At the film’s start, reporter Carl Kolchak (Darren McGavin) sits alone in a small and cheap hotel room listening to himself on tape recount a story. The story: After a series of murders of young women on the Las Vegas strip, murders in which the victims had tooth marks on the neck and massive losses of blood, Kolchak suspected that the killer was a vampire. Through his many contacts, Kolchak tracked down Janos Skorzeny (Barry Atwater), a 70-year-old Romanian with superhuman strength who only went out at night. Kolchak and the police found Skorzeny at his home, and dispatched him with a wooden stake.

When Kolchak wrote up the story, he was blackmailed by the police and Las Vegas politicians. Fearing the public reaction, they wanted to make sure the piece never saw the light of day. “We are supposed to print news, not suppress it!” cried Kolchak, a kind of 1970s Glenn Greenwald. Forced out of town, Kolchak is putting it all in a book. The truth is (The Night Stalker was a main inspiration for The X-Files) is going to see the light of day.

Carl Kolchak might seem crazy, but as Lucas observes in the audio commentary, “pause to consider what historians now tell us about what was really going on between the White House and journalists at this particular time.”