The Town That Dreaded Sundown (1976)
I love Charles B. Pierce's The Legend of Boggy Creek (1972), a docudrama style horror film about a Bigfoot creature whose sightings around Fouke, Arkansas had been reported since the forties. The great thing about TTTDS is that it is very similar in it's documentary style film making.
It's even narrated by Vern Stierman who brought so much mythical wonder to Boggy Creek. However TTTDS deals with a different kind of monster altogether.
The Town That Dreaded Sundown is based on the true life Texarcarna moonlight murders in which a masked serial killer known as the Phantom Killer commits murders in the mid 1940's on the Texas Arkansas border.
The film follows Texas ranger Ben Johnson and local sheriff Andrew Prine as they attempt to catch the killer. Spoiler alert. As with the real life murders the killer is never caught.
Pierce brings that same creepy atmosphere he gave Boggy Creek to this film and it's all the better for it. At times it's genuinely eerie and the murders are well staged. Johnson and Prine give the film a lot of class in the acting stakes even if many of the cast are local townsfolk. In my opinion this brings more realism to the film than it might have done with pro actors.
The Town That Dreaded Sundown's style is highly original, in fact the film arrived on screens before the slasher craze of the late seventies / early eighties and the sack cloth mask worn by the killer has been borrowed in slasher films ever since. Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981) being the most famous case.
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