Overview

Winter Kill is a 1974 U.S. made-for-tv movie directed by Jud Taylor and written by John Michael Hayes and David Karp. It stars Andy Griffith as Sam McNeill, the sheriff in a small resort town in the mountains of northern California. The film is mystery-suspense drama about McNeill's attempts to solve a string of local serial killings linked by messages left at the scenes of the crimes. Nick Nolte played the role of Dave Michaels. The movie was intended as a series pilot. When it failed to sell, the main character was renamed and used as the lead character for the short-lived 1975 series Adams of Eagle Lake, also starring Andy Griffith. The film was released on DVD by Warner Bros. in 2009 along with Griffith's 1977 TV movie Deadly Game, making it one of the few of Griffith's TV movies from the 1970s to have an official DVD release.