the channel really quietly so no one
will wake up and watch Cold Checkand be terrified. So I love this
series, but the biggest failing isthat 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, hehandles them, and then you know,
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at the end of every episode thephotos 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 ofthe next generation of Check. They learned
from that mistake. They did haveone off episodes, but they had a
bigger narrative. There were consequences toactions. We did have this broader conspiracy
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of why things keep getting suppressed,but that became part of the story.
And so you could go and watcha single X Files episode, but you
would also see something that would makeyou want to come back the next week
and the next week. And ColdCheck 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 Checktrying to do that a little but just
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didn't do it maybe enough. Therewas that whole the mark and this and
then the other. And I rememberright towards the end because again another canceled
series, but right towards the endthere were I think two episodes that started
to play into the mythology and theyit just went away just could I mean,
the reboot is interesting. I thinkyou're right. The reboot said,
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ah, we can fix the seriality, will make this all about this,
you know a little bit of borrowingfrom the fugitive. His wife has been
murdered and he's the suspect and he'sgoing to find out and has something to
do with some supernatural conspiracy. Butyou 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 irascibleand grumpy old guy, but you
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just want to hear the next wisecrack 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 betweenscary stuff. And there's some genuinely scary
moments in the series and certainly inthe TV movies, with that humor,
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you know, it's it's making funof Updike, or it's Miss Emily talking
about her sex life, or it'syou know, Tony and Carl having these
big blowouts. That ability to balancescary and funny. I mean, that's
really the history of a lot ofhorror and certainly you know, I just
just watch Nope, the new JordanPeel film, and I think that's one
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of the great things that Jordan Peelis really expert as a filmmaker, is
balancing Okay, this is scary anda little political and a little unsettling,
but here's some funny bits to kindof 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'tany I do appreciate that the book is
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short, but I think it's alittle too short. I wish that it
went on for more because I enjoyedit so much. Thank you. Unfortunately,
Wayne State has a really strict wordlimit, So yeah, I felt
the same way I said, Ifeel like I I you know, I
would have loved I do think,you know, for people that love the
series, you know, I hopepeople will consider looking at my book.
But I definitely think this book,in combination with Mark's book, The Nice
(28:48):
Talker Companion, which is I understandit 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 havea whole lot of additional information. So
I definitely would say, if youwant 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 stupidseries? You hand in my book.
(29:11):
If they buy my argument, thenthey 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 tookso long to find that original col check
companion. Yeah, I don't wantto I don't even want to remember how
much I paid some back alleyway orsomething, but it was invaluable and it's
wonderful. And Mark is an amazingreporter and TV historian and again just an
(29:34):
absolutely lovely individual, gracious and kind. Some people, you know, when
they've written about something, they thenwant to lay a fence around it and
say mine, nobody can come nearit. Mark is the exact opposite,
just a scholar and a gentleman inevery good sense of that word. And
so yes, I think I'm notsure exactly can Mark can come on and
tell you exactly when the book iscoming out, But I've heard him say
(29:56):
that now, so I believe that'shappening. And again, I think that
is really the definitive look at meselling 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 togetherthey're they're the perfect gift. I think
where's the best place for people tokeep up with you in all your projects.
I would definitely encourage people to followme on Twitter. That's where I
(30:18):
put out most stuff I am.My Twitter handle is at Dark Projections,
a combination of a book I wrotecalled 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 producedhere in Syracuse at WAAR and going out
(30:40):
through National Public Radio. The podcastis called pop Life, and we occasionally
do horror episodes, but we doa lot of general pop culture things.
So please feel free and look uppop 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 honorto be here. I love I
love the Podcas Gust really great talkto you. Thank you. M h m hm
Hey, folks, welcome to aspecial 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 aboutcole 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 Milestoneseries. Check out the series. They've
(01:10):
been doing a lot of great work. I have to recommend a lot of
the books that they've done, especiallythe Twin Peaks one, But this book
about Cole Check fantastic, as ProfessorPhillips 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 ChackTapes, I know you have.
If you're listening to The Projection Booth, maybe I haven't, but you know
(01:34):
it was enough that Chris and Iput together a whole long series talking all
about the nights Stalker. So enjoythat, and enjoy this book, and
enjoy this interview. Can you tellme a little bit about you how you
got into academia. I'm not evensure I remember anymore. I've been a
professor for an awful long time.I am a professor of Communication and rhetorical
(01:55):
Studies at Syracuse University. I've beenon the faculty here for twenty three years.
