Before we get started this week, I enjoyed Saturday afternoon’s Pigstock, where various local Rotary clubs raise funds for a charity called Children of Vietnam. It was a solo adventure, because my intended +1, local journalist and author Ian McDowell, who read a spooky story at our last Rotary meeting, stayed home sick. We will hopefully hear more from him in a Q&A in a couple of weeks.
This week’s article about fictional reporter Carl Kolchak originally appeared in ParABnormal Magazine. I’m reprinting a very slightly extended and corrected version here as homework for next week’s original story, which I wrote for this Kickstarted anthology (and which they eventually rejected, in the last round of judging).
Still, I’m happy that the book has done well, having won a Bram Stoker award for best horror graphic novel this year. It is currently sold out at the website above.
As a small boost to them, I include a link to The Sample, an AI-driven newsletter recommendation service.
Without further ado,
The Man in the Seersucker Suit,
or,
The Haunting of Carl’s Hat:
A Meta-Narrative Hypothesis
by
R.D. Hayes
Streaming services and a series of novels and comics have brought new life to Carl Kolchak, fictional tabloid reporter and bumbling occult detective, star of the highest rated TV movie 1972 had to offer. The Night Stalker and its sequel The Night Strangler were followed by twenty episodes of monster-of-the-week television during the 1974-75 season. The 2005 revival starring Stuart Townsend and Gabrielle Union was spectacularly unsuccessful, but the earlier classic series influenced a generation of writers and artists, most vocally Chris Carter of The X-Files, who credits Kolchak with about 30% of the inspiration for his creation.
Wardrobe of the Damned
Kolchak’s trademark seersucker suit and straw boater hat were much remarked upon during the series, mostly for comedic effect, but never explained. Seersucker is a summer fabric woven from cotton, originally developed in British colonial India specifically to bunch and ripple in ways that held it away from the skin, allowing for better ventilation and more cooling. Both Las Vegas (the setting of the first movie) and Chicago (the setting for the series) can be quite hot during the summer, but Kolchak is never shown in any other outfit, even during episodes explicitly set during winter months (which, except for a few canned location shots, were admittedly filmed in sunny Los Angeles). It seems the look was as much a part of the character as Superman’s cape and big red “S”. Assuming this is true, what did it mean?
The most common blue-and-white version of the seersucker fabric was originally worn in the United States as overalls and other working man’s clothing, until Ivy League students in the 1920s adopted it the way current hipsters have adopted Army camouflage patterns and full beards, as ironic fashion statements (the red-and-white version was often worn by nurses and hospital volunteers, leading to the term “candy stripers”). It seems likely that Kolchak’s suit was meant to represent the character’s working class background and lack of concern for social conventions like fashion. It marked him visually as a nonconformist.
The pale color of the seersucker suit also had a practical production effect of making Kolchak easy to see and film against the dark backgrounds of the night-time environments in which he found most of his monstrous victims. These included:
creatures from at least four different world folklore traditions;
three immortal serial killers (two of them from literary sources);
three vengeful ghosts;
two different vampires;
one satanic shape-changer;
and a werewolf on a cruise ship.
I say “victims” because Carl Kolchak himself, despite his evident clumsiness and genre-busting reluctance to ball up his fists and fight, was clearly the most dangerous predator in the series, one who went out of his way to hunt down and kill any bulletproof monster, alien, or android he came across.
During none of these life-or-death encounters was Kolchak ever wounded, except for getting frostbite on his exposed skin after an accidental encounter with liquid nitrogen. This might lead one to speculate that the suit served as some sort of magical armor; however, it often got quite dirty, and it was torn in at least one episode by a dog bite. Genre fans regularly engage in this sort of meta-narrative argument, trying to square the circle of logical inconsistencies in their entertainments, and the rest of this article will serve as an extended example.
The Justification Game, Part One: The Seersucker Suit
Given that the suit was not protective, what other fictional purpose might it have served? What if it was the opposite of protective? What if, instead of camouflage, it was a visual advertisement, like the colorful flower-like leaves of a pitcher plant or a Venus flytrap? In other words, it could have been a honeytrap, something to make Kolchak more visible, to actively lure the monsters in, like moths to a pale blue pinstriped flame, once he sought them out and placed himself in their paths.
This interpretation implies that Kolchak was either not aware of the monster-hunting consequences of his wardrobe choices or not entirely in control of his actions. In the natural world there are many parasites that influence the behavior of their hosts. For instance, there are multiple species of Cordyceps fungi that cause infected ants to climb blades of grass, where they will be eaten by birds or sheep (a similar but fictional fungus capable of colonizing human beings featured in an episode of The X-Files). Mice are susceptible to a single-celled microbe called Toxoplasma gondii, which causes them to lose their fear of cats. This microbe can also infect humans and has been proposed as a possible cause for schizophrenia, a mental disorder that includes audio or visual hallucinations and delusional beliefs.
