The Town that Dreaded Sundown (1976)

Almost six months have passed since World War II ended in September, 1945, and the bucolic town of Texarkana, which straddles the border between Texas and Arkansas, effectively making it two cities, had been slowly adjusting to this post-war climate:

Mustered out servicemen were returning home by the hundreds to begin the long and tedious process of readjusting to civilian life. Anxiety that a government munitions works, one of the largest employers in the area, would shut down with the cessation of the war proved unfounded as the depot would remain open.

And so, it appeared Texarkana, a town of good, friendly, and hardworking people, was about to experience a period of optimism and prosperity -- until a cold night in March, 1946, as the full moon shined above, turned deadly, which was only the beginning of four months of terror and paranoia that would temporarily derail this postwar boom. 

It all started when Sammy Fuller and Linda Mae Jenkins (Hackworth, Fullworth) park in a secluded spot on some back-road after catching a movie to do what most young couples do on these makeshift lover’s lanes in the dark. 

But Linda Mae isn’t really feeling it, distracted by an unease that someone is watching them, much to Sammy’s consternation. And while he appears ready to give up and call it a night after getting stuck at first base, both are startled when the car hood suddenly pops open, and then just as quickly slams shut, revealing a hulking figure with a white canvas sack pulled over his head leering back at them through two slits cut into the cloth.

And as this masked man angrily shakes the distributor cap he’d just torn off the engine at the them, making it impossible to start the car, Sammy tries it anyway but no soap.

Meantime, the assailant breaks out the driver’s side window with a pistol and pulls the driver out, slicing him up badly on the broken glass. Then, once the boyfriend is subdued and out of the way after a savage pummeling, the attacker enters the car and slides across the seat toward the screaming Linda Mae.

Cut to the next morning, where a passing motorist finds Linda Mae by the side of the road -- alive, but barely. Once the County Sheriff is alerted, his chief deputy, Norman Ramsey (Prine), finds the original crime scene at the parked car, where he discovers Fuller has also miraculously survived despite being shot multiple times.

Later, at the hospital, Ramsey is joined by Sheriff Barker (Aquino) for a debriefing by the medical staff who treated the victims, which reveals both were shot and severely beaten; and while the girl was not raped, her back, stomach, and breasts were heavily bitten; literally gnawed on.

Unsure of what they’re dealing with, an uneasy Ramsey pays a visit to R.J. Sullivan (Citty), the Chief of the Texas-side Texarkana P.D., thinking they might want to warn the local teens of what happened, to be alert, and maybe arrange some joint patrols of the isolated roads around town just in case this attack wasn’t a fluke. Strapped for money and manpower, just like the Sheriff’s department, Sullivan offers to do what he can but it won’t be much.

Three weeks later, despite nary a sign of this newfangled boogeyman, Ramsey still patrols the country lanes and back-roads around Texarkana until he comes upon a parked car on the side of the road. In the pouring rain, he gets out for a closer look but the car is empty.

Suddenly, he hears gunshots nearby. And after calling in his location and a request for backup, he heads to where those shots came from, where he finds Howard Turner, dead in a ditch, his face beaten to a pulp with two bullet holes in the back of his skull.

Further up the road, he finds Turner’s girlfriend, Emma Lou Cook, also dead of multiple bullet wounds to the head, tied to a tree, covered in human bite-marks. Ramsey also spots the hooded killer fleeing the scene in a car but the rain is too heavy and the car too far away to get the plate number or get a shot off with his scatter-gun.

When ballistic tests definitively link these two heinous crimes, panic grips the area, resulting in a run on local gun stores and pawn shops and a boom in home security sales as locks are reinforced and windows are boarded up against the looming threat of what the press have dubbed the Phantom.

Having never dealt with this kind of deadly and unmotivated menace before, Barker and Sullivan arrange to bring in some outside help in the form of legendary Texas Ranger, Captain J.D. “Lone Wolf” Morales (Johnson), who will take over and jump-start their stalled investigation. Ramsey is assigned to assist Morales, as is city patrolman A.C. “Sparkplug” Benson (Pierce).

Thus, as Ramsey gets the Ranger up to speed, and Sparkplug makes a total ass of himself, the deputy explains his theory on the killer’s modus operandi; how he believes the Phantom will strike every 21 days to coincide with the cycle of the moon, meaning he is destined to attack again when the city high school holds its prom.

Morales finds this assessment sound. And so, on the fateful night, several decoy cars and couples made up of city, county, and State cops, half of them in drag, are staked out at secluded spots outside of town, hoping they will draw the Phantom out.

Meanwhile, back in town, the prom is just wrapping up with the last dance. And as everyone heads home, the band starts breaking down and packing up, including trombone player Peggy Loomis (Butler), who, with instrument in tow, meets up with her boyfriend, Roy Allen (Lyons).

Now, despite all the warnings, Roy isn’t ready to go home just yet and wants some *ahem* ‘alone time’ with his girl. Peggy is reluctant, and rightfully so, but he offers they can just drive to Spring Lake Park, which is located in the middle of town, where he assures they will be safe. Still worried, Peggy agrees to this compromise.

Alas, these two unsuspecting teens are about to find out the hard way that nowhere is safe from the Phantom Killer, and will pay for this mistake with their lives -- and pay most gruesomely…

The anomalous twin city of Texarkana came into being in 1873 when two rival railroad lines -- the Cairo-Fulton Railroad, which was headed west, and the Texas-Pacific, which was headed east, negotiated a junctioning just south of the Red River on the Texas-Arkansas border. They then started selling off parcels of land to settlers, who would eventually form the town when it was incorporated on the Texas side in 1874 and on the Arkansas side in 1880; and both sides have been feuding ever since over who controlled what.

Even its naming was in error, when a surveyor thought it was located where Texas, Arkansas and Louisiana met on the map, resulting in Tex(as)-Ark(ansas)-(Louisi)Ana. 

And so, from its inception, through the turn of the century, through Prohibition, and through the Depression, Texarkana has endured a contentious and volatile history and developed a notorious reputation as a haven for bootleggers, illegal gambling, prostitution, political corruption, and crime both organized and not so organized, earning Texarkana the nickname of Little Chicago, joining places like Phenix City, Alabama, Omaha, Nebraska, and Calumet City, Illinois, as the most corrupt places in the country when World War II came to an end.

And so, dealing with a jurisdictional no-man’s land that spanned two States, two counties, two (half) cities, and the resulting bureaucratic chaos, little was done to effectively stop or even curb this illegal activity as any organized resistance was next to impossible due to a lack of coordination or cooperation between six different law enforcement agencies, who were often on the take, and who, like everyone else, didn’t really get along.

Thus, with that backdrop in place, if you wanted to get away with murder, Texarkana sure seemed to be the perfect place to try it. And try this someone did.

Remember, back in 1946, the term serial killer hadn’t been invented yet; and it would be well over a decade before Charles Starkweather and Caril Fugate introduced the term thrill-killer to the masses. But for a period of four months in early ‘46 the city of Texarkana and its surrounding counties were hit by a brazen and brutal combination of both in a string of deadly assaults perpetrated by a person or persons unknown.

