The Town That Dreaded Sundown (1976)

During a ten-week period from February 22-May 3, 1946, the Texarkana region of the United States, twin cities at the border of Miller County, Arkansas and Bowie County Texas, was plagued by a quadruple series of unsolved serial murders perpetrated by a still-unapprehended madman dubbed by the local media as "The Phantom Killer." This individual, described by his first pair of victims, was around six feet tall, and wore a white pillowcase-like mask with two holes cut out for his eyes and one for his mouth. According to Jimmy Hollis, he was a dark-tanned white man around 30 years of age; according to his girlfriend, Mary Jeanne Larey, he was a light-skinned black man. His modus operandi was to target young couples parked in an isolated parking lot, a "lovers' lane," as they were called, on weekend nights and shoot them dead, typically two bullets each, with a .32 automatic Colt pistol. 

By the end of his homicidal spree, the Phantom had brutally assaulted eight people, claiming the lives of five of them. As was likely his intention, these eight attacks affected the lives of far more people, sending a shockwave of terror, panic, and paranoia throughout the entire region of Texarkana. That summer, for the first time, residents no longer felt safe leaving their doors unlocked. As soon as the sun went down, they would lock their doors and arm themselves while police patrolled the streets and neighborhoods. Following the second double homicide, stores quickly sold out of guns, ammunition, locks, and other protective devices. The police were baffled by the lack of hard evidence linking any one individual to the unmotivated, senseless crimes. Frustrated by the lack of answers and fed up with living in fear, some townies sought to play hero and conduct their own search and destroy mission, putting themselves in harm's way via parking their cars in secluded areas and waiting for the Phantom to reveal himself. He never did. After three months without any assaults, the town began to reclaim some semblance of normalcy. But life in Texarkana would never truly go back to the way it was. 

The prime suspect of the Texarkana Moonlight Murders remains a career criminal named Youell Swinney, a perpetual car thief and counterfeiter whose own wife ratted him out to the police based on the description of the Phantom's second double homicide. However, because she refused to testify against her husband in court, prosecutors refrained from pursuing murder charges against Swinney, and interest in his involvement quickly faded. In 1947, he was convicted of car theft and, due to his status as a repeat offender, sentenced to life in prison, serving 26 years before being set free. Swinney lived out the rest of his life as a free man until his natural death in a Dallas nursing home in 1994. To this day, while it's heavily likely these heinous crimes were carried out by Swinney, no individual has been formally charged, leaving behind five dead bodies, three fortunate individuals whose lives would forever be scarred, and an air of morbid mystery surrounding one of the most infamous unsolved murders in the annals of American crime. All of which should theoretically provide the blueprint for a terrifying and suspenseful horror movie. Alas, despite a brilliantly conceived title and a tragically perfect true story from which to draw, The Town That Dreaded Sundown, as scripted by Earl E. Smith and helmed by Charles B. Pierce, is a plodding, excruciatingly slow, suspense-deficient dramatization that may adhere admirably to the facts of the unsolved case, but is fatally wounded by a bone-dry presentation that plays more like a stuffy police procedural than the tense teen slasher it should have aspired toward, relying on breathlessly expository narration, one-dimensional characterization, and an overt lack of graphic violence that would befit such a real-life horror story.

Following the conclusion of World War 2, the region of Texarkana is in the midst of a renaissance toward placidity and prosperity. That is until one Sunday night, on March 3, 1946, a young couple, Sammy Fuller (Mike Hackworth) and Linda Mae Jenkins (Christine Ellsworth), is viciously assaulted in their car while parked on a lovers' lane by a silent, masked menace soon to be known as "The Phantom Killer" (Bud Davis). Both victims are discovered alive later that morning and taken to a hospital where they recover from their injuries. Straight from the jump, my stomach was twisted into knots of dread, racked with the horror of realization that I was in for a botched reenactment of a grimly intoxicating real-life nightmare. The assault of Fuller and Jenkins, based on Jimmy Hollis and Mary Jeanne Larey respectively, is one of the worst opening scenes in the annals of cinematic horror, and it had a right to go down as one of the best. Before I dig into the mechanics of the filmed reenactment, here's a breakdown of the assault as it actually transpired.

