Movies
[Review] ‘Town That Dreaded Sundown’ Is a Mixed Bag
Being of… well, a certain age, I have vivid memories from the 1976 premiere of Charles B. Pierce’s gritty, low-budget thriller The Town That Dreaded Sundown. Not of the film itself – I was too young to see R-rated movies at the time – but the radio and television ads, which were scary enough to brand themselves instantly on my brain, to the point where I could recognize them quickly enough to flip the channel before the horrors revealed themselves again. When I finally had a chance to see the film during one of its many Cinemax airings in the early ’80s, my fear of horror movies had long since evolved into fascination, then undying passion… but the image of the “Phantom Killer” smashing through a victim’s screen door still creeped me out enough to make me close my bedroom window even on the hottest summer nights. That hulking, heavy-breathing goon, clad in workman’s overalls, his face shrouded in a burlap sack (a wardrobe choice which no doubt influenced Jason Voorhees’ look in Friday the 13th Part 2), haunted a fair share of nightmares… and, as the original ad campaign proclaimed, the nameless, faceless monster was still at large!
When I revisited the film recently, I found that much of the raw terror remained intact (despite some clunky bits of exposition and silly comic relief), and realized that, through the lens of nostalgia, I loved it even more. So I was intrigued – a and a bit concerned – when I’d heard Blumhouse’s new remake/reboot/re-whatever of Sundown was adopting the whole “meta” approach that so many ironically-inclined filmmakers have been embracing lately. I wasn’t sure what to think of that prospect, but I knew I had to find out. What I discovered, at a screening of the film at this year’s Beyond Fest, was indeed intense and disturbing… but not quite as compelling as I’d hoped.
First off, I have to say director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon and producer Ryan Murphy (who impressed genre TV audiences and Emmy judges alike with their work on American Horror Story) and screenwriter Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa not only did their homework on Pierce’s film and the unsolved 1946 crimes which inspired it, but also incorporated Sundown‘s lasting imprint on popular culture – particularly that of Texarkana, Texas, where the first film was set (though not all the actual murders took place there). It seems that town no longer dreads Sundown, but embraces it as their own, until recently hosting a popular screening of the film each Halloween… and that event becomes the lynchpin for this version, which is neither entirely a remake nor a sequel, but a self-referential tale involving a new rash of murders by someone with the same MO as the Phantom.
I’m not down on meta-style reboots, or even horror remakes in general, provided the filmmakers find a clever and original spin on the concept, and I will say Gomez-Rejon & company have created an intriguing and often very scary twist in the tale… but while it works pretty well up to a point, their take on Sundown falls a bit too quickly into the usual horror/slasher tropes to truly refresh the Phantom story. I’m not knocking the slasher formula itself – it’s one of my favorite horror subgenres – but Pierce already used that framework to excellent effect before slashers even had a name, with the added spice of it being a period piece and based on a real-life case. That’s a damn hard act to follow, and more often than not, this version fails to stake its own claim on Phantom turf; it doesn’t help that scenes from the original are often juxtaposed with their modern equivalents, though it does lend itself to the odd idea that the movie has somehow come unstuck in time.
The film begins with a stylish retro flourish at the annual Sundown drive-in screening in Texarkana, leading to a brutal murder by an apparent copycat Phantom. From here the film actually takes a similar approach to Human Centipede 2, establishing a modern-day killer obsessed with recreating the events in the original film, and striving to improve on them. To this end, all the memorable kill scenes from the original are re-staged, but where the first film was fairly graphic for its time, the violence here is ramped up to the extreme, taking advantage of the MPAA’s surprisingly loose restrictions on explicit gore. The best example is the infamous “trombone murder,” which in 1976 was pretty disturbing for its weirdness alone; in the updated version, however, it’s unsettling on a whole new level that I won’t spoil here.
Another plus is the excellent cast – from young lead Addison Timlin as a girl whose innocence has just been violently ripped from her (or has it?), to some seasoned genre vets (including the always excellent Veronica Cartwright) – and they handle the material nicely, though the script saddles our heroine with a bit too much amateur sleuthing and hand-wringing emotional torment; once again, these are slasher tropes that can be fun in their familiarity, but not so much when over-cooked. Gomez-Rejon’s skill with crafting a skewed, unnatural world was proven many times on AHS, and he’s on top of his visual game here, keeping his camera in constant motion and disorienting the audience with jarring angles, floating POV shots and distorted lenses (one extreme high-angle shot of an outdoor chase is beautifully creepy). It’s unfortunate that the script can’t reach the same bar – particularly when it comes to the tired twist ending, which seems to exist simply because the filmmakers assumed audiences would expect it.