The first attack occurred in February that year, when Jimmy Hollis (25) and Mary Jeanne Larey (19) were parked on a lonely road outside the city in rural Bowie County, Texas, where they were accosted by a large man, his features hidden beneath a burlap sack, who forced them out of the car at gunpoint. He then pistol-whipped the boy, fracturing his skull, before chasing down and sexually assaulting the girl, who had tried to escape. The masked man then fled when another car approached the area.

Both victims survived the attack. The next two weren’t so lucky as the assailant struck again one month later in late March, when Richard Griffin (29) and Polly Anne Moore (17) were found shot dead in the back of Griffin’s parked car. Blood evidence at the scene that wasn’t trampled by lookie-loos showed the couple was most likely killed outside the car and then moved; and an autopsy showed Moore had been sexually assaulted.

Texarkana Gazette (April 15, 1946). 

And yet it wasn’t until after a third attack and two more deaths before the very notion these cases were connected and possibly committed by the same man had ever occurred to anyone.

This latest double-homicide took place on April 14, when the bodies of Paul Martin (16) and Betty Jo Booker (15) were found about a mile apart in Spring Lake Park, which was located inside the Texas-side city limits.

Like the other couples, Martin had been beaten and shot twice. And Booker, also fatally shot, would show signs of assault and of being redressed postmortem. When forensic tests showed all four victims were killed by a .32 caliber pistol, this is what finally got the quarter to drop for the local authorities and the FBI that there was a madman loose in Texarkana, who would most probably kill again.

And once this theory leaked to the local press, they quickly latched onto it and had a sensationalist field day, printing rumors as fact and theories as gospel. Headlines screamed "Sex Maniac Hunted in Murders" and "Phantom Killer Eludes Officers as Investigation of Slayings Pressed" and "Phantom Slayer Still at Large as Probe Continues.”

The North Platte Telegraph (March 2, 1946).

In fact, it was the managing editor of the Texarkana Gazette, Calvin Sutton, who officially tagged the killer as the Phantom, taking inspiration, perhaps, from the ads for a local theater that was currently showing a murder mystery, The Phantom Speaks (1945).

Now, it was all of this cumulative yellow ink after the third attack that pushed the already panicked citizenry of Texarkana into a paranoia-induced mass-psychosis as people armed themselves against the threat of the Phantom and deployed booby-traps to sound an alert if the killer was stalking nearby.

LIFE Magazine (June 10, 1946). 

And when news of the Phantom went national, thanks to a photo-spread in LIFE Magazine on the Art of Texarkana Home Self-Defense (June 10, 1946), this triggered another feedback loop of fear-mongering, which led to more false sightings, false leads, and false confessions, and a town that literally shut down when the sun set.

“In the spring of 1946 the streets of Texarkana were empty by sundown,” said Sally Reese (The Shreveport Journal, December 24, 1976). “The Phantom stalked couples in parked cars on lonely roads -- that’s why we got off the streets by sundown. He killed on moonlit nights, so the people came to dread nights with a full moon. The people hurried home and locked themselves in for the night. They were afraid.” And Reese would know because she was there at the time and experienced the impending dread first hand.

Texarkana Gazette (April 16, 1945).

“I was in Texarkana when the Phantom struck,” Reese testified. “And I know that the town did indeed dread sundown … In fact, I barricaded our house so securely that if the Phantom had gotten in somehow, we surely would have been slain. We couldn’t have escaped -- a point made somewhat irritably by my mother, coming in around midnight worn out from duty at St. Michael’s Hospital, every time she had to breach the fortifications. She did not appreciate the trouble I took to secure our house, because she was not then as uneasy as I -- and I was uneasy because I knew more than was printed in the Texarkana newspapers. I knew it because I was on the staff [of the Texarkana Gazette].

“As I recall the news-coverage, it more or less followed the official line that the less the Phantom knew about the evidence in hand the more likely he was to tip his hand … We suspected everybody. I suppose the thought was ‘what the killer did not know would hurt him.’ It didn’t work out that way, though; the Phantom was never caught.”

Manuel Trazazas "Lone Wolf" Gonzaullas.

Here it should be noted it wasn’t until after the second double-homicide and the case became national news before the Texas Rangers got involved, including the infamous M. T. "Lone Wolf" Gonzaullas. 

A rather notorious publicity hound, Gonzaullas took over the case. He organized surveillance of the back roads that fit the killer’s M.O. and deployed decoys in parked cars, hoping to draw the Phantom out, but the killer never took the bait.

Texarkana Gazette (May 5, 1946). 

Then, two weeks after the Martin-Booker murders, the Phantom allegedly struck for the fourth and last time, when he broke his pattern and targeted a farmhouse on the Arkansas side, killing Virgil Stokes (37); shot twice in the head through a window while sitting in his living room. His wife, Katie Stokes (36), had been in bed, heard the glass breaking, and found her husband dead in his chair. She moved to call the police only to be shot twice in the face through the same window.

And as the Phantom tried to break into the house, the badly injured victim managed to escape and elude the killer, reaching the safety of a neighbor. But by the time the alerted police arrived, the Phantom was long gone. Mrs. Stokes would survive the ordeal, but she never even saw the man who shot her, leaving Gonzaullas with two more victims and no new leads to the Phantom’s identity.

Texarkana Gazette (May 4, 1946). 

And so, “Murder Rocks City Again: Farmer Slain, Wife Wounded” screamed the headlines the following day. And as the subsequent days passed with no new leads and no suspects, the Texarkana Gazette kept fanning the flames, warning their subscribers, “The killer might strike again at any moment, at any place, and at any one,” which sent another massive jolt of Phantom anxiety throughout Texarkana and the surrounding communities, including the little town of Hampton, Arkansas, where a young eight-year-old named Charles B. Pierce spent many ‘a’ sleepless nights worrying the Phantom might be coming for him next.

“My momma and Daddy made a pallet by their bed from my brother and me,” Pierce told Al Shea for The West Bank Guide (January 5, 1977). “Daddy put a rifle beside the bed. We slept like that during the time the killer stalked the town. We had five locks on our door. Everybody in town was paralyzed by the killings.”

LIFE Magazine (June 10, 1946).  

As he grew up, when he wasn’t worried about phantom killers or swamp monsters -- which we’ll be addressing in a second, Pierce was either going to the movies or making 8mm home movies with his best friend and neighbor, Harry Thomason.

“When I grew up in Hampton, there was nothing to do but go to the movies,” said Pierce in an interview with Lane Crockett for The Shreveport Journal (April 8, 1977). “They fascinated me as a kid. I guess I always dreamed of making one.”

Charles B. Pierce, alias Mayor Chuckles. 

Obsessed by the medium of moving images from the jump, Pierce decided to make this his profession. He landed his first job at KTAL-TV Channel 6 in Shreveport, Louisiana, in the mid 1960s, where he swept the floors, ran camera, and was later promoted to weekend weatherman. Pierce would also take on the role of Playville’s Mayor Chuckles, the host of a local children’s program called The Laffalot Club.

