Accustomed to goofy sitcoms like The Munsters and The Addams Family, the gothic trappings of dated old Universal monster movies, and campy Bela Lugosi impressions on variety shows, the American television audience was unprepared for a drama that would treat vampires seriously — and chillingly.
And that’s why ABC’s 1972 TV movie The Night Stalker came as a welcome shock. The brilliant screenwriter Richard Matheson did not condescend to the material, but carefully drew his audience into a genuinely scary story about a vampire let loose on contemporary Las Vegas.
The Night Stalker set a record for the most viewed made-for-TV film and was released overseas as a theatrical film.
Among those impressed by the TV movie was comics writer Steve Mitchell, who recalled it when he was creating a character for the short-lived Atlas-Seaboard publishing company.
With his minimalist costume and well-honed acrobatic abilities, Hollywood stuntman Jefferson Rand moonlighted as a red-clad monster fighter in two issues of The Cougar in 1975.
He had his reasons. The Louisiana native had lost his parents because a witch’s curse turned his brother Rick into a werewolf.
“At the time, I was a huge fan of The Night Stalker,” Mitchell told Comic Book Artist magazine. “One of the things the first Night Stalker movie had was all those great chases and fights! You want to see how good fights are staged? Watch The Night Stalker again; it’s some great stuff.
“So I said, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool to have a hero who investigates the macabre, but who was really talented when it came to the action stuff?’ For some reason, I said, ‘Well, why not have the protagonist be a stuntman, a guy who is very physically adept, but not a superhero?”
“Actually, it was the idea of ‘What would have happened if Burt Lancaster had become a superhero?” was the genesis of it,” Atlas editor Jeff Rovin recalled. “But Steve was very much a (Dark Shadows producer) Dan Curtis fan, and took it in that direction.
“Steve and I were huge Burt Lancaster fans. As a matter of fact, the name of Tiger-Man’s alter ego was Lancaster Hill, which was inspired by Hecht-Hill-Lancaster, which was Burt Lancaster’s production company.”
“Our line was more like Charlton than it was Marvel,” Mitchell said. “We also had action heroes, but not always superheroes: The Brute, Tarantula, Lomax, our version of Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos — I can’t even remember the name of that.”
The Cougar fought a vampire and a werewolf before vanishing along with all the other Atlas protagonists. And just to make sure the readers didn’t miss the point, the cover copy of his first issue underlined it: “A Hollywood Stuntman turned Night Stalker!”
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