Previously taught at the University of CentralMissouri 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 myfamily. I grew up in Texas studying
communication and culture, but just afascinating way of trying to understand how people
(02:16):
sort of make sense of the world. And it's been an interesting ride.
And somehow it took me down lotsof dark alleyways to meet lots of monsters.
So well, yeah, I seethe picture of Frankenstein behind you,
I mean, big monster guy.It looks like yeah. So you know.
I've been studying horror for probably allthose twenty three years and a bit
(02:37):
more, mainly in horror films,but increasingly, as with the Cold Check
project, interested in horror narratives andother media. So looking at television,
actually currently looking at a project abouthorror on the radio. So it is
interesting to look at the pervasiveness ofthese stories we tell to scare ourselves now
(02:59):
was the Cold Check Book? Wasthat 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 fewyears back I wrote a book called Projected
Fears, Horror, Films and AmericanCulture that looked at the broad history of
horror from nineteen thirty one until atthe time the present, which was around
(03:23):
two thousand. I've written a bookcalled 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 endof that, And just recently had
a book called A Cinema of Hopelessnessthat looks at horror and other genres in
the current era, sort of thetwenty first century, and asking why we're
so angry and depressed? So doyou know why we're so angry and depressed?
(03:46):
No, but I wrote a bookabout it, So you know,
I guess, I guess maybe therewas an answer in that. But yeah,
I mean the nutshell of the bookis, you know that we are
at a point in I think Westernculture, at least certainly American cold where
there's a kind of fantasy that thesystem is not working, you know,
and that it has failed us.And we've seen that in you know,
(04:08):
on the right, we certainly sawthat with the January sixth riots and kind
of insurrection the Tea Party. Iwould say a lot of the Trump presidency
was around you know, the systemdoesn't work, it's a swamp. It
has to be drained, it hasto be torn apart. But the same
from the left right, you certainlyso Occupy Wall Street, and so there's
this kind of circulation of narratives ofwhy can't we just burn the whole thing
(04:30):
down, let's quit, right,And so for me in horror Cabin in
the Woods was a great example ofthat. Who people have seen that film.
No, it's all about this evilsystem, 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 filmsall about this kind of system that is
so evil and we just want outof it. We can't seem to get
(04:51):
out. So that's my nutshell answerto that question. So I'm already fascinated
by the radio project that you're startingto work out, because radio was such
a great place for horror stories andjust I remember having the bit Jesus scared
out of me listening to Horror Radioone. I think it was AM five
sixty when I was a kid,and it's just like wow, having its
(05:13):
roots there going into television, Imean television. You point out a lot
of great things in the Cold Checkbook, the whole idea of Twilight Zone
and Outer Limits and just taking horrorhome 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
(05:35):
really through film, Like in aroundnineteen thirty one, after the popularity of
Draculin Frankenstein, you start getting theadvent of these anthology series The Witch,
the Witches, Cauldron, you knowthat blanking on other names because I was
thinking about Cold Check today, butyou get a lot of these sort of
anthology horror that are all like separate, little individual stories, a little like
(05:57):
Twilight Zone or Outer Limits. Infact, that that format would be the
way that that horror would enter televisionbecause several of those shows, there were
very popular radio shows in the nineteenthirties would reformat and become television like you
know, the you know, theGeneral Motors theater sort of thing, right,
So they would have these little um, you know, vignette again,
(06:17):
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 allthe major studios like quit it, shift
to science fiction, shift to somethingelse, get away from ghosts and demons
(06:39):
and curses and things like that.And the same was happening with the radio.
So some of the very first reallyserious efforts to censor radio in the
mid thirties and actually set up theFCC as a full on censorship board,
not just a licensing board, weredriven by people who were worried about horror.
