What would happen if Carl Kolchak, the relentless reporter who exposed a vampire in Las Vegas, came face-to-face with Barnabas Collins, the tormented vampire of Dark Shadows? Would Kolchak immediately reach for a wooden stake? Would Barnabas recognize a fellow outsider? And, perhaps most intriguingly, what could possibly bring these two men together?
Author and television historian Mark Dawidziak answered those questions in his short story, “Interview with a Vampire?,” a crossover that united two of producer Dan Curtis’ most memorable supernatural creations. Originally published by Moonstone Books, the story subsequently received a comic book adaptation, but there’s considerably more to its creation than a clever meeting between fictional characters.
In an exclusive conversation with Vampires & Slayers, Dawidziak revealed how he developed the story, obtained the blessing of both Curtis and The Night Stalker creator Jeff Rice, and devised a surprising connection between Barnabas and Janos Skorzeny, the vampire Kolchak encountered in the original 1972 television movie. And, as it turns out, Dawidziak hasn’t entirely given up on the possibility of bringing the story back.
Bringing Two Vampire Worlds Together
The idea originated when Moonstone Books, which had been publishing Kolchak comic books, decided to expand into prose fiction. “They had just done comic books up to that point under their license with Jeff Rice,” Dawidziak, whose ultimate exploration of Kolchak’s world, Night Stalking, has just been republished in an extensively expanded edition. “And they decided they were going to do an anthology of short stories. They went through to several really terrific writers and asked them if they wanted to write a Kolchak story. People like Stu Kaminsky and Max Allan Collins, and almost everybody said, ‘Yeah.'”
Dawidziak was among those approached, but he wasn’t interested in simply producing another conventional Kolchak adventure. “I said, ‘Well, let me think about it. Let me kick around something, see if I can come up with an idea.’ And I had come up with an idea on crossing Carl Kolchak with the Barnabas Collins character, but there had to be a reason for these two characters to encounter each other. In storytelling, there’s this kind of highfalutin term called nexus. And nexus is when characters cross and they meet on some plane. They meet in some way. So there’s got to be a reason. It can’t be just because, ‘Oh, I can put them in the same story together, so I’m going to do it.’ The more I thought about it, I thought, ‘Oh, I think I know the reason.'”
The next step was getting permission from the men who controlled the respective properties. “I went to Dan Curtis because Dan still controlled anything done with the Dark Shadows world. You couldn’t do anything without his permission. So I went to Dan and I said, ‘I want to do this story. I want to cross two characters you’re known for, and this is what I want to do. This is the reason I want them, but I need your permission for this to happen. And here’s the resolution point on this.’ He came back and he said, ‘I love it. I love this idea.’ So then I went to Jeff Rice, who still controlled the literary rights to Kolchak, and had the same discussion. ‘This is the reason I want them to meet.’ And Jeff said, ‘Oh, that’s a really good idea.’ So I had both of their permissions to do the story.”
A Desperate Reporter Receives a Mysterious Invitation
The story finds Kolchak at one of the lowest points in his life. Fired from his job at Chicago’s Independent News Service, he’s exhausted by years of pursuing supernatural stories that nobody wants to believe. “This story was set between Carl getting fired in Chicago at INS and Los Angeles,” Dawidziak explains. “He’s been fired so many times. He’s been through Las Vegas, he’s been through Seattle, he’s been through Chicago. He is burning out.”
Returning to New York, Kolchak receives an unexpected letter, written on elegant stationery, from a stranger named Barnabas Collins. The mysterious gentleman invites him to Collinsport, Maine, enclosing train tickets and newspaper clippings describing vampire attacks in the coastal town. “So Carl is basically reading the same type of stories he wrote in Las Vegas,” Dawidziak notes. “And he figures, well, this could be any number of things, but if you’re going to step off into oblivion anyway, Collinsport, Maine, is as good a place to do it as anyplace else. So curiosity gets the better of him and he heads to Maine.”
The journey deliberately evokes the opening of Dark Shadows, when Victoria Winters arrived in Collinsport by train, as well as Bram Stoker’s Dracula. When Kolchak finally arrives, Willie Loomis is waiting to escort him to the Old House. “Willie’s got a note from Barnabas, and the note echoes what Dracula writes to Jonathan Harker in the novel,” Dawidziak says. “And while they stop to get coffee at the Collinsport Inn, this woman comes up to the car and bangs on the window and says to him, ‘Don’t go in this car. Don’t go wherever this car is taking you. Get out.’ She looks a little crazy. This all echoes stuff that’s in Dracula, basically.”
At the Old House, Kolchak begins to suspect that he’s walked into another vampire investigation. The increasingly unsettling behavior of Willie Loomis only strengthens that suspicion. “Most of the story is built through that day that he spends in the Old House, seeing the picture of Barnabas, learning what he can here and there, replaying things in his mind. And it basically works in how you can build suspense.”
The tension apparently worked. Dawidziak recalls receiving an enthusiastic response from editor P. N. Elrod, herself an experienced vampire novelist. “She sent me a note that basically said, ‘Boy, you can build suspense like a motherfucker.’ High praise indeed.”
Kolchak Finally Meets Barnabas Collins
By the time night falls, Kolchak is convinced he’s about to encounter a vampire. He arms himself with a crucifix and wooden stakes fashioned from old furniture. Then, in the middle of a typical Collinsport thunderstorm, Barnabas arrives.
