Texarkana looked normal during the daylight hours, but everyone dreaded sundown.

[craigjclark]

Comments

[joeblevins]

What a coincidence. I got this off TCM, too, and didn't get around to watching it until a couple days ago. My curiosity was piqued because I'd heard this film mentioned on a few podcasts as an acknowledged progenitor of both the Halloween and Friday the 13th series, both of which are centered on masked killers. I'd only seen two Charles Pierce films before this -- both about Boggy Creek, natch -- and I have to say this was a much better film than either of those. For one thing, Pierce shoots in a 2.35:1 aspect ratio, and there are actually some pretty stunning vistas here. The Phantom is genuinely menacing, and the horror sequences are quite effective and nasty. (I wondered why Dawn Wells was cast in a rather small part, but I think Pierce is kind of using her the way Hitchcock used Janet Leigh. Wells is an actress whom viewers know well and probably like, so it's especially unnerving to see her being hunted by the Phantom.) True, some of the non-professionals in the cast do give flat, awkward performances, but a few also give a

[craigjclark]

It's easy to see how the white-hooded Phantom in this film influenced the burlap-sacked Jason Voorhees in Friday the 13th, Part 2. And I figure the comic relief was Pierce's attempt at emulating the scenes with the bumbling cops in Last House on the Left. Of course, I question the bumbling cops in Last House, too.

[joeblevins]

I think as a masked, faceless, remorseless, hulking, mute killer in workingman's clothes, the Phantom is a likely progenitor of both Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers. (Supposedly somewhere, John Carpenter has directly acknowledged the influence of Pierce's film.) Last House is a movie that comes up frequently in reviews/discussion of The Town That Dreaded Sundown. I agree, I'd take the comic relief out of that movie, too. But I'd keep the killers' wacky theme song.

I'd also like to point out that The Town that Dreaded Sundown sounds like a 1970s Rankin-Bass animated special. "Coming up next, it's The Town That Dreaded Sundown with Gene Kelly as the Storyteller and Ernest Borgnine as Mean Old Mister Moon!'

[craigjclark]

I actually have a fairly recent book of John Carpenter interviews and The Town That Dreaded Sundown doesn't come up at all in it. Maybe he mentioned it in a more vintage interview.