How Kolchak: The Night Stalker Influenced Final Fantasy
The more I write this blog, the more I feel like I’m doing it to show how video games are very much art and very much part of the cultural give and take you see among literature, cinema and other narrative forms. This is one of those stories, if a quick one.
In my interview with Alex Jimenez about the origins of Dark Stalkers, the subject of the TV series Kolchak: The Night Stalker came up, and I was at first surprised before realizing that I should have seen this coming. Kolchack, which aired on ABC for just the one 1974-1975 TV season, has an outsized influence for its relatively short time on the air. It’s sometimes credited for inventing the concept of a “monster of the week”-type show, and I’m not sure that’s technically accurate seeing as how Doctor Who and Scooby Doo both premiered before Kolchak. But it’s nonetheless explicitly an inspiration for The X-Files and the TV version of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, which were both extremely generative for all manner of weird TV in the last thirty years, and that alone means Kolchak’s DNA lives on, even in many genre fans today have never seen the show.
After posting the Dark Stalkers piece, I wanted to re-watch a few episodes of Kolchak, because it had been a good fifteen years since I watched it the first time. And in order to pick where I’d start, I looked online to see what episodes people thought were particularly good. More than a few lists pointed to “Horror in the Heights,” which concerns a series of inexplicable murders in one of Chicago’s Jewish neighborhoods. I won’t give too much away, because I thought it was a well-written one-off adventure that took some turns I wasn’t expecting, but the scenes with the featured monster would have legitimately spooked me if I had seen this as a kid. It’s hard to explain if you haven’t watched a lot of B movies, but sometimes working with a limited budget can actually make something scarier because you literally can’t realize your monster in full. The production can only afford to show glimpses of it, and as a result the viewer fills in the blanks with something from their own mind, which is always going to be more unnerving than whatever someone else’s mind comes up with. This is very much the case with “Horror in the Heights,” especially when the monster is jus barely appearing onscreen.
A night out for Sol and Miriam. Yes, those are literally their names.
The episode is streaming in the U.S. on Peacock, and I do encourage you to watch, but I feel like reading the rest of this post won’t exactly spoil what makes it good.
At the end of the episode, the revelation that the monster in question is a Raksasha actually ends up answering two separate mysteries. The Raksasha, if you don’t know, is a malevolent creature from Hinduism and other dharmic faiths. It eats people, and while it is often described as having claws and fangs, it can also shapeshift and use illusions to hunt prey. I know about the Raksasha from the first Final Fantasy, where they’re a generic enemy that looks feline in appearance, to the point that the original localized English name for them was Man Cat.
As you may recall, however, Final Fantasy lifted a great deal of its bestiary from Dungeons & Dragons, and the Raksasha was indeed one of those, having debuted in 1977, also looking more explicitly feline than it does in real-world traditions. What I was surprised to learn researching this online, however, is that the Raksasha made it into the first edition of the D&D monster manual specifically because of this one episode of Kolchak, and co-creator Gary Gygax said as much back in 2005 — and indeed, some of the manipulative magics the D&D version commands would seem to be more inspired by the Kolchak version of the monster rather than the version that comes from mythology. That said, the D&D version is explicitly tigroid in appearance and the Kolchak version is not, and I’m not clear where that change came from but it definitely shows that Final Fantasy was “inspired” more by D&D than anything else. Perhaps that’s why the Raksasha didn’t appear in another Final Fantasy until FFXIII, and looking rather un-tiger-like at that.
And this is how Kolchak: The Night Stalker got its DNA in one more property enjoyed by an audience many times greater than what actually watched the show back in the day. Rather prolific, that Carl Kolchak.