“Barnabas walks in and Kolchak holds up the crucifix and Barnabas takes it away from him and says, ‘That’s interesting. That’s interesting.’ And he holds up a mirror to him and says, ‘You like what you see or what you don’t see, bloodsucker?’ And Barnabas just keeps saying, ‘Oh, that’s very interesting.'”
As Kolchak prepares to strike, Willie restrains him. Barnabas calmly returns the crucifix to the reporter’s pocket and reveals something Kolchak could never have anticipated. “If you had been here a few years ago, you would’ve encountered a vampire,” Dawidziak recounts Barnabas explaining. But Barnabas is no longer a vampire. Having been freed from his curse during the concluding adventures of the original Dark Shadows characters, he has summoned Kolchak for an entirely different reason.
“He has him sit down, he pours him a glass of sherry and he says, ‘The reason I asked you here was to tell you something probably nobody will ever tell you, and that’s thank you.'” And this is where the crossover delivers its biggest surprise.
The Secret Connection Between Barnabas Collins and Janos Skorzeny
Spoilers for “Interview with a Vampire?” follow.
In The Night Stalker, Kolchak defeated Janos Skorzeny, the ancient vampire terrorizing Las Vegas, but Dawidziak devised an origin for the character that reaches directly back to Collinsport. “When I was a newly made vampire, I attacked a woman on the wharf of Collinsport named Maria Cosgrove,” Dawidziak explains, recounting Barnabas’ revelation. “And she left for Europe, and she was a very active vampire. And one day, around 1916, she met a young man named Janos Skorzeny, and she turned Skorzeny into a vampire.”
That means Barnabas, however indirectly, was responsible for creating the very monster Kolchak destroyed in Las Vegas. Barnabas had even met Skorzeny before the events of The Night Stalker.
“Skorzeny told me, ‘I’m the head of the line, I’m the head of the bloodline,'” Dawidziak says, describing Barnabas’ explanation. “I can sense when people are near. I knew when he was approaching, I knew when he was getting close, and he was on his way to Las Vegas. He was coming down from Canada, making his way through New England, and he stopped off to see the head of the bloodline.”
Barnabas remembers Skorzeny as particularly vicious. “Even by vampire standards, he was a piece of work,” Barnabas said. “I think he would’ve tried to kill me if he didn’t sense I was stronger.”
Having followed the events in Las Vegas, Barnabas knew exactly what Kolchak had accomplished. “If nobody else has thanked you, I’m going to thank you because you rid the world of a very mean vampire.”
There is, however, one unresolved detail. Kolchak asks what happened to Maria Cosgrove, the woman Barnabas originally attacked. Barnabas explains that vampires can sense when their descendants have been destroyed. He has never experienced that sensation with Maria, suggesting she may still be somewhere in the world.
Dawidziak deliberately left that thread unresolved. “It also opened the door for a later story that would bring the Maria Cosgrove story back at some point. Nobody ever did it. But that was always sort of out there as the open-ended part of this.”
More Than a Vampire Crossover
Although the revelation about Skorzeny provides the narrative connection, Dawidziak emphasizes that “Interview with a Vampire?” was ultimately about something else: restoring Kolchak’s belief in himself. “So it’s a story about renewal,” he explains. “It’s a story about how Carl goes on to Los Angeles, but he creates the nexus. The nexus is that Barnabas is indirectly responsible for the creation of Janos Skorzeny, and there’s a direct connection. So there’s a reason for them to meet, and this is the secret that’s revealed at the end of the story.”
The train carrying Kolchak to Collinsport also serves as a metaphor for the reporter himself: battered, outdated and seemingly ready for retirement, but somehow still running. At the end of the story, Kolchak learns that the old train may remain in service for another 20 years. “And Carl basically says, ‘I like this train,'” Dawidziak explains. “It’s also a story of how Carl finds renewal through this encounter with Barnabas. Going to expect death, he gets life.”
He believes the encounter provided a believable bridge between Kolchak’s experiences in Chicago and his subsequent adventures in Los Angeles. “Because how does Carl keep getting back up? Every time he gets knocked down. And once he’s been through Chicago, he’s been knocked down so many times, it’s going to take something pretty special to get him back up and going again. So that was the notion, that this encounter with Barnabas would do that.”
Could the ‘Dark Shadows’ and Kolchak Crossover Return?
The story appeared in Moonstone’s prose anthology and proved popular enough to inspire a comic book adaptation. But both versions have become difficult for fans to obtain. Dawidziak would like to change that. “Every so often I get this request from both Kolchak and Dark Shadows fans of, ‘How can I get a copy of the story?'”
His idea is to assemble a new collection featuring several of his Kolchak stories, including the novel Grave Secrets, “Interview with a Vampire?” and the novella “Cancellation,” along with one entirely new adventure. The difficulty is navigating the rights to the characters, the previously published stories and their artwork. With Jeff Rice deceased and Kolchak publishing rights having changed hands, Dawidziak acknowledges that securing the necessary approvals could be complicated. “I don’t know whether it’s possible,” he admits.
Nevertheless, the author remains enthusiastic about the idea, particularly because the original crossover was created with the approval of both men responsible for bringing these characters to life. “It was wonderful that Jeff and Dan were so enthusiastic about it,” Dawidziak reflects. “Because again, it was a way of connecting them.”
And for fans of both Dark Shadows and The Night Stalker, it’s a connection that remains fascinating: two classic vampire worlds linked by one bloodline, one determined reporter and one unexpected thank-you.