On the night of Friday, February 22, 1946, 25-year-old Jimmy Hollis and his 19-year-old girlfriend, Mary Jeanne Larey, were sitting in Hollis' car, parked in a lovers' lane, after having seen a movie together. Around 10 minutes after their arrival, a man disguised in a white pillowcase approached the driver-side door and shone a flashlight into the window. Thinking this man was a cop, Hollis stated that he had the wrong person, to which the assailant bluntly replied, "I don't want to kill you, fellow, so do what I say." He ordered the young lovers out of the car and demanded that Hollis remove his trousers. After he complied, the Phantom struck him twice over the head with a firearm, the sound of his skull fracturing so loud that Mary Jeanne assumed he had been shot. Believing this to be a robbery, Mary Jeanne took out Jimmy's wallet and showed their attacker that he had no money. In response, the Phantom hit her in the head with a blunt object, knocking her to the ground. He then ordered her to stand up and run. Initially, Mary Jeanne fled toward a ditch, but was directed to run up the street instead. Stumbling upon a deserted car parked off the road, Mary Jeanne was confronted again by the Phantom, who asked why she ran away, to which she reminded him that he had told her to do so. The Phantom called her a liar and knocked her back onto the ground before sexually assaulting her with the barrel of his gun. After the ordeal, the assailant allowed Larey to escape, and she fled to a nearby house, waking the occupants and phoning the police. Meanwhile, Hollis regained consciousness and alerted a passing motorist, who likewise called the police. Both lovers were taken to the hospital, where Larey spent the night being treated for a minor head wound, whereas Hollis spent several days to recover from multiple skull fractures. By the time Bowie County Sheriff Bill Presley and three other officers arrived at the scene of the assault, the Phantom had vanished. 

This preliminary happening set the stage for three more sets of attacks, all of which involved at least one fatality. Perhaps the Phantom wasn't ready to claim a life just yet. He was getting his feet wet, experiencing what it felt like to inflict pain and suffering on another individual before advancing toward a more permanent form of terror. If adapted faithfully and skillfully, the Hollis-Larey assault could have paved the way for a spine-chilling cold open to join the ranks of John Carpenter's Halloween or Sean Cunningham's Friday the 13th, the latter of which depicts the simultaneous murder of a young couple whose sexual rendezvous is interrupted by the emergence of a silent, teen-targeting psychopath. Regrettably, Smith and Pierce fumble the vastly scarier real-life event with a hastily sketched scene straight out of the teen slasher handbook. 

As Sammy rests his head on Linda Mae's lap, all but pleading for sex like your typical teen horror horn-dog, she expresses fear that someone is watching them. Rather than keeping our perspective locked with Linda Mae so we may share in her mounting apprehension, hearing what she hears and unable to see anything she cannot, or positioning us behind the prowling eyes of the Phantom, Pierce immediately counteracts any chance at generating white-knuckle suspense by foolishly showing the Phantom crouched down in front of his victims' car. Remember the scene in Scary Movie where Ghostface stalks Cindy Campbell outside her classroom wielding a fishing hook, and once she turns her head back toward the front of her class, he quickly runs behind a tree? That choice to actually show the killer hiding behind a tree like a mischievous child, as opposed to making it look as though he vanished into thin air, worked because it was in the service of parody. This scene, by contrast, is meant to be taken stone-faced seriously as a reenactment of a physically and psychologically harrowing crime. The sight of the madman waddling to the car comes off as silly-looking. 

Instead of approaching the driver-side door with a flashlight, this fictionalized Phantom takes a more cliched approach, aiming to elicit a cheap jump scare via flipping open the hood of the car and slamming it down to reveal his masked face in the windshield. On the one plus side, Ellsworth delivers a flawless vocal performance, letting loose with a scream so authentic, shrill, and blood-curdling it should earn a nod of approval from the scream goddesses such as Jamie Lee Curtis and Marilyn Burns. But combined with the smashing of the driver-side window through which Sammy is violently pulled, the set piece is more ear-piercing and annoying than genuinely horrifying, Pierce opting for a rushed pace and chaotic action over the prolonged bodily and mental anguish that characterized the actual assault of Hollis and Larey.