There's a senator from IOWAA, ClydeHarry, who was one of the
champions of this, who wrote anentire op ed about Boris Karloff reading an
(07:02):
Edgar Allan Poe poem on a verypopular kind of variety radio show and saying
that this was inappropriate. It wasterrifying children, it was bringing evil things
into the homes, and of coursethe same was true with television. You
know, I know so much aboutmore of the comic book industry and how
that was censored. I never thoughtabout the radio industry. Yeah, it's
(07:23):
it's a fascinating moment. And actually, so this is completely off topic,
but hey, we're chatting. Oneof the interesting thing about the history of
radio censorship was the big moment whenit probably would have happened if it was
going to happen in terms of areally full throated federal censorship system. The
FCC does have regulations, but it'snot a full blown censorship structure. Was
(07:44):
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. Butif you just tuned in late, which
a lot of people did, itsounds like a real radio program and they're
giving you real news reports in betweena jazz show, and they're aliens and
Hackensack or whoever. It was inNew Jersey. People freaked out, and
(08:05):
there's a big kind of public moment, and so a lot of the folks
who were worried about horror, andthey were also worried about sexuality in Maywest
and humor, but they were worriedabout 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 ofthe World's proves is how powerful radio is,
(08:30):
and that radio, in the wronghands, radio could be used to
incite riots, or incite panic,or get people to run for their homes
and shoot at water towers, whichis exactly what it did. Oh again,
we would see later in the thirtiesNazi Germany using radio for exactly the
purposes. So a lot of peoplesaid, that's exactly why the government should
not have control of the airways,because the government should not have control of
(08:54):
this really powerful weapon. So it'sfascinating 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 FrederickWortham starts testifying. He writes a book
(09:18):
called The Seduction of Innocence where hesays, you know, comic books are
destroying morals and creating homosexuality and teachingpeople to be criminals and all kinds of
quote horrible things. And that's whatled to the Comics Code, the elimination
of horror comics. You know,huge, huge impact. But it happened
even then. It happened at theindustrial level because it was the comic book
(09:39):
creators agreeing to this kind of internalfear. 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 gettinginto the home. Right. It was
in the theater that was that wasa problem. But if it got into
the home through ray, ideo,through pulp novels, through comic books lated
(10:03):
through television, now that was toomuch. That's where people wanted to draw
the line and say you can't sendthat 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 earlynineteen seventies to allow something like The Nightstalker
to happen. I think it's afascinating period, and it really is this
ongoing it's a funny, the ongoingkind of sibling tension between motion pictures and
(10:26):
television. Right. So, youknow, 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 watchit for free. Why would it go
out? So that starts to pushHollywood to get rid of the production code
and bring in a lot of technologicalinnovations like three D and surround sound and
(10:48):
stereoscope and all that sort of technologicalbut really to start pushing the boundaries and
say we can show you things thatthe government's not gonna let put on television.
The flip side by the time youget to the seventies is a particularly
in relation to horror. That periodfrom about nineteen sixty eight to nineteen eighty
two is what some of us callthe second Golden Age of horror. For
me, it really starts with GeorgeMerrow's Night Living Dead as the kind of
(11:11):
indie, ugly dirty film at theexploitation cinema, and then Rosemary's Baby the
respectable film. But both of thosewere really pushing the boundaries of what people
had thought of as horror, likethey were really kind of going beyond what
expectations were. But you'd also hadthe 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
(11:35):
nineteen eighty two, you get allof your iconic films, right, not
only the franchises like Halloween and TheThirteenth but the kind of gritty like Last
House on the Left and I Spiton Your Grave and Texas Chainsaw Massacre,
etc. Right, these films thatare really like pushing the edges of what
you know can be considered acceptable insociety. So there you get Network television
(11:58):
had been abbling in horror, right. You certainly had a lot of comedy
horror, so like Bewitched and TheMunsters and the Adams Family, and he
had little anthology, you know,kind of morality tales from Rod Serling.
A daytime television of course, hadDark Shadows, which was a really progressive,
innovative show. But none of thosewere really like the horror films that
(12:20):
in nineteen seventies. None of themwere like bringing the horror Home. The
horror film I remember being. Thefirst thing that really hit me was Halloween.
So I saw that in nineteen seventyeight, and what terrified me was
not just the maniac with the maskand the knife. Okay, that was
scary. What terrified me was itwas set in the suburbs, right.
