The Norliss Tapes is indeed a 1973 American made-for-television horror movie featuring Roy Thinnes und Angie Dickinson, helmed by Dan Curtis and written by William F. Nolan. It narrates the narrative of Norliss’ contact with such a widow and her artist husband who has returned from the dead through such a series of recordings left behind from the missing Norliss, an occult investigator.
The picture was initially created by NBC as a pilot for such a television series that was never made. On February 21, 1973, the picture debuted as a stand-alone on the NBC network. Years ago, it developed a small cult following among independent theatregoers.
David Norliss, a writer working on a book refuting spiritualists as well as fakers, goes missing from his San Francisco home, leaving behind such a series of audio cassettes describing his disappearance and previous investigations. As his publisher, Sanford Evans listened to the audio, the storey emerges.
The Norliss Tapes was adapted from such a novella by Fred Mustard Stewart underneath the working title Demon; writer William Nolan stated he adopted Stewart’s fundamental premise of a “walking dead guy” as well as turned it into a teleplay that was mainly made up of his own ideas.
The pilot was filmed inside the California cities of San Francisco and Monterey. On February 21, 1973, the picture debuted. Anchor Bay Entertainment, under licence from 20th Century Fox, published it on DVD for the first time in 2006. The DVD, which is no longer available, had theatrical trailers as supplementary material. The film had a brief resurgence inside the cult cinema circuit in the 2000s, with theatre showing in Toronto, New York, as well as Los Angeles.
“Curtis directed the picture with such a focus on tension, which he achieves,” noted Variety. With its unabashed reliance on the supernatural, the concept underlying Nolan’s writing has merit. What matters is that Nolan, Curtis, Thinnes, and the company accomplish in their core goal of scaring people.
This movie was also commended by the Hollywood Reporter, which described it as “a lot of fun, with a unique spin on the traditional vampire theme.” The movie was also complemented by TV Guide’s Maitland McDonagh, who called it “a frightening, nicely filmed bogey storey that stands up remarkably well.”
Dan Deal considered The Norliss Tapes “another of the poorer entries inside the Dan Curtis canon” in his book Television Fright Films of the 1970s, criticising it for its “over-reliance on speech, thin characters, an unattractive monster, and far too much shorthand logic.”
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