The squad of policemen who constitute the protagonists of The Town That Dreaded Sundown are nearly uniformly bereft of personality. Early into the movie, it becomes clear that Smith has decided to narrow his focus down onto three characters in particular: Deputy Norman Ramsey (Andrew Prine), the equivalent of Bill Presley; Captain J.D. Morales (Ben Johnson), the most renowned criminal investigator in the country, based on Texas Rangers captain Manuel T. Gonzaullas; and Patrolman A.C. "Sparkplug" Benson (Charles B. Pierce), a fictional character constructed for comedic relief purposes who's relegated to the role of Morales' personal driver. Of this trio, Morales is easily the most compelling for the no-nonsense gravitas imparted by the Oscar-winning Johnson, whose boundless determination to capture the Phantom is conveyed in his stern, invariably unsmiling face and gruff, down-to-business tone of voice. One look into this man's joyless eyes and you can see he's spent the better part of his lifetime chasing demons that may have awakened some within. 

On the opposite end of the spectrum, A.C. Benson is the most irritating and tonally disruptive character Smith has elected to zero in on. Played by none other than the director himself, Pierce proves himself no more adept in front of the camera than he is behind it. Nicknamed "Sparkplug" because of a troubling tendency to resort to threats over the phone when dealing with misbehaving citizens, Benson is written as a failed attempt to counteract the growing atmosphere of murder and mystery with a dose of lighthearted comic relief, leaning offensively into the stereotype of the bumbling excuse for an authority figure. While chauffeuring Morales and Ramsey around town in pursuit of the killer, he drives recklessly for no apparent reason other than to make one question how on earth he was hired by the police force in the first place for any role more advanced than filing paperwork. When the force devises the idea to decoy the Phantom out of hiding by portraying themselves as young lovers parked in deserted parking lots, naturally Sparkplug is among the men who agree to dress in drag, paving the way for the most overtly buffoonish sequence that's more creepy and homophobic than legitimately amusing. As Sparkplug sits in a parked car looking out for any signs of the killer, his colleague razzes him by commenting on the inconsistent size of his "breasts," wrapping an arm around his shoulder to "make it look good," and finally squeezing one of his fake breasts as a pancake-flat punch line. The entire construction of Sparkplug unpleasantly evokes the "inept cop" subplot that dragged down Wes Craven's directorial debut, The Last House on the Left, in a similar manner. Deputy Ramsey fulfills the function of the wallflower of the trio, a competent and hardworking enforcer of the law who nonetheless lacks the experience and expertise of Morales, the type of guy who sits in the backseat of the cruiser and observes the goings-on without much ability to change them.

None of these lawmen are examined in specific, private detail, driven by a mutual objective to decipher the identity of the Phantom and apprehend him. We learn nothing about their personal lives or their relationships outside the police station. Do they have wives? Children? Interests or hobbies separate from their jobs? How has Morales' long-term experience as a dependable Texas Ranger affected his ability to function off the clock and manage interpersonal relationships? After a long day of work, is he capable of taking off the cowboy hat and grabbing a drink with his work and non-work buddies? Or does the violence he contends with every day seep into his bones and keep him awake in a cold sweat every night? You'll never receive a hint of those answers in Smith's surface-level screenplay. 

The victims of the Phantom's seemingly unquenchable bloodlust are somehow given an even shorter end of the stick. Because The Town That Dreaded Sundown revolves primarily around the investigation of the Texarkana Moonlight Murders rather than the fatal and nonfatal attacks themselves, the eight real-life victims are introduced during the moment of their spectral encounters, only to be summarily dismissed right after. Therefore, it's impossible for either Smith or Pierce to engender much in the way of sympathy or empathy for their doomed characters whose only purpose is to serve as meat for the Phantom's grinder. Aside from the burden of minimal screen time, two victims in particular are portrayed in a stereotypically boneheaded light: Roy Allen (Steve Lyons), based on Paul Martin, and Peggy Loomis (Cindy Butler), based on Betty Jo Booker. Roy is an idiot who constantly refuses to heed Peggy's warning to avoid isolated stretches of road in the stillness of night, and Peggy isn't granted substantially more intelligence as she caves in to her meathead boyfriend's pleas for "just five more minutes." After their car crashes into a tree downhill, Peggy stumbles out and stands still as she watches Roy get bludgeoned over the head repeatedly by the Phantom's gun. Does she sneak away and search for help? No. Does she develop a backbone and intervene in the struggle to provide a counterattack against the killer? No. What does she do, you ask? Conforming to the most damaging stereotype of the archetypal damsel in distress, Peggy lets out a scream that attracts the Phantom's attention, and once he pursues her, she begins backing away, only to fall flat on her behind. Does she pick herself up and make a run for her life like Sally Hardesty running through the woods from a chainsaw-wielding Leatherface? No. She elects to crawl backward. Oy vey.