It was a neighborhood, not thatyou know, my neighborhood was not that
(12:41):
affluent, but you know, it'sstill. When you know, Laurie is
running from J Michael and she's bangingon the neighbor's doors and they look out
and they closed the shutters and turnoff 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 inthe US suburb where I lived. It
(13:03):
was following my school bus and thatwas like, ah, right, So
what I think cold Check did.One of the reasons I think that that
original nineteen seventy two television movie andthen the second movie in the series really
cemented itself into pop culture was coldCheck was able and that was why Dan
Curtis, who had done Dark Shadows, was able to take scary monsters that
(13:26):
would have been in sort of blackand white B movies over there and bring
them here. And that was terrifying. And again, as some folks probably
know, many of your listeners willknow that first January nineteen seventy two screening
or airing of the night Stalker moviewas the most watched television movie in history
(13:46):
for many years, even after thateventually got Eclipse, but it was a
any event. People were calling peopleand saying, oh my god, are
you watching the show? It's soAnd I think one of the things that
really made it, back to yourpoint, was horror wasn't out there or
over there or back then. Horrorwas in an alleyway in Las Vegas with
an autopsy with police, like inthe world we live in, and that
(14:09):
that was quite terrified. I'm gladtoo that you brought up the whole idea
of the importance of the investigative reporteras well, and especially in the early
seventies. I'm trying to remember thiswas before Nixon put in this right signation,
but this has got to be rightaround 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
(14:33):
you know, when you write abook, you write it, you finish
it, you sent it off.It goes into mysterious things and that eventually
comes back, and sometimes my brainloses some details. But one of the
really iconic for me Cold Check theseries episodes is the Devil's Platform, which
people might remember is the senatorial candidatewho's made a deal with the devil and
turns into a dog. Somehow itmade sense, but anyway, trust me,
(14:56):
folks, is what happens. Thatcame actually only a few weeks,
maybe five or six weeks after theWatergate resignation, so this was right there.
But even the initial choice, andI think you're exactly right the choice
too. I think two really thinginnovative things about Cold Check the choice to
make it about the monster hunter rightto focus on the investigator. So we're
(15:20):
not following the monster as we didcomedically 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 followingthis investigator. It's kind of and the
great thing about it. The secondthing is what cold check in many ways
is a police procedure. Right ifyou just take out the reporter part,
(15:41):
if he's not an ions and he'snot hunting for monsters. This is every
you know Rockford, Mannex, BigMillin and Wife, pick any of your
nineteen seventies police proceduals. It's thatsame sort of step by step procedural outline.
But people should also remember that inthe early nineteen seventies, maybe a
little bit like for some folks thesedays, police was not an automatically good
(16:04):
term. We had had the civilrights demonstrations, the violence, particularly in
the South, Bull Connor unleashing dogson peaceful protesters in Selma. We had
had the police response, the veryviolent Chicago police response to the Democratic National
Convention protests in nineteen sixty eight.So the uniform was not automatically, Oh,
(16:26):
they're here to save us, right, there was something a little bit
frightening. So Cold Check is likea number of series in the nineteen seventies
of sort of finding a different kindof hero, and the journalist, as
you rightly point out, was aperfect example. We had not yet had
Watergate by the time you get thefirst Cold Check movie, but we had
had the Pentagon Papers, and wealso had a long history of both in
(16:48):
reality and in popular culture, ofgroundbreaking investigative journalists. So the journalist is
a kind of natural for stories ineither television or film. And so by
take the traditional gothic monster, puttingit into the current age, focusing on
an investigator and making him a reporter, it was just the perfect formula for
(17:10):
that early nineteen seventies audience. Yeah, and that antagonism between he and the
police always played such a great roleas well. Absolutely, and had to
feel, you know, a gettingcontemporary to people who were watching questionable practices
by the police and then seeing thatkind of antagonism aimed at our hero Cold
Check. So again, you knowthat that early nineteen seventies anti establishment was
(17:33):
you know, kind of part ofthe zeitgeist, right, the hippie movement,
the civil rights movement, the earlystages of the lgbt HU movement,
but all pushing back. In allof those movements, Women's liberation, etc.
The police and the authorities were theenemy, 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,
(17:56):
but he could connect with that youngerviewer in nineteen seventy because he was
anti establishment. Colcheck was always rubbingthe police, the politicians, the wealthy,
the business owners, anybody authority.The minute Colchack to walk in,
you can see their face drop becauseno one wanted to see Carl walk into
the diamondoction or the hotel administrator's office, or you know, any of those
(18:19):
sort of places. Though, So, how did you come to write this
book about Colcheck? Now? Iwas not I'm not quite old enough to
have watched the series when it firstcame 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, whichI think a lot of folks found it
on the CBS reruns. And Ithink actually this was probably the thing,
(18:40):
if there's anything that helped to imprintColcheck on not only the culture, but
a whole generation of horror fans andhorror creators, people like Chris Carter and
others who saw colcheck a real modelof telling horror stories. I think probably
the pure happenstance moment was CBS purchasingthe rights to rerun the night Stalker TV
(19:08):
series in seventy eight, seventy nine, eighty eighty one in their CBS late
night programming and so that's where Idiscovered it. And so it had always
been in my head as an iconichorror narrative, but I think for me,
I had always kept it as like, well, that was television,
and so I think for my ownkind of academic development, you know,
(19:30):
spending most of my time looking inthe history of film, it took a
moment. And part of it wastalking with folks at Wayne State who said,
hey, what are you doing,etc. Part of it, honestly
was also COVID because a lot ofmy work involves going to film archives and
it's hard to go to an archivewhen you can't get on a plane or
leave your house. And so itwas kind of in that moment of saying,
(19:51):
wait a minute, that series wasn'tjust something I watched as a kid.