While The Town That Dreaded Sundown definitely has its share of disappointments, I enjoyed the grim mood and surreal, nightmarish atmosphere, and the characters were compelling enough to keep me invested in their plight. As a long-time fan of the original, I wasn’t put off by what the filmmakers tried to do with this one… I just don’t think they entirely succeeded.
Here’s what we know about Longlegs so far. It’s coming in July of 2024, it’s directed by Osgood Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daughter), and it features Maika Monroe (It Follows) as an FBI agent who discovers a personal connection between her and a serial killer who has ties to the occult. We know that the serial killer is going to be played by none other than Nicolas Cage and that the marketing has been nothing short of cryptic excellence up to this point.
At the very least, we can assume NEON’s upcoming film is going to be a dark, horror-fueled hunt for a serial killer. With that in mind, let’s take a look at five disturbing serial killers-versus-law-enforcement stories to get us even more jacked up for Longlegs.
MEMORIES OF MURDER (2003)
This South Korean film directed by Oscar-winning director Bong Joon-ho (Parasite) is a wild ride. The film features a handful of cops who seem like total goofs investigating a serial killer who brutally murders women who are out and wearing red on rainy evenings. The cops are tired, unorganized, and border on stoner comedy levels of idiocy. The movie at first seems to have a strange level of forgiveness for these characters as they try to pin the murders on a mentally handicapped person at one point, beating him and trying to coerce him into a confession for crimes he didn’t commit. A serious cop from the big city comes down to help with the case and is able to instill order.
But still, the killer evades and provokes not only the police but an entire country as everyone becomes more unstable and paranoid with each grizzly murder and sex crime.
I’ve never seen a film with a stranger tone than Memories of Murder. A movie that deals with such serious issues but has such fallible, seemingly nonserious people at its core. As the film rolls on and more women are murdered, you realize that a lot of these faults come from men who are hopeless and desperate to catch a killer in a country that – much like in another great serial killer story, Citizen X – is doing more harm to their plight than good.
Major spoiler warning: What makes Memories of Murder somehow more haunting is that it’s loosely based on a true story. It is a story where the real-life killer hadn’t been caught at the time of the film’s release. It ends with our main character Detective Park (Song Kang-ho), now a salesman, looking hopelessly at the audience (or judgingly) as the credits roll. Over sixteen years later the killer, Lee Choon Jae, was found using DNA evidence. He was already serving a life sentence for another murder. Choon Jae even admitted to watching the film during his court case saying, “I just watched it as a movie, I had no feeling or emotion towards the movie.”
In the end, Memories of Murder is a must-see for fans of the subgenre. The film juggles an almost slapstick tone with that of a dark murder mystery and yet, in the end, works like a charm.
CURE (1997)
If you watched 2023’s Hypnotic and thought to yourself, “A killer who hypnotizes his victims to get them to do his bidding is a pretty cool idea. I only wish it were a better movie!” Boy, do I have great news for you.
In Cure (spoilers ahead), a detective (Koji Yakusho) and forensic psychologist (Tsuyoshi Ujiki) team up to find a serial killer who’s brutally marking their victims by cutting a large “X” into their throats and chests. Not just a little “X” mind you but a big, gross, flappy one.
At each crime scene, the murderer is there and is coherent and willing to cooperate. They can remember committing the crimes but can’t remember why. Each of these murders is creepy on a cellular level because we watch the killers act out these crimes with zero emotion. They feel different than your average movie murder. Colder….meaner.
What’s going on here is that a man named Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara) is walking around and somehow manipulating people’s minds using the flame of a lighter and a strange conversational cadence to hypnotize them and convince them to murder. The detectives eventually catch him but are unable to understand the scope of what’s happening before it’s too late.
If you thought dealing with a psychopathic murderer was hard, imagine dealing with one who could convince you to go home and murder your wife. Not only is Cure amazingly filmed and edited but it has more horror elements than your average serial killer film.
MANHUNTER (1986)
In the first-ever Hannibal Lecter story brought in front of the cameras, Detective Will Graham (William Petersen) finds his serial killers by stepping into their headspace. This is how he caught Hannibal Lecter (played here by Brian Cox), but not without paying a price. Graham became so obsessed with his cases that he ended up having a mental breakdown.