The most, albeit not entirely, successful aspect of The Town That Dreaded Sundown by far is the cinematography by Jim Roberson, who finds some innovative ways to present his fiendish madman while depriving him of his full potential to terrify on certain occasions. To preserve the aura of mystery generated by the Phantom Killer and visually reinforce that his identity could belong to just about anyone, Roberson films the masked Davis in a series of knee- and ground-level shots as he prowls the woods at night, zeroing in on his pair of black shoes -- a tactic that would be imitated five years later to introduce Jason Voorhees in his first outing as the killer of Camp Crystal Lake. This cinematographic technique isn't the only visual that will reemerge in Friday the 13th Part 2. Jason's original mask, a white pillowcase with a single eyehole cut out, was clearly inspired by the Phantom Killer. Like his real-life counterpart, the killer of Smith's screenplay has two eyeholes cut out, but is missing the third opening for his mouth. Reasonably, the filmmakers realized the mask would look scarier with every feature but the eyes concealed. And Pierce is very much in awe of the Phantom's hauntingly spare appearance, as evidenced by Roberson's numerous close-ups of the Phantom's ghost-white face as he inhales and exhales, reminding us that behind this cloth of evil exists a flesh-and-blood human being, albeit of the most dastardly variety. To emphasize the Phantom's more dramatic arrivals, such as when he manifests at the front door of the Reed homestead, Roberson will zoom his camera in quickly for an ostentatious close-up of his face. Two impressive shots follow the aforementioned break-in: a shadowy wide shot of the Phantom standing in the middle of the Reeds' kitchen, and a POV shot of him following a trail of blood from Helen Reed (Dawn Wells) on the carpet of her bedroom, leading to the backdoor.

To contrast the atmosphere of conviviality and security that originally permeated Texarkana with the homegrown terrorism waiting to burst the bubble, Roberson pans his camera across crowds of unsuspecting citizens in the daytime, standing expectantly outside a movie theater, dancing romantically at a high school prom. On the flip side, his objective shots of the Phantom skulking about the woods or a cornfield drains the direction of suspense because we know exactly where he is, denying us the ability to identify with his targets' terrified uncertainty. And no matter how many scenes are awash in rainfall, like an exterior shot of rain pouring down outside the windshield of Morales and Ramsey's cruiser as they patrol the streets, they can't substitute for an authentically gloomy atmosphere.

The Town That Dreaded Sundown clocks in at a standard runtime of 90 minutes, although Pierce and Smith manage to make it feel substantially longer by setting their story at an agonizingly unhurried pace and dawdling over wasteful scenes that should have been excised by editor Tom Boutross. A perfect case in point: after the trio of protagonists -- Morales, Ramsey, and Benson -- gathers in a cruiser, Sparkplug realizes he can't find his keys. He checks his pockets to no avail, so he steps out of the car and checks beneath the wheel well. Unsurprisingly, they're not there either. He runs back into the building and upends his desk, where the keys remain elusive. Finally, once Police Chief R.J. Sullivan (Jim Citty) reminds him of the number of the car he's planning to drive (unit 7), Sparkplug looks to the wall beside his desk and finds the keys hanging untouched beneath the number 7, where he jokingly insists he was going to check next. Obviously, Smith's intention is to highlight the supposed comedic ineptitude of the police department, but the only thing he and Pierce (on- and off-screen) accomplish is dragging out the runtime and wasting my time in the process. In compliance with the format of the police procedural, Pierce and Smith linger on interminable scenes depicting boring policemen as they gather together and strategize about potential-but-futile methods to locate their unattainable opponent at the expense of developing his victims into smart, sympathetic, dimensional human beings.

