Cult Cinema: The Town That Dreaded Sundown (1976) - Reviewed

Images courtesy of American International Pictures

Recurring Arkansas based set-decorator of Coffy and Dillinger turned-regional filmmaking sensation Charles B. Pierce whose 1972 highly fictitious docudrama horror film The Legend of Boggy Creek marked the arrival of an unusual low-budget mixture of science-fiction and documentary realism.  A film worker churning out small town American fables and urban legends, Pierce made a total of thirteen films over his checkered career including but not limited to co-writing Clint Eastwood’s film Sudden Impact.  But it was his return to horror in 1976 with The Town That Dreaded Sundown that helped further cement Pierce’s status as a kind of progenitor to docudrama mystery programs such as Sightings and Unsolved Mysteries with its leanings towards informing as well as terrorizing the viewership.  It’s not particularly effective or scary or historically accurate, but as far as paving the way for films such as Friday the 13^th Part 2 for its use of the burlap sack masked antagonist and interjection of awkwardly misplaced humor the influences cannot be denied.

 
With the names and dates changed to protect the innocent despite controversies over the promotional campaign implying the masked phantom killer was still ‘lurking’, The Town That Dreaded Sundown with its impersonal voiceover narration laying out the groundwork for another kind of The Legend of Boggy Creek is more or less a loose dramatization of the 1946 Texarkana Moonlight Murders which still remain unsolved.  Reportedly beginning several months after the end of WWII, an unmotivated crime emerges involving a figure who injures a young couple out on a lonely road including cutting the man and sexually assaulting the woman.  After phoning in ruthless investigator Captain J.D. Morales (Ben Johnson fresh off of The Wild Bunch) to try and track down the culprit, the attacks become increasingly violent when another couple turns up dead.  Despite efforts between the police force setting up cross dressing decoys spying on teenagers in the area, the Phantom killings continue unabated with panic spreading across the town as residents buy up firearms and board their windows. 

 
Featuring the trademark utilitarian scope cinematography Charles B. Pierce employed on The Legend of Boggy Creek where widescreen, fullscreen and the meaning of a compositional shot don’t seem to matter in this meat-and-potatoes filmmaking verse and an effective enough horror-oriented score by Boggy Creek composer Jaime Mendoza-Nava, The Town That Dreaded Sundown is better remembered for what it inspired rather than anything really in the film itself.  Supposedly featuring uncredited rewrites from actor Andrew Prine who played Deputy Norman Ramsey, the film’s probably better remembered for its poster image designed by a then-unknown Ralph McQuarrie who would go on to do posters for the Star Wars trilogy as well as Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  The advertising campaign claiming the Phantom killer was still at large in Texarkana prompted some angry rebuttals from city officials threatening lawsuits and critics naturally were hard on the film’s parading around of motiveless killings including a scene where someone is murdered with a trombone.  Ben Johnson and Andrew Prine do a lot of heavy lifting to give the production some star power but every ounce of the film feels like a regional oddity that got very lucky. 

 
Somehow getting away with capitalizing on an idea rather than a finished film for a second time after The Legend of Boggy Creek (which it also repurposes some footage from near the end) attracting a couple of notable actors and paving the way for the first official screen appearance of Jason Voorhees, The Town That Dreaded Sundown didn’t fare well critically but did well enough commercially that eventually Texarkana, Arkansas began hosting and screening the film on Halloween for free to the public as a tradition.  Years later in 2014, Ryan Murphy of Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story and Jason Blum of Blumhouse mounted a meta-sequel of the same name, picking up years after the already-meta ending of a crowd of filmgoers going to the premiere of The Town That Dreaded Sundown featuring Ed Lauter, Veronica Cartwright and Gary Cole as well as The Blair Witch Project star Joshua Leonard.  A decently sized and received studio remake, it did reasonably well but I suppose there’s something to be said for the original film’s scrappy regional charms.  Its not a professional picture by any stretch of the imagination but I’m a sucker for regional exploitation.

--Andrew Kotwicki