After bouncing around several TV stations in Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas for nearly 12 years, Pierce finally settled in Texarkana around 1971, bought himself a 16mm camera, and opened an advertising agency, where he made shorts and TV commercials for local businesses and eateries.

Around the same time, Pierce’s old childhood buddy, Thomason, had just written, directed, and shot his own feature; the paranormal thriller, Encounter With the Unknown (1972). “A big, jovial but low-keyed man,” observed columnist John Bustin for The Austin American (September 27, 1973), noting how Thomason “had been a combination football coach and art-drama teacher at the little town of Hampton, who suddenly got the idea that he wanted to be a movie producer.”

Like Pierce, undaunted that “he really knew nothing about the business,” Thomason quit his job at the school, purchased a movie camera, learned how to load it and offered his services to an ad agency “on the condition that they didn’t have to pay him if they didn’t like his stuff.” Apparently, they did, which gave him enough experience with the craft to branch out to make his own independent feature.

The Austin American (September 27, 1973). 

Filmed in and around Little Rock, Arkansas, Encounter with the Unknown was an anthology film broken into three segments. The first dealt with a preternatural revenge from beyond the grave after a prank backfires and turns deadly; the second involves the discovery of what just may be a porthole to hell and those foolish enough to go poking around in it; and the third is a familiar ghost story of a haunted bridge and an ectoplasmic hitchhiker.

Buoyed by narrator Rod Serling, who brought an air of authority to the proceedings, and more than it probably warranted, Thomason and his Centronics International made a tidy profit off the film on the initial regional roll-out, as well as its follow up feature, shot simultaneously, So Sad About Gloria (1973); a tale of gaslighting, repressed memories, and axe murders.

The Shreveport Journal (March 25, 1972). 

Inspired by his friend’s success, Pierce felt he could also shoot a movie locally, too, and make some money. But at the time he really didn’t have any. Money. At least not enough to make a serious run at a production. But one of Pierce’s biggest clients was Ledwell and Son Enterprises, who manufactured semi-trailers, developing a very successful ad campaign for them that ran all over the south. And based on this success, Pierce approached Ledwell about co-financing a proposed feature film.

And while Ledwell wasn’t completely sold on the idea, he did agree to bankroll a production to the tune of $100,000. And after a few false starts, what Pierce had in mind was an ersatz nature documentary, “based in fact,” on another local legend; a Bigfoot like creature that roamed the swamps around Fouke, Arkansas, to cash-in on a rash of recent sightings of the Fouke Monster, dating back to 1971, when the unidentified cryptid allegedly attacked and terrorized the home of Bobby and Elizabeth Ford.

“I was lucky enough to have access to someone who could give me financial backing,” Pierce told Sarah Colletti of The Shreveport Times (August 12, 1976). “If I knew then what I know now I’d never have the nerve to do it.”

Now, I went into the history and production of Pierce’s inaugural film and its aftermath, taking deep dives into both The Legend of Boggy Creek (1973), which I thought was really good, honest, and Boggy Creek II: And the Legend Continues… (1983), which I thought really wasn’t. And so I will send you down that rabbit hole to get all the details if you’re so inclined.

But for now, what’s important to note was how Pierce really tapped into something with this faux documentary, using a scholarly narrator to give it some weight, employing flashbacks and local raconteurs to tell his story, achieving a folksy verisimilitude -- all on top of some beautiful cinematography, which captures the whole hick mise en scene; it let audiences feel the heat and humidity, smell the peat moss, be mesmerized by the chorus of cicadas, and feel all those psychosomatic skeeter bites, making the mundane feel menacing and pushing the whole enterprise into something that felt like it should’ve been shown on PBS and not at the Drive-In.

Well, at least until the third act when things go a little bit … bonkers.

Behind the scenes, The Legend of Boggy Creek.  

“I don’t believe in monsters,” Pierce revealed in an interview with Jack Harp for The Alexandria Daily Town Talk (December 3, 1972). “I didn’t much believe in the Fouke creature when I started making the picture. I got about half way through and actually heard him scream and started believing. The more we studied the creature and worked on the movie, the more firm beliefs became that there was something there.”

Regardless if the creature was real or not, Pierce had a huge hit on his hands and made a shit-ton of money four-walling the picture around Arkansas and Louisiana when he couldn’t find a distributor. “I couldn’t get any major studio to want to fool with it,” Pierce admitted to Eugene Chadbourne of The Calgary Herald (June 21, 1975). “They knew it was my first film, they knew what I’d spent on it and figured it couldn’t be much of a film.” A decision several studio execs would come to regret.

The Cincinnati Post (July 13, 1973). 

With its unprecedented regional success, Pierce then made even more money by selling The Legend of Boggy Creek to Howco International for national distribution and the TV and foreign release rights to American International Pictures, earning the film some $22 million in ticket sales, which netted Pierce around $4 million.

“Has success changed me?, said Pierce (Shea, 1977). “Well, hell, I always played like I was rich when I was poor, so having money now hasn’t changed a thing.”

Taking those profits, Texarkana’s new mini-movie mogul set up his own working studio in Shreveport, Louisiana, and continued making pictures, including Bootleggers (alias Dead-Eye Dewey and the Arkansas Kid, alias The Bootleger's Angel, 1974) and a couple of elegiac westerns, Winterhawk (1975) and The Winds of Autumn (1976). And while all were solid enough, none reached the audience fever pitch or financial payoff of The Legend of Boggy Creek.

Ergo, Pierce decided his next project would tap into the same faux documentary style as Boggy Creek did. He also decided to base it on another “true story” about another local legend, a notorious cold case, which was now referred to in hindsight as The Texarkana Moonlight Murders.

Originally, back in 1973, Pierce had wanted to immediately follow up The Legend of Boggy Creek with a film about the Phantom Killer. But since this was a tale based more in fact than fiction, he ran into some push-back from his neighbors.

“About three years ago, after Boggy Creek, I was planning to film this story,” said Pierce (Shea, 1977). “I knew a lot of relatives of the victims were still alive and living in the area where it all took place. One day I looked out of my office window and there were like 150 people on my lawn praying that I wouldn’t make it."

The Omaha World Herald (January 30, 1958). 

“There was some flack,” added Pierce (Crockett, 1976). “Several of the immediate families involved with the case were concerned. The city was practically up in arms.” And for good reason.

“A lot of people around Texarkana don’t like to talk about [the Phantom],” Pierce explained to Elston Brooks for The Fort Worth Star-Telegram (August 8, 1976). This tracks from my own experience. My mother still doesn’t like to talk about the Starkweather / Fugate killing spree that ran across our home state of Nebraska in 1958. The fear was real. However, they were eventually caught. But, “The Phantom was never caught. Maybe 75-percent of the town believes the Phantom is still living amongst them. Some thought he might still be around the town, and that a movie might stir him up.”

The Kilgore News Herald (June 17, 1976). 

Thus, “I want to do it but I probably won’t,” said Pierce (Brooks, 1973). “Feelings still run too high there. People don’t want a movie about it -- and what can you do if that’s your hometown, and the objectors are your friends and neighbors.”