What if Carl Kolchak’s obsessive-compulsive monster-hunting behavior was a symptom of infection by some sort of paranormal parasite, as a part of its feeding strategy or its life cycle? Surely there must be more to the otherworld ecology than an endless array of top predators. If so, what form might this parasite have taken?
The Justification Game, Part Two: The Cursed Chapeau
Carl, why are you still wearing that bird’s nest on your head?
-Tony Vincenzo, Carl’s editor, “The Devil’s Platform”
In the episode quoted above, Kolchak’s favorite coworker, Miss Emily the geriatric advice columnist, brought him a present from Italy: a brand new, seemingly expensive white hat. Carl’s response was to wear it out the door but then to immediately hide it in a hall closet and replace it with his battered straw boater, which was a regular object of ridicule around the office.
In fictional fact, every time Carl had to take the hat off for purposes of disguising himself as a doctor or a building inspector, he would still bring it along, hiding it in the stack of bedpans he was using to shield his face from view, or under his seersucker jacket. As soon as possible, it was always back on his head, even in construction-site situations where continuing to wear a hardhat would have been more sensible. Simply leaving it in the car seems not to have been an option. In other words, Kolchak was clearly emotionally attached, not just to that style of hat but that specific hat, to an unreasonable degree.
To explain this unhealthy degree of compulsion, I propose that either the hat was cursed by some unknown sorcerous assailant in Kolchak’s past, dooming him to kill or be killed by the various monsters he would inevitably meet; or that the hat was itself some kind of magical creature. It might have been a shapeshifter — Kolchak encountered several of those — or it might have been an invisible energy creature that attached itself to the hat and, through the hat, to him. Invisible energy creatures and mind control were also regular tropes of the series. This unusual form of possession might have been more difficult to detect. After all, who wears a hat during a seance, or an exorcism ritual?
A curse or magical symbiont might also go some way towards explaining Kolchak’s otherwise unbelievable luck in surviving so many encounters with so many seemingly different monsters.
The Justification Game, Part Three: “Who Would Believe Me?”
This interpretation, which I will playfully term “the Haunting of Carl’s Hat” (HoCH), requires a substantial reordering of the Kolchak mythology. Like twisting a kaleidoscope, the colorful plastic chips on the inside reorder themselves into new self-symmetrical patterns. In the world of popular culture, such a maneuver is sometimes called a retcon, a neologism of the phrase “retroactive continuity,” borrowed from the comic book industry, where the highly distributed nature of the creative workforce and the continuous tight monthly deadlines meant that many mistakes were made, in terms of consistency in logic and lore.
In science, and ideally in the real-world version of Kolchak’s newspaper industry, which both share with comics the serial publication model, mistakes are admitted and corrections are published (though rarely on the front page). But how does one admit a mistake in a fictional world without throwing shade on a past creator, perhaps one of the writer/artist in question’s personal heroes? A retcon simply rewrites the fictional history so that the facts of that history are otherwise than they have been previously been presented. It is a common way of erasing past prejudices, of making comic book characters (usually the less popular ones) more diverse, in terms of gender, ethnicity, and religion. This is artistically clumsy but convenient for the corporations that own the characters.
Another, less disruptive way of achieving the same goal is to introduce legacy characters, who represent another generation of the same heroic tradition. Layers of mythology and complexity are added without changing the fictional facts of the past. In both of the movies and in several episodes of the series, Kolchak worked with temporary partners, people who had skills or access to information or spaces that he needed — most of whom he exploited, and some of whom died for their trouble. In certain later novels, Kolchak leads a team of young investigators who call themselves the Night Stalkers. This is not so much a retcon as an experiment in market-driven character development.
The third and most artistically difficult narrative sleight-of-hand is the kaleidoscopic treatment above, which changes nothing but the reader’s interpretations. This is properly not a retcon, not a cheat, but the essence of successful storytelling. Rod Serling’s famous twist endings in The Twilight Zone and The Night Gallery (which ran from 1969-73, making it a near contemporary to Carls’s adventures) are prime examples of the technique. I hereby claim that the HoCH hypothesis is of this third variety.
Whether the HoCH meme becomes a successful part of the Kolchak mythology is ultimately a matter of consensus between creators, fans, and copyright holders. I am simply, as they say in the show, “putting it out on the wire,” to see who might pick it up and run with it.
This article is dedicated to my older brother, Jessie Floyd Hayes, who introduced me to the series through oral retellings of his favorite episodes. RIP.
REFERENCES / FURTHER READING
https://kolchak.fandom.com/wiki/Carl_Kolchak
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seersucker
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Series/KolchakTheNightStalker
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordyceps
https://www.cdc.gov/parasites/toxoplasmosis/index.html