In an attempt to solemnly convey the tragedy of the true story on which it's based and remind viewers that the story unfolding before their eyes isn't a product of fiction, but rather a dramatization, Pierce commits arguably the most egregious miscalculation of his entire production: hiring a narrator to verbally tell his story. Credit where it's due: the selection of said narrator himself is masterful. The sonorous and sinister voice of Vern Stierman instantly evokes that of the great John Larroquette from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Truth be told, before I learned of Stierman's identity on Wikipedia, I was certain that Larroquette was the narrator of The Town That Dreaded Sundown. The similarity of their voices is uncanny.

Here's where the major difference between them comes in: where Larroquette's heart-stopping vocal talent was utilized strictly in the opening off-camera monologue of the original Texas Chainsaw (as well as the opening and closing scenes of the remake), Stierman's is employed excessively throughout the entirety of The Town That Dreaded Sundown, to the point where his voice becomes another character in the story to intrusive effect. In a classic case of telling over showing, from the opening frame to the final, Stierman drops in frequently to deliver an overwhelming dump of exposition pertaining at times to some of the most forgettable and uninteresting details, e.g., the relationship timeline of one pair of victims. At other times, he will inform us of events at the precise moment we're watching them unfold. Even though Pierce and editor Boutross cut together a montage of Texarkana residents boarding up their windows and having locksmiths install new locks, the human feelings of horror, anxiety, and paranoia are never truly transferred to the audience. The psychological impact of the Phantom's influence on the residents of Texarkana is more explained than genuinely felt, Smith relying on the ease of narration as a substitute for visual and emotional storytelling. Had Stierman's services been employed only in the opening and maybe at the end, Pierce would have done himself a huge favor in terms of distinguishing his movie from the dry taste of a documentary. None of the words that exit this narrator's mouth are memorable because he's required to verbalize too much information at once, killing momentum as swiftly and brutally as the Phantom dispatches one of his victims. 

For that matter, the dialogue between the onscreen characters isn't composed with much greater attention to subtlety. When Ramsey is informed that his squad is "getting the most famous criminal investigator in the country assigned to this case," he verbosely replies, "You don't mean that fella they call 'The Lone Wolf' of the Texas Rangers? The big man himself. Captain J.D. Morales. Living legend. Most famous ranger in the history of Texas." Talk about saying a mouthful. Rather than introducing us to Morales in the flesh and trusting in Johnson's ability to sell the dedication of his character organically, Smith uses his characters as mouthpieces as a shorthand for character development. During a get-together at a restaurant in which the Phantom happens to be dining socially, a psychologist based on Dr. Anthony Lapalla explains that whoever the Phantom is must be a sexual sadist who is relishing the attention lavished upon him by the media and police forces of Texas and Arkansas. (Conveniently, Smith leaves out the part where Lapalla insisted that the killer probably isn't black because "in general, negro criminals are not that clever.") None of the chatter offers a hint of insight into the personal lives of any of the policemen involved, revolving solely around the clinical details of the case at hand.

Jaime Mendosa-Nava composes a generic and forgettable score that thoroughly fails to either generate or augment tension during the Phantom attack sequences, straining to enliven hopelessly ineffective jump scares with a bombastic "dun-dun-duuun!" sting on the soundtrack. To aurally express the dual comedic dimension of the movie, Mendosa-Nava composes a silly, jaunty trombone-heavy score that accompanies the bumbling effort of Sparkplug to find his car keys while Morales and Ramsey impatiently wait for him. It detracts not only from the atmosphere of doom encroaching around the residents of Texarkana, but the urgency of the police's investigation. 

