1973 - THE NORLISS TAPES, ok horror film pilot

If you are looking for someone to blame for all of this Twilight, romantic vampire nonsense then producer/director Dan Curtis is your man.  Starting in 1966 with the Gothic daytime soap opera Dark Shadows which introduced the heart throb vampire Barnabas Collins.  Dan Curtis became a specialist in mixing old B movie horror film conventions with a more modern sensibility. 

The Norliss Tapes is a TV pilot for what was clearly going to be a horror anthology type of show the idea being that the writer David Norliss has left a series of tape recordings behind (cassette tapes no less) that would document his encounters with the supernatural.  The plan for the series was to begin each episode with his publisher listening to one of these tapes.

The Norliss Tapes is a perfectly entertaining time killer of a film.  It never really gets to the level of Curtis' previous modern horror films The Night Stalker and The Night Strangler.  Those films were written by Richard Matheson who was very good at achieving the right mood for a modern horror thriller. 

There is also nothing wrong with the actor Roy Thinnes as the writer David Norliss, but he could have really used a little bit of a sense of humor which was something Darren McGavin achieved as Carl Kolchak in the Stalker series. 

While blaming Dan Curtis for the Twilight series, he might as well also take the blame, for The X Files,  Lost, and just about an other quasi supernatural piece of modern day supernatural or horror garbage an audience has to sit through.

72 made for TV minutes.