And so, Pierce shelved the project until 1976. “Times change,” said Pierce (Shea, 1977), who by then had four successful features under his belt. “They know my work now and my neighbors trust me. I wouldn’t do a hatchet job on them or their town. It’s my town, too.”

There were also two other competing scripts about the Phantom circulating around, looking to go into production at the same time. And so it was critical to be first.

Pierce would once again collaborate on the script with Earl E. Smith, who had written all of his features mentioned thus far. Said Crockett (April, 1976), “The story was researched through The Texarkana Gazette and that there were story conferences with police personnel who had worked on the case 30 years before. Pierce looked on the case as history and that his film was not an indictment of poor law enforcement because no one was ever convicted of the killings. He believed the law had done as good a job as they could.” Ranger Gonzaullas, who was still alive at the time, but died shortly after the film was released, abstained from being involved.

As filming commenced, “I haven’t encountered too much resistance [from the town],” said Pierce (Brooks, 1976). “If it were going to be made I guess they’d rather it be made by me than by others.” And to be clear, Pierce always insisted the film was never about the elusive killer, or the grisly mass murder, but the crippling psychological effect it had on the town itself.

“We changed all the names, mainly to protect those who still make their home around Texarkana,” Pierce told Perry Stewart for The Fort Worth Star-Telegram (January 17, 1977). “The Phantom killed five persons in all and tried to kill three others. From a modern standpoint, that’s not a high kill ratio. But look at what it did to that city. People were paralyzed with fear, afraid to walk in front of their windows after dark.”

Said Reese (December, 1976), “If Charles Pierce’s movie captures the mood of Texarkana when the Phantom roamed, he’ll be matching Ken Dixon, then a UPI correspondent, when he filed his first lead from the town that dreaded sundown: ‘I checked into a hotel called Grim, and the first newspaperman I met was a fellow named Graves.’ I always thought Dixon established the mood of Texarkana (at the time) perfectly with those words.”

For his crew, Pierce would pilfer several members of Thomason’s amateur stable, including cinematographer Jim Roberson, who shot Encounter with the Unknown, So Sad About Gloria and The Great Lester Boggs (1974) for his former drama teacher Thomason.

The Times Record News (October 10, 1973). 

Like Pierce and Thomason, Roberson had no experience at all making movies when Thomason called up his former student during his freshman year of college, encouraging him to come help him make a feature. Roberson said he didn’t know anything about making a movie, but Thomason told him not to worry because, well, he didn’t either.

And so, “I went to his office, he handed me a light meter, said this is how you read it,” Roberson later testified on his crash course in filmmaking (Shout! Factory, 2013). “He handed me a Bolex camera, handed me some film, showed me how to load it. I loaded it and I went out and shot an insurance sign, going round and around. I went back. Unloaded it, had it processed, looked at it on a projector the very next day and I was hooked. Something as simple as that.”

Pierce and Roberson.

Roberson met Pierce through Thomason, they hit it off, and as he geared up to shoot Winterhawk, feeling he wanted to concentrate more on directing, Pierce hired Roberson as the Director of Photography. He also shot The Winds of Autumn and was set to return on Pierce’s latest film about the Phantom Killer but Roberson broke his foot just two days before shooting.

But instead of getting a replacement, Pierce stuck with his man. “Charlie hired a guy to haul my crutches and chase me around, because I would hop one-footed down the street as soon as I stepped off the camera and [he] would run ‘em under me,” said Roberson (ibid). “I caved-in three casts [during the shoot] because part of what we were doing was in the swamps, then the rain all the time. That made it kind of difficult. But you could do that kind of thing when you’re in your 20s”

Winnfield News-American (November 3, 1976). 

Meanwhile, the show’s co-producer and production manager, Tom Moore and Bob Gates, had worked with Pierce 15 years prior at a TV station in El Dorado, Arkansas. “Shooting the film was like putting together a giant crossword puzzle,” said Gates (The Lafayette Daily Advertiser, November 3, 1976). “It’ll be a clear picture once all the pieces are put together.” And these puzzle pieces included dressing up the town to be era appropriate and keeping some 18 pre-1946 vintage automobiles in working order.

Moore had some previous experience, having produced a couple of regional horror films shot in Texas: Mark of the Witch (1970), where the spirit of a wiccan possesses her way to revenge, and Horror High (1973), which was basically I Was a Teenage Jekyll and Hyde. And Moore would kind of do an end run around Pierce and get permission from the Ledwells to write, produce and direct a sequel to The Legend of Boggy Creek.

In Return to Boggy Creek (1977), the action shifts from the Arkansas swamps to the bayous of Louisiana, where a kinder, gentler creature befriends a group of children lost in a hurricane. “We’re making a family adventure film here where the monster actually ends up saving the children,” said Moore (The Lafayette Daily Advertiser, December 5, 1976). “We’re trying to make the show in the old Walt Disney style of movies -- entertainment for the whole family.”

Said Perry Steward (Fort Worth Star-Telegram, July 11, 1977), “Charles Pierce, who took his Boggy Creek millions and went on to make more ambitious features, probably is sport enough to wish these poachers well. But the one time Texarkana ad man is certain to bristle when he learns that both legend and geography have been tampered with.” In the end it did not matter because Moore's film was terrible, made little money, and quickly disappeared.

Now, those who worked with Pierce over the years always complimented his enthusiasm but admitted the writer, producer, and director, and cinematographer, sound man, electrician, and gaffer, really didn’t know what he was doing, but always knew exactly what he wanted -- and usually got it by any means necessary.

And as he exploited and captured the Phantom’s reign of terror, his film, The Town that Dreaded Sundown (1976), played relatively close to history and yet played pretty loose with the facts. As we mentioned, he changed the names of the players and victims to protect the innocent -- and perhaps save himself from a few lawsuits -- while taking many dramatic liberties. 

And none were more egregious or outlandish than his interpretation of the Martin-Booker murders, when their surrogates, Roy Allen and Peggy Loomis, are attacked in State Line Park by the deranged killer.

Following his usual pattern, the Phantom subdues the male first. Here, by jumping on the moving car’s running board and pulling the boy out through the window, causing it to crash into a tree. And as Roy is beaten senseless, a concussed Peggy tries to flee, only to be caught and tied face-first against a tree.

Once she’s secured, the killer finishes off the boy with his pistol. He then pokes around the car and finds Peggy’s trombone, attaches a knife to the end of the slide, and then uses this to stab the girl in the back, repeatedly, while he “plays” the instrument until she is dead in a truly odd and rightfully notorious scene that should not work, at all, and yet ... Comical, and yet ... Horrific, but.

Editor’s Note: Most of the credit -- no, all the credit -- for making this scene work goes to the actors, especially Cindy Butler as the victim, who really sells the hell out of her own dubious demise. "I've been accused of going a little too far off the deep end with that trombone scene, but it worked,” said Pierce (quoted from Shout! Factory, 2013). “When that picture played opening night in Texarkana, a lot of people were there who had grown up during that time. When that trombone scene was over, you could've heard a pin drop. I'm telling you, everybody was just frozen." End Note.

