During a roughly three-month period in 1946, the town of Texarkana would fall victim to a brutal series of slayings in which the lives of five people were ended. A massacre of sorts that would soon grow to be local legend. Just two hours away in Hampton, Arkansas, an 8-year-old Charles B. Pierce was growing into the independent filmmaker many would come to know him as. One of his most popular films would be an adaptation of the ‘Texarkana Moonlight Murders’ of 1946, the story of ‘The Phantom’ that would haunt his nightmares as a child, the very real and true story of “The Town That Dreaded Sundown”.
On December 24, 1976, Pierce’s “The Town That Dreaded Sundown” got its wide release in theaters. The film was riddled with controversy and even lawsuits at the time for its marketing campaign that claimed it was “a true story”, the first major horror film to do so in such a direct way, alongside its graphic depictions of the Moonlight Murders of ’46. Tobe Hooper’s 1974 “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” being an extremely loose depiction of the Ed Gein murders claimed to be “BASED on a true story” but was effectively stretching the truth about how accurate the early slasher was to the real-life killings. The Town however, was much closer in terms of the events depicted, which may have led to its less main-stream appeal and performance. But not to worry, the original film (while still largely considered a deep cut) has grown an audience of passionate fans.
“The Town That Dreaded Sundown” holds an important spot in American horror history and independent cinema. It was released at a time where the slasher film was just starting to take shape and informed what this subgenre would evolve to be in the coming years. The film has an unconventional structure when compared to its more popular counterparts and feels more like you’re watching the marriage of a western and a true crime documentary rather than a proper horror film (in a good and very scary way). There’s very little character work in The Town with a stronger focus on atmosphere and putting the audience in the headspace of the townspeople that are being hunted. There’s no real main character in “The Town That Dreaded Sundown” only a feeling of looming dread that encompasses the film and an emphasis on the curfews, the paranoia, the impact of the murders, leaving the audience themselves feeling like the main character in the story – a helpless bystander. This of course makes the film a great moody summer horror watch but not necessarily a fun one (again, in a very good way!). The kills are stark, gritty, and often strung together with little to no score making them feel almost like actual murders being captured by the filmmakers. The stylistic choices paired with the fact that The Phantom has many technical similarities to actual serial killers (the bite marks he leaves on his victims, the showmanship, the sexually repressed undertones of his MO, etc.) makes him a genuine source of fear, not an anti-hero, supernaturally-coded, masked, slasher villain who the audience secretly roots for to kill annoying teenagers.
A great example of the film’s clear influences on the slasher genre is in one of its best scenes, the trombone kill. Two bandmembers, fresh off the clock from playing at the high school dance, are found and targeted by the killer. The man being beaten and shot after The Phantom ties his girlfriend to a nearby tree. The Phantom silently meanders, as if to think on how he wants to end her life then picks up their trombone. He ties his pocket knife to the end of it and aggressively plays the instrument into her back, killing the woman. This kind of creative horror kill would normally be played for gleefully grossed-out yelps but The Town’s intention is much more invasive. When The Phantom kills his victim, the scene is almost completely silent with the fading grunts of the woman and The Phantom’s angry heaving breaths making up the sound bed. It almost plays as sad and tragically horrifying rather than a traditionally ‘fun’ slasher kill scene. Here, by using the couple’s own instrument as the method of execution, The Phantom creates this kind of twisted punishment, holding on the victims’ faces and leaving the audience to decern what they could be thinking: ‘Maybe we would have died quicker if we didn’t happen to have our instruments. Maybe we wouldn’t have died at all if we had just stayed at the dance. Maybe we’d still be alive if we didn’t live right here, right now, in Texarkana.’ (It’s fucked up right?)
This scene would go on to serve as inspiration for what we now know as the typical (more fun) slasher kill as well as The Phantom’s baghead-look clearly being emulated in Jason’s costume design for “Friday the 13th: Part II”. In yet another subsect of its influence, the film’s theatrical poster designer, Ralph McQuarrie, would go on to create the concept art for George Lucas’ “Star Wars”.
However, director Charles B. Pierce’s body of work is not sparce when it comes to horror influence. One of his previous films, 1972’s “The Legend of Boggy Creek” was an early version of what would eventually become the found footage horror film. Boggy Creek is a horror mockumentary about a small town’s bigfoot-style legend and the group of documentary filmmakers that follow its trail of terror. The film would serve as yet another important horror stepping stone, eventually giving in-direct birth to films like “The Blair Witch Project”, “Lake Mungo”, “Paranormal Activity”, the list goes on and on. “The Legend of Boggy Creek” premiered with no distributer and was independent film in the truest sense of the term, being completely funded by local businesses in Pierce’s area. Thankfully, Boggy Creek would provide enough attention and success to kick start Pierce’s career as a film director, eventually leading us to his next horror film “The Town That Dreaded Sundown”.
For the rest of Charles B. Pierce’s career, he would continue to helm smaller-scale productions, the kind of fare that would read more like traditional American folklore than anything else. His catalog of films is charming and singular to say the least, the kind of films that (even at their most brutal) have an atmosphere and a tone that very much so communicates the fiery spirit of independent film and storytelling. The legacy of Pierce’s films, specifically his horror films, echo through the genre to this day. And like many before and after him, it all started with an idea and the will to make it a reality.