For an adaptation of a real-life slasher story, Pierce's presentation of violence in The Town That Dreaded Sundown is overly restrained, relying on the suggestive power of sound effects and minimal blood to emphasize the feeling of horror as opposed to lingering on graphic details of carnage. Unfortunately, he lacks the atmosphere, buildup, and victim identification to back up such an aspiration. Sammy is merely dragged through a broken driver-side window and never seen again, leaving behind specks of blood which drip from the shards of remaining glass. Moments later, the Phantom appears at the passenger side and climbs into the car atop a screaming Linda Mae. Editor Boutross cuts to an exterior shot from behind the car, and once the Phantom closes the door, his victim's shrill scream suddenly cuts to silence. For the double homicide of Emma Lou Cook (Misty West) and Buddy Turner (Rick Hildreth), Pierce locks us into the limited perspective of Ramsey, permitting only the sound of two gunshots in the distance. When Ramsey locates Emma Lou, Pierce displays a postmortem shot of her with her arms tied around a tree, and Roberson's camera zeroes in on a bite mark and bullet wound in her upper back.

The most graphic and innovative kill is reserved for Peggy Loomis. In real life, Betty Jo Booker was shot twice: once through the chest and in the face. Her body was positioned behind a tree lying on its back, with her right hand in the pocket of her buttoned overcoat. For his cinematic retelling, Smith deviates from those facts in favor of basking in the gory imagination of a horror film, allowing his fictionalized Phantom to think outside the box. Rather than using the immediate power of a bullet, his sole weapon of choice in actuality, he turns to the sharp, Freudian tip of a knife. In real life, Booker played the saxophone; Loomis plays the trombone. To literally weaponize her musical talent while visually signifying his own hunger for sexual dominance, the Phantom attaches the blade of a knife to the bottom of her trombone slide and "plays" it repeatedly into her back as she sits helplessly tied to a tree. Without ever showing the blade penetrating Peggy's flesh, Boutross cuts back and forth between close-ups of the Phantom thrusting the slide forward and Peggy groaning in agony, her head jerking back with each stab. 

The murder of Floyd Reed is the most faithful to that of his slain real-life counterpart, Virgil Starks. As he sits in an armchair reading a newspaper, the Phantom shoots him twice in the back of the head through a closed window. Smith and Pierce are so precise in this reenactment that they even recreate the detail of Starks attempting to stand after his shooting. In real life, he slumped back into his chair; in the movie, he slumps forward onto his footrest. Roberson pins his camera squarely on the front of Floyd's lifeless face, which displays a trickle of blood leaking out of his mouth. Once he keels over, Roberson zooms in for a close-up of a bullet wound in the back of his neck. However, the only instance in which Pierce really lets himself indulge in some bloodletting is the murder of Roy Allen, the sight of blood cascading down his head a gruesome one in an otherwise sickeningly tame dramatization. 

Because the screenplay was written without an ending, Andrew Prine took it upon himself to write the last fifth of The Town That Dreaded Sundown, which concludes with a standoff between Ramsey and Morales and the Phantom set on a railroad. Apparently, both Prine and Ben Johnson were hung over while filming this train sequence due to partying the night before. It seems Prine might have been intoxicated when he wrote it as well. In order to remain true to the story, neither Smith nor Prine attempt to unmask the killer, yet the ending still feels conspicuously manufactured to comply with Hollywood standards, tacking on a prolonged chase replete with illogic. For a serial killer who was clearly intelligent and cautious enough to forever evade capture, why would he be walking around in broad daylight wearing his mask? It's not as if he was ever searching for victims in the daytime. If he really were shot in the leg before vanishing into thin air, wouldn't someone have noticed a man walking around town with a bloody limp? Especially with a swarm of patrolmen guarding the area? It makes no sense, and because we know the Phantom was never officially caught, this confrontation is an anticlimactic waste of time, lacking excitement or tension.

The first time I ever heard of The Town That Dreaded Sundown was in a conversation between Sidney Prescott and Dewey Riley in Scream. Observing the desolation of her hometown owing to a curfew, Sidney comments, "God, look at this place. It's The Town That Dreaded Sundown," to which Dewey replies, "Yeah, I saw that movie. It's about a killer in Texas, huh?" Up until that point, I had assumed the only horror film about a killer in Texas was the one and only by Tobe Hooper and Kim Henkel. After enduring an hour and a half of this bloodless, tonally jumbled, glacially paced slog, I can understand why -- much like its faceless, unapprehended antagonist -- it has faded into obscurity.

3.7/10