Once again, the cinematic investigation goes nowhere as leads dry up and suspects are cleared. Baffled by the killer’s irrational methods, Morales and Ramsey confer with a criminal psychiatrist, Dr. Kress (Smith). Meeting at a restaurant, and seeking some insight on what makes this killer tick, here, Kress explains the Phantom is a highly intelligent sadist with a strong sex drive -- but not in the way they think. He’s more interested in inflicting pain than sexual gratification. It is this pain that gratifies him.

And in a particularly disquieting moment, as Kress expresses doubts they will ever catch the wily Phantom, we pan down low and move to another table, where we see the familiar shoes of the killer, meaning he was privy to the entire conversation, explaining why he was always not one, or two, but several steps ahead of the law. 

Several weeks later, Helen Reed (Wells) is spotted by the person wearing those very same shoes as she leaves a grocery store. Later that night, Helen hears something prowling around outside and alerts her husband, who heard nothing and returns to his paper. Then, the Phantom appears right behind him in the window, who shoots the unwitting victim in the back of the head.

Hearing this, Helen investigates, sees her husband slumped over dead, and the Phantom, and retreats to the phone in the kitchen. But before she can crank up an operator, the Phantom crashes through the screen door and shoots her twice in the face.

Like her real-life counterpart, Helen manages a daring escape while the killer makes sure the husband is dead and flees into a cornfield, where the Phantom, armed with a pick-axe, hunts for her. And after a few harrowing moments, despite her grave injuries, she manages to reach a neighbor’s house and escapes.

Helen survives, but can offer little except a general description of the man who shot her and murdered her husband.

As news of this attack spreads quickly, it pushes a city on the brink of mass hysteria over the edge. But as things spiral dangerously out of control, Ramsey overhears a report about an abandoned car that matches the one he saw fleeing the scene of the first double-homicide. He alerts Morales, and they investigate the sandpit where the car was spotted. 

Armed with shotguns, they find the car -- and the masked Phantom!

Chasing him into the woods, taking several shots at the killer as they go, they reach some train tracks, where the Phantom manages to get across before a slow moving freight train cuts the others off. Morales and Ramsey keep on firing under the boxcars and hit him in the leg, but by the time the train clears off the Phantom is long gone.

A search of the surrounding swamp where his blood trail ended turns up nothing. Ramsey speculates the killer most likely holed up and died out there somewhere, but Morales isn’t so sure. Either way, the attacks and killings stopped after this incident and Texarkana returned to normal over time, collectively hoping to put this aberration behind them as quickly as possible.

As to who the killer really was, no one can say for certain as we cut to modern day (circa 1976) in front of a movie theater in downtown Texarkana that’s showing -- wait for it -- The Town that Dreaded Sundown.

And as we get all meta and pan along the crowd -- well, their feet anyway -- who are waiting to get into the next show, we see some familiar looking shoes bringing up the rear of the line, insinuating, and reinforcing the film’s promotional tagline, which bluntly insinuates the unknown killer still stalks the streets of Texarkana to this very day. 

Like the case of the Moonlight Murders itself, neither Pierce nor screenwriter Smith had a real resolution for The Town that Dreaded Sundown. Said Pierce (Brooks, 1976), “Although we have a surprise ending, we leave the case just as it was in real life -- unsolved.” But was it? Unsolved. Maybe, maybe not.

Over the years since the last attack it was getting mighty hard to separate fact from fiction, which had been occluded by rumors, fallacies, pet theories, and even Pierce’s film. And as the police revisited and true crime experts dug into this notorious cold case, what they found was an investigation plagued by jurisdictional disputes, conflicting witness statements from those who survived, and sloppy crime-scene preservation, leading to who knows how many missed clues.

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram (May 5, 1946). 

Also not helping was the out of control local press; for no matter what the newspaper archives said, official police reports were conflicted on whether any of the female victims were actually sexually assaulted or not -- or even if there were autopsies performed on several of the victims at all. Other sources said all the women were molested and penetrated by a foreign object; most likely the pistol.

What we do know for sure is none of the victims were gnawed on as the film contends. Was this something Pierce felt he could get away with instead of showing what really happened, which he probably couldn’t get past the censors? Or as the old axiom goes, When the bullshit is more titillating than the truth, film the bullshit. And if you want to separate the truth from the fiction, I highly recommend James Presley's The Phantom Killer: Unlocking the Mystery of the Texarkana Serial Murders (2014), an exhaustive look at the murders and a town in terror that breaks down the who, what, where, when and why the killer was never officially caught. 

Also of note, to modern forensic eyes, some experts aren’t even sure if the first assault and the last attack were even connected to the other two. Yet others contend the Phantom was responsible for even more victims, including Virginia Carpenter, who knew three of the Phantom’s victims, and who disappeared without a trace almost two years later in 1948; and a man named Earl McSpadden, who was found in pieces near some railroad tracks not long after the attack on the Stark's house; but the district attorney and coroner couldn’t agree if the man had been stabbed first before being dismembered by a passing train or not.

Some even contend that McSpadden was the Phantom all along, since the killings abruptly stopped after he died -- accident or not. This whole incident provided one of the main plot-points in Blumhouse's ill-conceived reboot-remake-whatever-you-wanna-call-it of The Town that Dreaded Sundown (2014), which gets so stupidly meta it eventually collapses into a singularity. 

There were plenty of other solid suspects over the years, too, including a college student who left a written confession to the killings before committing suicide, who was later exonerated by a postmortem alibi. There was talk of it being an escaped German POW; and a former tail-gunner on a B-29 confessed to Los Angeles authorities that he was the Phantom; but while he was in Texarkana at the time of the crimes he was later cleared when his confession didn’t match up to what little evidence there was. But the prime suspect all along was a man named Youell Swinney. And maybe, just maybe, the Texarkana authorities had their man all along.

It was a 33-year-old rookie Arkansas State trooper by the name of Max Tackett who realized a car had been stolen on the nights of each attack. And while following up that lead, Tackett arrested Swinney and his wife, Peggy, who were in possession of one of those stolen cars.

Youell Swinney (center). 

When arrested, Swinney begged Tackett not to shoot him. When Tackett replied he wouldn’t shoot someone for stealing a car, Swinney answered, "Mister, don't play games with me. You want me for more than stealing cars."

But the suspect sort of clammed up after that. His wife, however, wouldn’t shut up and gave a full detailed confession, implicating her husband as the Phantom; a confession she later recanted. And without the confession, or the wife’s testimony, with the lack of physical evidence, the district attorney felt they couldn’t press charges on Swinney for the Phantom killings. But what they could do, and eventually did, was send the car thief to jail for a very long time as a habitual criminal.

Neither Gonzaullas or the authorities on the Texas side felt Swinney was really the Phantom. Whether this was to just save face, who knows. What we do know is the killings stopped after Swinney was caught. Still, the evidence was shaky and Swinney was later released early in 1973 on a technicality. But he was back in jail by 1975 for, you guessed it, stealing another car. Swinney was still alive and in jail when Pierce filmed The Town that Dreaded Sundown, which makes no mention of the car thief at all except for a throwaway line from the dismissive narrator after the climax.

