An Early Work of Slasher Fiction

In 1976 the slasher genre wasn’t really a thing yet. Black Christmas had come out two years prior, but it hadn’t quite set the template yet. It had the ideas, the girls trapped in a house, an unknown killer taking them out one by one, but the formula was still finding itself. It could have just as easily been a one off kind of film, its own little horror movie that some fans looked back on fondly but that was largely ignored by most movie watchers. It was only a moderate success at the Box Office, making $4 Mil against a $686,000 budget, which is solid returns but not the kind of money that would lead to a cultural shift.

No, for that to happen we needed Halloween in 1978, which would go on to set the template and show how it really could be done. But for anyone that saw Black Christmas in 1976 and said, “yeah, I think we can do that,” they didn’t have Halloween to reference as well. The slasher movie boom was still two years out, and all through the 1980s we’d get a ton. In 1976, though, filmmakers were still working off older horror concepts, trying to see what could work and what wouldn’t as audience preferences changed. A slasher in 1976 wasn’t even called a “slasher” yet, and it wouldn’t have the rules or formula in place to guide it.

The Town that Dreaded Sundown feels very much like a slasher that doesn’t know what it’s doing, and that’s because it didn’t have the rules yet. It had to play in genres that currently existed, its creative team unsure about what kind of film audiences were really looking for. As such the film dresses itself up like a true crime story, playing closer to the cop dramas of the era… with maybe a bit of cop comedy thrown in as well. It’s more in line with Columbo or In the Heat of the Night (except without anyone really solving any crimes), but one that also wants to be horror. It’s a very strange melange of ideas that really never come together, making this an interesting, but in the end not very good, effort for the burgeoning slasher genre.

On the night of Sunday, March 3, 1946, in Texarkana, two teenagers, Sammy Fuller and Linda Mae Jenkins, park out on lovers’ lane for a bit of evening fun. Their fun, though, is interrupted by a masked killer, a man wearing a bag with holes cut out over his head. He breaks into the car, drags the two young lovers off, and horribly injures both of them. Linda is able to crawl away, making it to the road where she’s discovered. Sheriff's Deputy Norman Ramsey (Andrew Prine), heads up the investigation, in coordination with the Texarkana Police, in hopes of catching the man that did it… but no real evidence presents itself.

Three weeks later, on March 24, Ramsey is investigating lovers' lane spots when he hears gunshots. He finds an abandoned car and two dead, and a hooded man at the scene. Gunfire is exchanged, but the man manages to get away. This then leads to a series of murders, pairs of lovers killed every twenty-one days, with the cops, Ramsey and Texas Ranger Captain J.D. Morales (Ben Johnson), unable to make headway. Whoever this man is, he’s cautious and capable. They need him to slip up so that life in this sleepy town can return to normal, but with a killer on the loose that may never happen.

The Town that Dreaded Sundown feels like a mish-mash of two ideas that can’t quite find themselves. On the one side we have the cop story, which is the main meat of the film. Ramsey and Morales head out on investigations, sometimes dramatic and sometimes comedic (due to wild tonal shifts this film takes), looking for evidence that will help them identify who the killer is. The struggle the film has (beyond its shifting tone) is that there isn’t much for the cops to actually do. They can drive around, show up at places, and poke at clues, but there’s so little evidence left behind by the killer that it’s literally a waiting game to see if he slips up. That might have been realistic but it doesn’t make for thrilling drama.

Watching the film I was reminded of Zodiac, David FincherStarting off as a music video director, David Fincher has gone on to become one of Hollywood's great, visionary directors with a cool, perfectionist style like none other.’s true crime drama about the series of murders in the 1960s and 1970s. That film managed to find drama in the investigation, parsing out clues, leading its characters right up to the edge of a breakthrough before, inevitably, snatching it away from them. The film mines tension from the lack of progress, and then spikes it with moments where some key piece of evidence, or some scary moment, occurs. That’s what The Town that Dreaded Sundown needed, a case that could lend itself to that format, but the film never finds that in the true story of the Texarkana Moonlight Murders that it (loosely) bases its story upon.

The other side is the slasher sequences, the horror of watching a hulking guy go after teenage lovers to murder them. These, too, are a mixed bag but that’s because the filmmakers clearly weren’t sure where the line was just yet. Again, if we go back to Black Christmas, that film was considered positively shocking for the way it approached its murders. That kind of content wasn’t really shown in American theaters, not regularly, and people weren’t primed for it. You can feel the filmmakers restraining themselves, trying to toe up to a line for shock value without going over it, and this works to the detriment of the horror sequences.

The problem is that they are all generally pretty bloodless. There’s only so many times you can see some scream, without running away or trying to fight someone off, all to lead up to the camera cutting away before we see any stabbing or other kind of killing, before you just get bored. There’s a formula to most of the kills in the film, and it drains the shock and energy from what could be brutal moments. I understand them not wanting to glorify a real series of murders, but the filmmakers tried so hard to not be shocking that they ended up being boring instead.

Really, though, the film’s lack of consistent tone is what does the movie in. To go from horror sequences to cop drama to weird moments of over-the-top levity, to circle back around and do it all again, it leaves the audience listing from side to side without ever getting settled in for the ride. You can keep your audience off-center without wild tonal shifts just by making the story shocking and twisty, but instead we have a film that simply doesn’t know what it wants to be and never finds it by the time the credits roll.

But it was 1976 and at that point the genre didn’t really exist yet. I’m willing to forgive this film some since it was made by people trying to figure out what worked and what they could get away with. The Town that Dreaded Sundown isn’t a particularly good movie, but it was a noble effort to try and make something in a genre that was still getting its feet under it. I doubt I’ll ever go back and watch the movie again but I am glad I saw it once just so I could understand better the evolution of horror from Black Christmas to Halloween and what came between. The Town that Dreaded Sundown is an in-betweener film, something to set a guidepost as much to say “do this” as “don’t do that”. This film had to crawl, and make mistakes, and fuck up a ton, all so movies like Halloween could then come along a avoid all the mistakes while they spirited to greatness.