Reviews / October 31, 2023

The Norliss Tapes
Directed by Dan Curtis
NBC (1973)

On a pre-pandemic Halloween four years ago, my co-editors decided to bestow upon me the honor of reviewing famed made-for-TV movie The Night Stalker (1972). Even though I’d heard its praises sung far and wide, it was my first time watching Darren McGavin’s harried newspaper photog Carl Kolchak chasing a vampire through early-’70s Vegas. It was a triumph, and one I was a bit miffed that I’d long overlooked. This Halloween, I decided to give another of Kolchak producer Dan Curtis’s horror TV movies a try. The Norliss Tapes, which aired on NBC in February of 1973, features another favorite of genre sci-fi and horror TV, Roy Thinnes, in the lead role. Like McGavin, Thinnes would two decades later pop up as a guest star on The X-Files thanks to series creator Chris Carter’s love of his lead performance as David Vincent, lone crusader against a secret alien invasion in short-lived cult series The Invaders (1967-1968).

At the outset of The Norliss Tapes, we see Thinnes as David Norliss, in desperate emotional straits very reminiscent of David Vincent, in his richly-appointed study surrounded by the titular audio cassettes. On a phone call to his publisher Sanford T. Evans (Don Porter), Norliss sounds like a broken man, face contorted in exhaustion and terror, telling Evans his book on “debunking the supernatural” is late and the reasons why are on a series of tapes. “When you hear them,” Norliss croaks ominously to Evans, “you’ll understand.”

I made mention of the Nixon tapes in my review of The Night Stalker, seeing in Kolchak’s recounting of the details of his case into a tape recorder a prefiguring of the audio tapes that would roil the nation in a year’s time, and it’s interesting to see Curtis revisit this trope here just a few months before the Nixon White House taping system was revealed by Alexander Butterfield in front of the Watergate Committee in July 1973. Audio cassette technology was relatively new in ’73, developed for commercial use only a decade prior, but already it had begun to supplant the much more cumbersome reel-to-reel recorders. This increased availability made home recording possible for the everyday consumer, and gives The Norliss Tapes a sheen of high-tech to juxtapose with the ancient occult mysteries we’re about to see unfold.

Evans gets stood up by Norliss for a lunch date to discuss his book, and decides to visit Norliss’s home, where he sees an incomplete book introduction in the typewriter, along with a pile of audio tapes that contain the true tale of what has Norliss so shaken. For Kolchak, the tape recording is a mere dramatic coda, a testament made after we’ve accompanied him on his heroic journey through the nightside of Vegas. But in The Norliss Tapes, the recording itself becomes the medium by which we the audience are able to witness the drama in flashback. The telefeature was intended as a pilot for an episodic series much like the eventual 1974-75 Kolchak: The Night Stalker; and in that series, each new tape would present a new episode in Norliss’s sanity-draining wilderness year investigating the occult.

In his examination of surveillance in 1970s politics and media, The Seventies Now: Culture as Surveillance, poet and media scholar Stephen Paul Miller explores the decade by examining the seemingly omnipresent (self-)surveillance through recording devices in both the era’s fiction and in reality. Speaking in relation to 1971’s Klute and 1974’s The Conversation, both of which feature ominous audiotape recordings whose contents stalk the protagonists throughout the film, Miller states: “Terror lies in auditory feedback. In the early seventies, the feedback of auditory surveillance is ominously put into place.” In terms of self-surveillance and the role it played in the downfall of Nixon, the result of the presence of a documentary audio record is clear: “Perhaps it was unfortunate, perhaps it was not inevitable,” Miller opines, “but Nixon was our secret self. In an uncanny fashion, he came to represent America. He undid himself through self-surveillance. One might say he found himself to lose himself. In the same way and at the same time, the great American middle class gradually lost its New Deal tradition of social and economic progress in favor of stronger identifications with narrow self-definitions and interests.” This evocation of the narcissism, the hall of mirrors self-obsession of self-recording and its implications on identity and class, strikes an interesting light on the first case Norliss is asked to “debunk.”

That first case file throws him into the world of the wealthy and their forays into both creative art and dark ritual magic. Norliss receives a call from a widow, Ellen Cort (played gamely by future Police Woman Angie Dickinson), who says she’s had to deal with a prowler on her property who killed her loyal guard dog Raleigh. Ellen says she shot the trespasser point blank with a shotgun, but he still managed to get away. The further twist? Ellen is absolutely certain the intruder is apparently her own late husband, artist James Cort (reliable 1970s and ’80s action movie heavy Nick Dimitri). Norliss, a skeptic, investigates the world of artists, bohemians, and occultists swirling around the Corts, including mysterious antique dealer Madame Jeckiel (Blaxploitation star Vonetta McGee).

