The Night Stalker shocked everyone in 1972 when its first airing became ABC's highest rated original TV movie to that point, with a crazy 54 Share (a typical Super Bowl generally gets a share in the mid-60's). It was produced by genre giant Dan Curtis and written by genre god Richard Matheson, so it had a lot going for it -- not least of which veteran character actor Darren McGavin as a cynical Las Vegas newspaper reporter who finds himself battling a vampire.
The movie originally aired in a 90-minute time slot, so it clocks in at a tense, terse 75 minutes without commercials. McGavin is great, a reluctant, almost noirish hero with a good reason for supplying voice-over narration throughout -- he is talking into a tape recorder, after all.
The battles and physical stunts involving various confrontations with the vampire sometimes border on the crazy: people fly all over the place. In what would become a Kolchak trope, Carl quite realistically slips and falls occasionally while fleeing his supernatural pursuer. But he always gets up. And with the police both unbelieving and seriously incompetent, Kolchak is Las Vegas' only chance to escape becoming Fun Town, U.S.A. for Vampires.
Matheson and Curtis opt to have their vampire speak not at all -- I think a good choice. He's more of a vicious animal than anything else, and Barry Atwater does a fine job of portraying a completely non-charming, non-erotic vampire. The silent route would be used by Curtis in the Jack Palance version of Dracula that he produced, and may have also influenced the decision to make the fairly talkative vampire Barlow in Stephen King's Salem's Lot into the non-talking horror of the first TV-movie version. In all, highly recommended.
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