Now, actor Andrew Prine always claimed that he was the one who came up with and wrote said climax for Pierce’s version of the Phantom Killer to give it at least some semblance of a resolution -- even though the killer’s identity is never resolved. “I wrote the last fifth of the picture because it didn’t have an ending,” said Prine (Shout! Factory, 2013). “The train and all of that; I wrote that. I fictionalized it. There was never a chase but we had to have some sort of an ending [because] they never got the guy.”

Yeah, this climactic shoot-out was a total fabrication. And it was Pierce’s wife, Florence, who came up with the idea to have the Phantom attend the movie’s premiere to officially wrap things up, something John Carpenter would later echo at the end of Halloween (1978), where audiences had to leave the safety of the theater with the knowledge a homicidal boogeyman was still at large out there in the dark.

Pierce, meanwhile, was “an unabashed admirer of John Ford, the director who helped make John Wayne’s career and who is closely associated with Hollywood’s most prestigious westerns,” noted Crockett (April, 1977). “He is intense when he speaks of Ford and what he accomplished, and there is no uncertainty that Pierce, deep inside, is striving for the same thing.”

Ben Johnson. 

Pierce had hoped to work with Wayne before the actor passed away in 1979, which never came to be, but he was able to land one of Wayne’s frequent co-stars, Ben Johnson. As the legend goes, Johnson was discovered by Howard Hughes when the native Oklahoman delivered a batch of horses for the film The Outlaw (1943), where Hughes hired him on as a stuntman.

Said Johnson (The Caddo Citizen, December 30, 1976), “I had been making a dollar a day as a cowboy, but my first check in Hollywood was for $300. After that, you couldn’t have driven me back to Oklahoma with a club.”

Then, while working stunts on the Ford film Fort Apache (1948), doubling as a rider for Henry Fonda’s character, some horses bolted with a wagon in tow. A quick thinking Johnson managed to catch the runaway horses, reining them in before anyone got hurt, landing him a promotion to supporting actor and a five picture deal with a grateful Ford at $5,000 a week.

He made his acting debut in another Wayne vehicle, 3 Godfathers (1948), and it was Ford who recommended him to producer Merian C. Cooper for a starring role beside Terry Moore and a giant ape in Mighty Joe Young (1949), where he joined in on the rodeo to lasso the massive gorilla. Johnson would continue to co-star with Wayne in the likes of She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) and Rio Grande (1949), but would also work with Sam Peckinpah, too, on The Wild Bunch (1969) and The Getaway (1972).

As westerns dried up at the box-office in the 1970s, Johnson sort of hung up his spurs, cinematically speaking. But even though you could take Johnson out of the cowboy, you could never really take the cowboy out of Johnson. He would win an Academy Award for his supporting role as small-town entrepreneur Sam the Lion in Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show (1971) and played lawman Melvin Purvis in John Milius’s Dillinger (1963), teaming back up with his old Wild Bunch co-star Warren Oates, who played the notorious outlaw Purvis runs to ground.

“I’ll keep making pictures as long as people want me,” Johnson told Richard Dodds of The Times-Picayune (December 22, 1976). “When they slow down, I’ll slow down. I know that time is coming. I’m almost that old, but not quite.”

Johnson had just wrapped-up the telefilm The Savage Bees (1976), where a swarm of killer bees threatens New Orleans during Mardi Gras, when he signed on to play a Texas Ranger for Pierce. “I just thought the world of him,” said co-star Prine (Shout! Factory, 2013). “[Johnson] had that great gift that’s beyond acting. He simply, when he talks on camera or off, he tells the truth. And that’s a great natural gift he had.”

Andrew Prine's first film role was an uncredited part in the Audie Murphy biopic To Hell and Back (1955). He would then bounce around between episodic TV and bit parts in features over the next two decades, most notably working with Johnson for the first time in the John Wayne vehicle Chisum (1970).

But things shifted a bit in 1971 when he started starring in a string of independent low budget exploitation features, with films like Simon, King of the Witches (1971), Terror Circus (1973) and Grizzly (1976). “All films are positive experiences," said Prine (Shout! Factory, 2013). "I managed to take on so many roles in that period of the 1970s because I never met a film role I didn’t like. I took everything that came. I’m a working actor. I do not wait a year for a picture.”

“Charles B. Pierce was a complete wild-man,” said Prine, who first worked with the filmmaker on The Winds of Autumn. “Often didn’t know what he was doing, but had the guts and the gumption to proceed forward and learn what was needed. We had a helluva good time -- chased a lot of women, and in between, we occasionally made a film.”

In The Town that Dreaded Sundown, Prine and Johnson had great chemistry together both on screen and off. Tales of those two whooping it up off-hours is a production story I would love to hear sometime, as apparently they were both so hungover while shooting the climax they could barely stand up. “That was a tough day,” said Prine (ibid).

As for the film’s staying power, “I’m shocked at all the films, so many of the films I did, are now called Cult Classics. That means they didn’t make any money in the beginning, I never thought anyone would see these films more than once. You know, those were the days,” laughed Prine (ibid). “All those films we did have come back to haunt us. But aside from my joking, we had a helluva good time and we did the best with what we had.”

Dawn Wells. 

Prine had actually worked with Dawn Wells before, too, on the “Dark Outpost” episode of The Invaders (S2.E8, 1967). After wrapping up Gilligan’s Island (1965-1967), not wanting to be typecast as the farm girl next door in perpetuity, Wells would regroup and shift away from moving images around 1970 to exclusively work in the theater; initially taking the role of Doris the prostitute in a production of The Owl and the Pussycat, a welcome change of pace for the actor.

It was Pierce who coaxed her back in front of the camera, when she starred and served as the narrator on Winterhawk in 1975. But Wells was a last second replacement on The Town that Dreaded Sundown. Said Wells (Shout! Factory, 2013), “I got a call one morning from [Pierce], who said I got an actress who can’t talk and carry groceries at the same time. Can you help me out? Can I send my plane to come pick you up for a couple days work? And I said, ‘Sure, Charlie.’”

Thus, Wells was in Texarkana by noon the next day. To get into the character she had hoped to meet with Katie Starks, who was still alive, but the survivor declined, which was understandable but disappointing. And so, Wells didn’t even read the script, saying (Texarkana Gazette, July 8, 1976), "Acting-wise, it's an extremely emotional role. I didn't want to pattern my interpretation after anything. I wanted to go on my own feelings."

This unorthodox approach worked splendidly. Believe me there is a weird dissonance when you see Mary Ann from Gilligan’s Island get shot in the face -- twice! “When people talk about this picture, they remember the trombone killing, and the crawling through the cornfield scene,” said Roberson (Shout! Factory, 2013), who was initially dubious that Wells could pull the scene off given her perky association with the longest three hour tour of ever. “The whole time we were shooting I was going, dang, can she pull it off? And I mean it was so believable. It was just … it just made you shake. It was terrorizing; absolutely terrorizing.”

