By Ben Bussey
While I don’t want to suggest that my own personal horror movie knowledge and experience is representative of everyone (perish the thought), The Town That Dreaded Sundown is one of those films I’ve long been aware of but never actually seen, and I get the impression that’s true of quite a lot of us. As is remarked on the Blu-ray commentary track from historians Justin Beaham and Jim Presley, Charles B Pierce’s film hasn’t had too many video or DVD releases, yet has managed to maintain a strong reputation over almost four decades. Given that it landed in 1976 and centres on a masked maniac out to get young couples on lover’s lane, it’s often cited as one of the original slasher films, helping hone the format that John Carpenter would perfect with Halloween two years later, and innumerable imitators would latch onto very soon thereafter.
Of course, The Town That Dreaded Sundown’s status within the horror genre has now been properly cemented in the only way the current generation seems to know how, by getting a remake. This also came to home entertainment earlier this month, and I had initially intended for this to be a double bill review of both versions. However, the online screener copy I was given access to was of almost unwatchable picture quality with a distractingly large watermark, on top of which the film itself seemed little more than yet another bog-standard mainstream slasher with a clever-dick metatextual edge; as such, I only managed about twenty minutes before throwing in the towel.
Still, even though the remake may have been, judging by the little I saw, every bit as prosaic and predictable as we might fear, I really can’t say the same of the original. While it’s not hard to see how this film may have influenced the burgeoning slasher genre – in particular, the sack head mask been imitated more than once, most notably as Jason’s original look in Friday the 13th Part II – The Town That Dreaded Sundown really isn’t a horror movie in the strictest sense, but more of a police procedural, given a particular edge given that it’s based around a real series of murders, and was shot in the very town where those murders took place. The resulting film is a curious mix of fairly standard detective movie, something you could imagine catching on a sleepy weekday afternoon on television, but peppered with murder and stalking sequences of an intensity that’s still quite striking today.
Blurring fact and fantasy, the film is presented in a semi-documentary format with intermittent narration, following the Sheriff’s Department of Texarkana in the years after World War II, as a series of seemingly unmotivated attacks against seemingly unrelated people occur, resulting in murder. What makes the whole thing so sinister is not only that the murders really occurred, but that they were never solved. If you’re hoping for resolution, the reassurance that the hard work of the police force always pays off, you can forget it; all we have here is a portrait of a law enforcers clutching at straws, knowing full well they have little to go on, and knowing full well that the killer will almost certainly strike again. This just lends that extra sting to the harshness of the murder sequences; the film really lingers on the terror and anguish of the victims in a manner reminiscent of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but with progressively more bizarre means of dispatch that would seem to foreshadow the more cartoonish route slashers would take in the 80s, notably the use of a trombone. Dependent on your point of view, this might make the whole endeavour reek of sleaze, given that it was indeed modeled on a real serial killer case; for me, it makes matters that bit too close to the bone for the film to really be enjoyable. Either way, it means the film’s occasional lapses into vaguely slapstick humour, with director Pierce himself hamming it up as a bumbling, dim-witted deputy, feel all the more misguided; the comedy cops routine didn’t fit in The Last House on the Left, and it doesn’t fit here either.
So all in all, The Town That Dreaded Sundown is one of those movies which I can find plenty of respect for, but ultimately don’t feel a great deal of affection toward. I guess I just like my slasher movies ridiculous, and my true crime movies straight-faced and respectful, and this ultimately doesn’t fit in either way. Still, existing admirers of the film will certainly want to pick up this dual format edition from Eureka, boasting both Blu-ray and DVD copies of the film along with the aforementioned historical commentary, shedding a lot of light on the facts of the case and how closely (or not) the film adheres to these, plus new interviews with actors Andrew Prine and Dawn Wells and cinematographer James Robertson, plus a limited edition collector’s booklet from critic Mike Sutton (which wasn’t included with my screener).
The Town That Dreaded Sundown dual format edition is available now from Eureka Entertainment.