Johnny Depp's CQ (coolness quotient) - already sky-high in my mind - now spikes with the news that Depp's production company (Infinitum Nihil) and Disney are planning a feature film remake of The Night Stalker, the 1972 TV horror movie starring Darren McGavin as monster-slaying Hechtian reporter Carl Kolchak, with Depp producing and mayhap (been reading lots of George R.R. Martin, sorry) starring in the Kolchak role. The original Night Stalker is a deeply, deeply flawed film, yet one of television's most rousing anti-authority statements, and as effective a symbol of the Watergate era as any television program I can think of. The film resonated with not just Depp, but also Chris Carter, who cites Night Stalker, the 1973 sequel The Night Strangler, and the short-lived Kolchak: The Night Stalker series

as key influences on his own iconic contribution to the paranoid-TV genre, The X-Files, and who wound up guest-casting McGavin in two episodes of that show, including Travelers, ­a must-include in any pantheon of X-Files episodes.

While McGavin's rumpled, middle-aged Kolchak - typically garbed in seersucker  suit, white shirt, loosened tie, straw hat, and white loafers - bears little resemblance to X-Files G-man Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) physically, there's no denying the two are soulmates, particularly in their unyielding determination to expose the truth, damn the consequences. "Let the truth be known though the heavens fall," Mulder says in the episode "Redux"; in Night Stalker, Kolchak - believing a Las Vegas serial killer is only some nutcase who thinks he is a vampire, rather than an actual vampire, as the case turns out to be - explodes when his editor (Vincenzo, portrayed by Simon Oakland) spikes his story for fear of triggering widespread panic in the streets: "We are supposed to print news, not suppress it!"  

The Night Stalker was directed by John Llewellyn Moxey, a man of many, many credits, including, unfortunately, the legendarily bad 1968 TV remake of Otto Preminger's classic film noir Laura, with Lee Bouvier/Radziwill (Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis's sister) in the title role. Richard Matheson - who needs no introduction - wrote the screenplay (from a then-unpublished story by Jeff Rice), which includes countless gems, many via voiceover, as the story is constructed as a flashback beginning with Kolchak alone in a motel room, recalling the events that cost him his job, home, and girl, all because of his refusal to play ball with city officials by burying the truth. My personal favorite: "Sherman Duffy of the Chicago Globe once described a reporter as follows: ‘Socially he fits in somewhere between a hooker and a bartender. Spiritually he stands beside Galileo, because he knows the world is round.' Not that it does much good of course when his editor knows it's flat."

Many people mistakenly believe The Night Stalker was directed by Dan Curtis, who in fact only produced. This would be Depp's second film based on Curtis's TV work - the first being Dark Shadows (or, as onetime Curtis apprentice Jim Pierson calls it, Depp Shadows), an adaptation of the ground-breaking 1960s daytime gothic soap of the same name about a cursed New England family that includes the 200-year-old vampire Barnabas Collins, portrayed originally by Jonathan Frid and by Depp in the feature film version  now shooting in London under the direction of Tim Burton and scheduled for release in May 2012. 

There's so much to admire about The Night Stalker and so little room to expound, yet I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that fifteen-minute block of nearly dialogue-free footage late in the film, beginning with Kolchak's arrival at the vampire's lair - nocturnally, of course (an exemplary case of Kolchak's disastrous timing). I'm not saying it's Rafifi, but fifteen minutes of footage with just a couple of lines of dialogue in a prime-time TV movie in 1972 - that's impressive. Check out this four-minute segment yourself:

Of course, the most endearing thing about The Night Stalker is Kolchak himself: derided by his (many) nemeses as a washed-up reporter, he's been fired ten times from newspapers in four cities even before our story begins ("I'm becoming extinct in my own lifetime," he quips), yet he appears thoroughly oblivious to his obnoxiousness and is irrepressibly cocky ("Good morning, slaves," he greets his colleagues at the Vegas Daily News) and defiant, making him the perfect antihero not just for his time but for all time. McGavin is pitch-perfect in the role, and Depp will have his work cut out for him. But he's just cool enough to pull it off.