Being shot in the face was a new experience for Wells, too: "They planted a charge in the receiver,” Wells explained (July, 1976). “So I was standing there holding the phone, shaking, expecting the receiver to blow up in my face." Luckily it didn’t because what follows with her escape from the house and subsequent chase through the cornfield is an absolute clinic in suspense, which was a minor miracle considering the chaos of the efforts to capture it on film.

For the scene, as her character was desperately trying to get away through the cornfield, Wells was instructed by Pierce not to break off any cornstalks. Apparently, the farmer who owned the property was charging $1.50 per casualty. And on top of that, there was a pit bull staked out in the yard of the farmhouse she was trying to get to, who appeared to be a lot more vicious than his handler let on.

So there Wells was, covered in fake blood, shooting at 3am, crawling through this cornfield, trying not to break any stalks, when the dog spotted her, bared its teeth, and charged, pulling up its tethering stake. “About 30 guns went off,” recalled Wells (Shout! Factory, 2013). “Everyone was trying to shoot the dog. Never got the dog. That was more frightening than the movie!”

Speaking of frightening, after filming wrapped, Wells was driven back to the hotel where she was staying, still in makeup and wardrobe, exhausted, caked with mud and blood, where the night clerk fainted dead away at the sight of her. “He sure thought it was real.”

Still, in a cast full of reasonably talented actors, the film belonged to Bud Davis as the Phantom, even though we never see anything but his angry eyes and all we hear is his excited breathing. But the menace and rage he brings to each of his scenes are both palpable and extremely unsettling.

Davis had been a bartender in a Hollywood spot frequented by stuntmen working at the nearby Warner lot. Fate stepped in when one of his patrons invited him to come watch a gag they were shooting one day. He was hooked and soon got his union card. He was another Pierce regular, who served as a stunt coordinator on nearly all of his films. But it wasn’t just for Pierce, as Davis also worked on films like Forrest Gump (1994), the Austin Powers movies, and was still at it as late as of 2009 for Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds (2009).

The Long View Daily News (December 26, 1976). 

Most of the victims and bit parts for The Town that Dreaded Sundown were played by locals, who all acquitted themselves quite well. Cindy Butler had been Pierce’s mistress for a spell. And after he divorced his first wife, Pierce and Butler were married; but this union, too, would end in divorce not long after filming Boggy Creek II in 1983. Which brings us to the film’s weakest link: Charles B. Pierce.

Aside from all the dramatic liberties taken, which stretched the “based on a true story” conceit way past the factory specs, one of The Town that Dreaded Sundown’s most glaring flaws is its tonal inconsistencies. These were all Pierce’s fault both behind and in front of the camera, as the worst offender is the odious comedy relief of patrolman Sparkplug Benson, played by Pierce himself as an utter buffoon. (Think Officer Kelton in all those Ed Wood movies -- only dumber.)

“I play the role of a rookie policeman who’s kind of like Barney Fife, the Don Knotts character on The Andy Griffith Show. He can’t find his gun half the time, that kind of thing” said Pierce (Stewart, 1977), defending the logic behind his creative choices. “You can’t expect people to sit on the edge of their seats the whole time.”

But what makes this so jarring is Pierce, Roberson, and Davis staged and executed these suspenseful murder set-pieces so effectively, whose morbid impact is then completely lost when we cut to Sparkplug making an ass out of himself again AGAIN. And worst of all, you get the sense both director Pierce and actor Pierce thought this malodorous crap was actually funny.

The Wichita Beacon (January 28, 1977).

Said production manager Gates (December, 1976), “Making a film boils down to four things, any one of which can kill a potentially good project. That’s the script, the photography, the editing, and the musical direction.”

Behind the camera, and where the film truly excels, all credit goes to cinematographer Roberson, who, despite his relative inexperience, really captured something here. While watching The Town that Dreaded Sundown, one can’t help but notice how skillfully Roberson utilizes the widescreen anamorphic Panavision lens, and how he fills his frame and shoots his scenes so right I feel its only second to the work of Dean Cundey, who I feel is the master of the format.

Roberson, meanwhile, deferred credit to his director, saying (Shout! Factory, 2013), “It was just the way Charlie wanted to tell it. The way he wanted to do it.” It’s too bad he was kind of relegated to small-screen TV in the 1980s and wasn’t given more opportunities to stretch his legs a bit behind the camera because the evidence speaks for itself.

Editor Tom Boutross was another Pierce regular, whose career began slicing together Robert Clarke’s sci-fi misfire The Hideous Sun Demon (1958). He would follow that up with an underappreciated piece of sleaze-noir called Rat Fink (alias Wild and Winning, 1959), made by the same people behind The Sadist (1963), where a young sociopath murders his way to a singing career. He then really worked some magic on The Legend of Boggy Creek and was Pierce’s guy from then on.

Pierce and Boutross.

Pierce also scored a coup when he struck up a friendship with composer Jaime Mendoza-Nava, which netted him a beautiful score for The Legend of Boggy Creek, which really helped glue that film together. Mendoza-Nava returned for The Town that Dreaded Sundown, where he concocted something even better; a haunting score with rural and rustic overtones that really helps to spread the dread.

Also returning from Boggy Creek was Vern Steinman, an old KTLA colleague, who served as a narrator on both films. And while The Town that Dreaded Sundown didn’t quite achieve the true documentarian vibe of Boggy Creek it had its own procedural aesthetic that served it well and got what Pierce was trying to get across effectively enough.

It took about four weeks of shooting on a $400,000 budget during a very hot and rainy June in 1976 to complete filming of The Town that Dreaded Sundown. And after five months of post-production the film was picked up by American International Pictures and made its debut just after Christmas that bicentennial year.

Thus, The Town that Dreaded Sundown would be a significant departure for Pierce. “I had been doing family-oriented pictures all this time, and here I come along and done one about a sadistic killer,” said the filmmaker (Stewart, 1977). “The thing is, though, you can’t play patsy when you do subject matter like this. You have to make the story for what it was.”

Thus, his fifth feature would be a rarity, his first to garner an R-rating, mostly due to its “sheer intensity” according to the MPAA. “There’s some bad language but no nudity and not much gore,” said Pierce. “Still, I don’t recommend this for kids.”

Pierce would also bring back illustrator Ralph McQuarrie, who did the poster for The Legend of Boggy Creek, to produce the highly provocative poster art for The Town that Dreaded Sundown, which was then emblazoned with the brilliant tagline: “In 1946 this man killed five people … Today He Still Lurks the Streets of Texarkana, Arkansas.”

Of course around this same time McQuarrie was producing concept art for George Lucas, who was trying to sell his new fangled space opera to 20th Century Fox. But that’s another story for another day.

Now, I vividly recall the TV commercials and radio spots for The Town that Dreaded Sundown and how they scared the ever-livin’ piss out of younger me when they aired back in the day. But I didn’t get to actually see it until years later as a “Based on a True Story” AIP double-bill with The Amityville Horror (1979) sometime in the early 1980s. And of the two, I think Pierce’s film holds up way, way better.

The Grand Island Independent (June 13, 1980). 

