The Town that Dreaded Sundown
Charles B. Pierce
Initial release: December 24, 1976 (USA)
As long as people have organized themselves in ordered societies, there has
been serial murder, and legends surrounding them. Greek myth speaks of
Procrustes, a bandit who would lure travelers his house with a promise of
hospitality (a big deal in Ancient Greece) and offer him a bed, and brutally
reshape them to fit: hacking off limbs that were too long or smashing bodies
that were too short. In China around the second century BC, a prince went
around at night killing dozens of people with impunity, until the emperor
stripped him of his privileges and sent him away. Many werewolf and vampire
tales can possibly be traced to serial killers. And of course, as the
population grew, cities spread, wealth disparities widened, and the modern
serial killer stepped into the spotlight, ready to create legends atop a pile
of corpses. Charles B. Pierce's The Town that Dreaded Sundown is an amateurish attempt at telling the tale of the Texarkana Moonlight
Murders, but it's far more grounded in legend (and B-movie camp) than fact.
Pierce was a legendary independent filmmaker notorious for a series of low-budget films across a variety of genres, including the infamous Bigfoot-esque mockumentary The Legend of Boggy Creek, cited as a major influence on none other than Blair Witch Project. The DNA of Boggy Creek can be seen in Sundown; aside from being punctuated by the gravelly narration of Vern Stierman, who like Pierce before him was a weatherman at KTAL-TV, the NBC affiliate in Texarkana, there's a certain docudrama vibe in Pierce's direction, the way he frames characters and manages dialogue, particularly in scenes in the sheriff's office.
Sundown is as tonally schizophrenic as it gets, bouncing around from police procedural to slasher movie to screwball comedy, often all three in the span of a few minutes. Pierce himself plays a wholly fictional rookie cop who threatens citizens over the phone and drives like a maniac, at one point driving a police car straight into a swamp. A sequence where some cops execute an undercover sting in drag to catch the Phantom (as the killer is called) on prom night aged exactly the way you think it has. And in one of the most notorious scenes, the Phantom straps a knife to the business end of a trombone and "plays" it to stab one of his victims to death, a moment so absurd it's equal parts chilling and unintentionally hilarious.
The Town that Dreaded Sundown is, frankly speaking, not a good movie. Short of a few big-name actors, such as Ben Johnson (with whom Pierce had previously worked as a set decorator for John Milius' Dillinger) most of the acting is wooden and strange. All kinds of goofs and mistakes are strewn across the film, from script errors (someone mentioning they'd killed five people when in actuality there were only four at that point) to the just plain irresponsible, like a cameraman fully visible for a brief moment on a train car. And yet the film has a cult following. We can attribute part of that status to the fact that Pierce, already a local celebrity from his previous film and television work, made films that celebrated Texarkana and its culture. But I think most of it has to do with those moments where the film succeeds, those tense moments when the cops stop slamming into each other or disappear entirely and the Phantom is on the rampage.
Don't expect to learn a lot about the Texarkana Moonlight Murders from this film; almost wholly fictionalized, it was actually the subject of a lawsuit for the way it portrayed one of the victims. Nonetheless, there's some historical value to the film given its influence on slasher films (predating Halloween by two years) and cult status. And of course, the legend lives on: in 2014, a quasi-remake was produced that pays homage to the fact that the original film is shown every year at Texarkana's Spring Lake Park around Halloween. If Pierce has any sort of lasting legacy, it's that.