It was a major moment in Americanculture at exactly this moment, right
exactly that time in the early nineteenseventies when horror is exploding, and you
know, it's certainly in the moviesyou get massive success of like The Exorcist
and Rosemary's Baby and Alien, butjust in culture generally, like people,
(20:12):
it's all I was running across that. I think it's the year that The
Night Stocker came out. Alice Cooperhad 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 sortof thing is happening, and incomes Cold
Check, and I started saying,how did that fit into that broader moment
(20:32):
in culture? And so the bookkind of came from that. What were
some of the challenges of writing thisother than COVID? COVID was a big
challenge. I think the other bigchallenge for me was figuring out kind of
how to position myself. But Ido want to be very clear. Mark
Dwidziak is both a the undisputed Kingof knowledge of coal check and probably everything
else about television. So I wantto be clear to anybody listening saying,
(20:55):
are you trying to get in Markduds? No, No, Mark is
the King. I bow to it. In fact, he was actually very
gracious when I was working on thisbook. I sent him some questions,
really assault to the earth, mostabsolutely lovely person. Even now as I'm
promoting it, he's often the firstperson to like things on social media or
say congratulations. So absolutely a prince. So I knew I couldn't do Marx
(21:18):
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 waswhere working with the folks at Wayne State
was really a Wayne State University Presswho's the publisher, was very helpful.
They had this series that people shouldcheck out beyond just my book called TV
(21:40):
Milestones. They're very short and cheap. Yeah, we like cheap monographs about
television show series that people are kindof arguing what this matter? Like,
this is a milestone, so youknow all your classics, like I Love
Lucy, The Honeymooners, more contemporarythings like twin Peaks, The X Files,
Twilight Zone, like all those kindof films. You'd say, if
(22:02):
you had the pantheon of iconic TVseries, these would be the series.
And it occurred to me that wasso I felt like my job was to
go in and say, hey,television world, television fan world, even
if you might not have heard ofthis series, because again it doesn't have
quite the immediate name recognition as sayI Love Lucy or The Honeymooners or Mashed.
(22:26):
I'd say, even if you haven'theard of this series, it changed
the course of television history. Andthat was so I felt my job.
So I guess part of the challengewas finding out what I'm trying to do.
But once that made sense that Icould take what Mark had done and
a lot of other great scholars andhistorians in sort of getting the history of
(22:47):
cold Check. I could borrow fromthem, 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 metell you why he met. It's such
a strange show, this whole ideaof the two TV movies. And then
the show comes out and the showdoesn't succeed. It doesn't run the full
(23:07):
twenty two episodes. It gets canceledafter what twenty or nineteen, I can't
remember. It makes twenty and thenthere are a couple in the scripts that
never get made. And it wasa race the other party is and I
see a lot of discussion on youknow, the various Cold Check social media
groups, and there are a lotof reasons it got pulled. Darren McGavin
was very unhappy. There were productionproblems, it had gone through some producers.
(23:29):
There were changes at ABC, bigbig 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 withThe Sunny Bono Show. And this was
(23:52):
not Sonny and Share. This ispost divorced Sonny by himself show which did
not last very long, so itdid not attract an audience. And I
think there are you know, Ithink 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 pointof in the book. I think what
cold Check did right influenced TV history, But I think also what Cold Check
(24:15):
the series did wrong really influenced thehistory, so that people like Chris Carter,
who really did use the X Filesto say or used Colcheck to launch
the X Files twin peaks, wasthe cold Check was used to say,
Oh, this is like cold Check. Certainly, Eric Kripkey Supernatural. Kripkey
basically admits I wanted to do ColdCheck, and when I realized the idea
(24:36):
I had was so close to coldCheck 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 thinka lot of those creators saw in
Cold Check what worked, but alsolearned from its mistakes. Yeah, there's
no miss Emily character on Supernatural,No no, But what Supernatural gets right?