Critical reaction upon its release was not kind and generally took the film to task over its excessively violent content. Said Timothy Block for The Daily Breeze (March 3, 1977), “A sadistic killer on a rampage. A town paralyzed by fear. The police completely baffled. And no clues to the killer’s identity. All strong elements for a terrifying film, you say? Unfortunately, it’s not true this time. Even with all those ingredients, The Town that Dreaded Sundown fails to terrify. At best it's dull and unimaginative. It simply repels and leaves you wondering why you’re in the theater at all.”

“With a good feel for the period and some eerie photography, there are flashes of an entertaining grade-B potboiler,” added Paul Povse of The State Journal-Register (March 19, 1977). “The futile attempts at broad humor might not have been fatal if Pierce hadn’t tossed in the sort of excruciating awful violence that is now a movie cliche. Victims are shot in the head, girls tied to trees and tortured in bizarre fashion.”

The Grand Island Independent (January 27, 1977).

Meanwhile, a little closer to home Mark Melson of The Shreveport Times (December 27, 1976) found that “The Town that Dreaded Sundown suffered from the lack of a real story or a sympathetic central character. The phantom murderer is not a good subject for a film, simply because so little is known about him, and he was never caught. So we’re left with some brutal crimes, graphically depicted on screen, and little else. No motivation for the crimes, no insight into the killer, no apprehension -- not even a look into the lives of the victims or the pursuers is provided.”

And I honestly feel that Kevin Thomas was kind of mailing this one in for The Los Angeles Times (March 5, 1977), saying, “The Town that Dreaded Sundown is this week’s trash picture. [The filmmakers] have crudely attempted to recreate the so-called Phantom Killer’s reign of terror with no discernible point except to depict a series of particularly grisly killings with a lingering, graphic morbidity ... To describe Pierce and Smith’s cinematic efforts as elementary is being overly kind. Pierce compounds the damage by supplying crass, low comedy relief by appearing as a dim-witted patrolman. It likewise makes no creative use of its strongest asset, its authentic small-town setting. There’s no sense of period, no suspense, no nothing, in fact. Just lots of violence.”

The Post-Crescent (March 29, 1977). 

But Jean Hoelscher was a little more even-handed in her review for The Hollywood Reporter (March 28, 1977). “Grabbing one’s stomach, and not one’s imagination, is both the strong and weak point of The Town that Dreaded Sundown. Strong because Pierce’s new film unstintingly depicts the true story of a hooded, psychopathic killer who terrorized the bordertown of Texarkana in the spring of 1946. Weak because the film stresses all the bloody authenticity at the expense of dramatic, imaginative involvement. We are too often told, rather than shown, that the town is in a panic, the streets are deserted. However, no doubt, there’s an audience for this straightforward account.

“Excellent photography by Jim Roberson catches details such as the blood dripping from glass shards of a broken car window,” said Hoelscher. “He sets chilling scenes; a beautiful moon hangs over a cornfield where the killer stalks a victim. Jaimie Mendoza-Nava contributes a fine music score. Tom Boutross’ editing is nicely unobtrusive. Pierce’s strange style mixes blood-curdling reality with an almost detached view of a narrated documentary ... The Town that Dreaded Sundown achieves good excitement much of the time, but it could have been stronger with a better dramatic involvement.”

From The Town that Dreaded Sundown Pressbook. 

To be fair, Pierce was well aware of his shortcomings, telling Crockett (April, 1977), “I’m a realist. That camera will tell on you. I go back and look at my pictures and naturally I wonder why I did certain things. I can pick them to pieces now. One of my biggest weaknesses as a filmmaker has been scripts. I can certainly shoot a film okay technically but it takes a great script to make a great film. To achieve being a good director you have to see the weaknesses. I can look at myself critically. I didn’t get to where I got by not listening to people. I need better scripts and more consistency of talent on screen.”

Despite the critical drubbing, Pierce had another hit on his hands. But even with all of his precautions, the filmmaker wound-up facing several lawsuits after the film’s premiere. The City of Texarkana sued him not over the picture but the tagline, feeling it defamed their city. "The ad is too much; that's just not true,” said then Mayor Harvey Nelson (quoted from Shout! Factory, 2013) in reference to the reference that the killer was still around and the implication he could strike again at any moment. “There's objection that this whole thing will be spreading fear in the community. There are relatives of the victims still living here, and this is very unpleasant to them." 

The Mobile Register (December 19, 1976).

To appease the city fathers, Pierce reached out to AIP to see if the inflammatory tagline could be removed. But the posters were already in circulation. Some offending taglines were covered with snipes, and there was an alternative ad mat released, which focused on the killer stalking lover’s lane instead.

Then in 1978, Mark Moore, brother of victim Polly Anne Moore, sued Pierce for $1.3 million for invading his family’s privacy. He claimed his sister was portrayed “as a high school dropout and a woman with loose and low morals; when in fact none of such was true." But the courts would deny his claim in 1979. Moore would appeal in 1980, taking the case all the way to the Texas Supreme Court, where he was once again denied.

But as the decades passed after the murders occurred and the film’s release, the city of Texarkana reversed course and started to embrace their notorious piece of history, even engaging in an annual outdoor Halloween screening of Pierce’s film since 2003 in the very park where Martin and Booker were murdered.

Which leaves us with sorting out the legacy of The Town that Dreaded Sundown. As friend and fellow online film critic Scott Ashlin so eloquently put it in his review for 1000 Misspent Hours and Counting, “Like an artless hillbilly giallo, The Town that Dreaded Sundown is first and foremost a murder mystery in which it plain doesn’t matter whodunit.” And while I don’t think it’s completely artless -- the cinematography and the music will back me up on that -- he does make a valid point about a film that goes, essentially, nowhere and resolves nothing.

Pierce’s film is also often touted as a proto-Slasher movie; and this has some merit when you consider the signature look of the killer, which was so fantastic it was later ripped off wholesale in Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981); and yet aside from the eccentric trombone attack and the cornfield chase, the killings are rather a blunt punctuation instead of the usual extended stalking as we spend little to no time with the victims.

And one cannot also discount its effect on the glut of true crime documentaries that grow on your favorite streaming platforms like kudzu these days, where premises are stretched past the point of credulity through multiple episodes, repeating the same bullet points over and over, and almost always resolve absolutely nothing on these unsolved mysteries. 

Thus, The Town that Dreaded Sundown’s legacy is both legitimate and suspect. No frills, no ideas, just sudden and intense explosions of violence executed so effectively you kinda wish the rest of the film would’ve lived up to these heinous murder set-pieces. And if that says more about the filmmaker or the viewer, well, that’s me shrugging right now.

Originally posted on October 26, 2018, at Micro-Brewed Reviews.

The Town that Dreaded Sundown (1976) Charles B. Pierce Film Productions :: American International Pictures / EP: Samuel Z. Arkoff / P: Charles B. Pierce / D: Charles B. Pierce / W: Earl E. Smith / C: Jim Roberson / E: Tom Boutross / M: Jaime Mendoza-Nava / S: Ben Johnson, Andrew Prine, Dawn Wells, Jimmy Clem, Charles B. Pierce, Bud Davis