The McGuffin powering James Cort’s return from the grave is a mysterious ancient Egyptian ring dedicated to the god of death Osiris, which was sold to Cort by Jeckiel. In a bargain with the demon “Sargoth,” Cort seeks immortality by using his artistic skill to create a golem of clay for the god to inhabit. The clay sculpture appears out of nowhere in Cort’s old studio, while at the same time, in the wealthy Bay Area community surrounding the Corts’ property, exsanguinated corpses are turning up everywhere, causing local sheriff Tom Hartley (Night Stalker veteran and perennial ’70s TV lawman Claude Akins) to try to cover up the occult crimes to avoid a panic. Of course, the lurid murders are being committed by the undead Cort, as it’s discovered by Norliss at the opening of the third act that “the [statue’s] clay is 40 percent human blood.” Norliss and Ellen succeed in burning down the studio, destroying not only Cort’s unholy artistic creation but the undead artist himself.

The narrative thrust of The Norliss Tapes—an investigator seeking to debunk the paranormal—would be familiar to a broad cross-section of middle American TV audiences, and not just because it’s a bit of a retread of ratings success The Night Stalker. 1973 was also the year of famed psychic Uri Geller’s appearance on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, where fellow stage magician Carson (with the help of professional debunker James Randi), was able to scuttle Geller’s purported psychic ability to bend spoons and repair watches. Of course, in the world of The Norliss Tapes, debunking doesn’t come so easy. Over the course of the TV movie’s two hours, Norliss turns from a skeptic who seeks to put a stop to “the fake mediums, phony astrologers, the self-proclaimed seers and trick mystics… bilking millions of dollars each year out of their gullible victims,” to someone who takes the eerie advice and occult expertise of Madame Jeckiel seriously. His combination of dogged investigative work and willingness to believe Ellen Cort—that her assailant survived a point-blank shotgun blast—puts him on a collision course with dark powers.

Ultimately, all of these dark powers are put in service of the wealthy. Madame Jeckiel’s shop purveys artifacts for the delectation of the ruling class, just as James Cort’s art does. Cort’s art dealer, Charles Langdon (Hurd Hatfield), tries to do a little graverobbing to grab the valuable ring of Osiris from Cort’s interred body, and of course winds up as one of the zombie’s victims. Dan Curtis’s direction and cinematography does an amazing job at capturing both the lush interiors and stunning landscapes of the Bay Area; Norliss’s agent and publisher dine in a high-rise San Francisco restaurant with amazing window views. Curtis also treats the everyday schlubs out there in 1973 Television Land to high-angle location shots of Norliss driving his admittedly super-cool rust-orange convertible Corvette Stingray along the Pacific coast. Thinnes’s hardboiled voiceover on the audiotapes informs us, in case we weren’t aware, that “there’s no doubt this rugged peninsula country could give the French Riviera tough competition.” The catacombs under Cort’s palatial estate, built “in the 1920s… during Prohibition [to store] guns and liquor,” allow the zombie Cort to move around on the estate from his studio to the world beyond, preying on his victims to collect blood for his demonic ritual. Like Peter Falk’s contemporary series Columbo, the wealthy in The Norliss Tapes are venal and greedy: greedy for more trinkets, more luxury, more fame, and ultimately more life. In a way, Norliss has managed to do what he set out to do, but instead of stopping con men from bilking the innocent, he’s uncovered a world in which the rich can defy any authority—even death—with the help of their supernatural patrons.

In the implicit distance created by the narrative frame of (presumably quite wealthy) Sanford Evans listening to the titular Norliss Tapes, we again delve into the questions of economic class, memory, distance, and haunting. The Norliss Tapes may never have been picked up for a series—a failed pilot itself seems to me a fairly hauntological what-if—but as Evans is about to pop a second audiocassette into the cassette player, as the case of James Cort fades into the magnetic ether, I couldn’t help but think about Mark Fisher’s observation from his essay “The Slow Cancellation of the Future” from Ghosts of My Life:

[Hauntological artists] were preoccupied with the way in which technology materialised memory—hence a fascination with television, vinyl records, audiotape, and with the sounds of these technologies breaking down. This fixation on materialised memory led to what is perhaps the principal sonic signature of hauntology: the use of crackle, the surface noise made by vinyl. Crackle makes us aware that we are listening to a time that is out of joint; it won’t allow us to fall into the illusion of presence (emphasis mine).

Cort’s crimes against the innocent—and by extension the panoply of sanity-shattering cases presumably on Norliss’s remaining tapes—will never be heard, their greedy perpetrators never brought to earthly or cosmic justice. Just another mediocre TV series consigned to the dustbin of history? Perhaps. But I like to think of those audiocassettes as something more, as a kind of unrealized “18½-minute gap” in the early ’70s self-surveillance panopticon, a lost testament of crimes disallowed from entry into the permanent historical record. Haunted by occult secrets, we the viewers and listeners come to realize that some tapes will truly never be heard.

—Michael Grasso