(24:59):
And I think, you know,to me, the biggest failing of
the show. And again I saythis lightly as as a fan. This
time, I can honestly say I'mgenuinely Sometimes I write about films I'm not
a big fan of just because they'reinteresting. But Cold Check is. I
would break curfew when I was nineand sneak to the living room and put
the TV on really low and layin my little sleeping bag right by the
(25:21):
you know, back of the dayswhen you didn't have you know, all
the stuff we have now, andturn the channel really quietly so no one
will wake up and watch Cold Checkand be terrified. So I love this
series, but the biggest failing isthat 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, hehandles them, and then you know,
(25:45):
at the end of every episode thephotos 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 ofthe next generation of Check. They learned
from that mistake. They did haveone off episodes, but they had a
bigger narrative. There were consequences toactions. We did have this broader conspiracy
(26:10):
of why things keep getting suppressed,but that became part of the story.
And so you could go and watcha single X Files episode, but you
would also see something that would makeyou want to come back the next week
and the next week. And ColdCheck 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 Checktrying to do that a little but just
(26:33):
didn't do it maybe enough. Therewas that whole the mark and this and
then the other. And I rememberright towards the end because again another canceled
series, but right towards the endthere were I think two episodes that started
to play into the mythology and theyit just went away just could I mean,
the reboot is interesting. I thinkyou're right. The reboot said,
(26:55):
ah, we can fix the seriality, will make this all about this,
you know a little bit of borrowingfrom the fugitive. His wife has been
murdered and he's the suspect and he'sgoing to find out and has something to
do with some supernatural conspiracy. Butyou 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 irascibleand grumpy old guy, but you
(27:18):
just want to hear the next wisecrack 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 betweenscary stuff. And there's some genuinely scary
moments in the series and certainly inthe TV movies, with that humor,
(27:41):
you know, it's it's making funof Updike, or it's Miss Emily talking
about her sex life, or it'syou know, Tony and Carl having these
big blowouts. That ability to balancescary and funny. I mean, that's
really the history of a lot ofhorror and certainly you know, I just
just watch Nope, the new JordanPeel film, and I think that's one
(28:02):
of the great things that Jordan Peelis really expert as a filmmaker, is
balancing Okay, this is scary anda little political and a little unsettling,
but here's some funny bits to kindof 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'tany I do appreciate that the book is
(28:22):
short, but I think it's alittle too short. I wish that it
went on for more because I enjoyedit so much. Thank you. Unfortunately,
Wayne State has a really strict wordlimit, So yeah, I felt
the same way I said, Ifeel like I I you know, I
would have loved I do think,you know, for people that love the
series, you know, I hopepeople will consider looking at my book.
But I definitely think this book,in combination with Mark's book, The Nice
(28:48):
Talker Companion, which is I understandit 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 havea whole lot of additional information. So
I definitely would say, if youwant 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 stupidseries? You hand in my book.
(29:11):
If they buy my argument, thenthey 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 tookso long to find that original col check
companion. Yeah, I don't wantto I don't even want to remember how
much I paid some back alleyway orsomething, but it was invaluable and it's
wonderful. And Mark is an amazingreporter and TV historian and again just an
(29:34):
absolutely lovely individual, gracious and kind. Some people, you know, when
they've written about something, they thenwant to lay a fence around it and
say mine, nobody can come nearit. Mark is the exact opposite,
just a scholar and a gentleman inevery good sense of that word. And
so yes, I think I'm notsure exactly can Mark can come on and
tell you exactly when the book iscoming out, But I've heard him say
(29:56):
that now, so I believe that'shappening. And again, I think that
is really the definitive look at meselling 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 togetherthey're they're the perfect gift. I think
where's the best place for people tokeep up with you in all your projects.
I would definitely encourage people to followme on Twitter. That's where I
(30:18):
put out most stuff I am.My Twitter handle is at Dark Projections,
a combination of a book I wrotecalled 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 producedhere in Syracuse at WAAR and going out
(30:40):
through National Public Radio. The podcastis called pop Life, and we occasionally
do horror episodes, but we doa lot of general pop culture things.
So please feel free and look uppop 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 honorto be here. I love I
love the Podcas Gust really great talkto you. Thank you. M h m hm
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