In Manhunter, Graham not only has to deal with Lecter playing psychological games with him from behind bars but a new serial killer in Francis Dolarhyde (in a legendary performance by Tom Noonan). One who likes to wear pantyhose on his head and murder entire families so that he can feel “seen” and “accepted” in their dead eyes. At one point Lecter even finds a way to gift Graham’s home address to the new killer via personal ads in a newspaper.
Michael Mann (Heat, Thief) directed a film that was far too stylish for its time but that fans and critics both would have loved today in the same way we appreciate movies like Nightcrawler or Drive. From the soundtrack to the visuals to the in-depth psychoanalysis of an insanely disturbed protagonist and the man trying to catch him. We watch Graham completely lose his shit and unravel as he takes us through the psyche of our killer. Which is as fascinating as it is fucked.
Manhunter is a classic case of a serial killer-versus-detective story where each side of the coin is tarnished in their own way when it’s all said and done. As Detective Park put it in Memories of Murder, “What kind of detective sleeps at night?”
INSOMNIA (2002)
Maybe it’s because of the foggy atmosphere. Maybe it’s because it’s the only film in Christopher Nolan’s filmography he didn’t write as well as direct. But for some reason, Insomnia always feels forgotten about whenever we give Nolan his flowers for whatever his latest cinematic achievement is.
Whatever the case, I know it’s no fault of the quality of the film, because Insomnia is a certified serial killer classic that adds several unique layers to the detective/killer dynamic. One way to create an extreme sense of unease with a movie villain is to cast someone you’d never expect in the role, which is exactly what Nolan did by casting the hilarious and sweet Robin Williams as a manipulative child murderer. He capped that off by casting Al Pacino as the embattled detective hunting him down.
This dynamic was fascinating as Williams was creepy and clever in the role. He was subdued in a way that was never boring but believable. On the other side of it, Al Pacino felt as if he’d walked straight off the set of 1995’s Heat and onto this one. A broken and imperfect man trying to stop a far worse one.
Aside from the stellar acting, Insomnia stands out because of its unique setting and plot. Both working against the detective. The investigation is taking place in a part of Alaska where the sun never goes down. This creates a beautiful, nightmare atmosphere where by the end of it, Pacino’s character is like a Freddy Krueger victim in the leadup to their eventual, exhausted death as he runs around town trying to catch a serial killer while dealing with the debilitating effects of insomnia. Meanwhile, he’s under an internal affairs investigation for planting evidence to catch another child killer and accidentally shoots his partner who he just found out is about to testify against him. The kicker here is that the killer knows what happened that fateful day and is using it to blackmail Pacino’s character into letting him get away with his own crimes.
If this is the kind of “what would you do?” intrigue we get with the story from Longlegs? We’ll be in for a treat. Hoo-ah.
FALLEN (1998)
Fallen may not be nearly as obscure as Memories of Murder or Cure. Hell, it boasts an all-star cast of Denzel Washington, John Goodman, Donald Sutherland, James Gandolfini, and Elias Koteas. But when you bring it up around anyone who has seen it, their ears perk up, and the word “underrated” usually follows. And when it comes to the occult tie-ins that Longlegs will allegedly have? Fallen may be the most appropriate film on this entire list.
In the movie, Detective Hobbs (Washington) catches vicious serial killer Edgar Reese (Koteas) who seems to place some sort of curse on him during Hobbs’ victory lap. After Reese is put to death via electric chair, dead bodies start popping up all over town with his M.O., eventually pointing towards Hobbs as the culprit. After all, Reese is dead. As Hobbs investigates he realizes that a fallen angel named Azazel is possessing human body after human body and using them to commit occult murders. It has its eyes fixated on him, his co-workers, and family members; wrecking their lives or flat-out murdering them one by one until the whole world is damned.
Mixing a demonic entity into a detective/serial killer story is fascinating because it puts our detective in the unsettling position of being the one who is hunted. How the hell do you stop a demon who can inhabit anyone they want with a mere touch?!
Fallen is a great mix of detective story and supernatural horror tale. Not only are we treated to Denzel Washington as the lead in a grim noir (complete with narration) as he uncovers this occult storyline, but we’re left with a pretty great “what would you do?” situation in a movie that isn’t afraid to take the story to some dark places. Especially when it comes to the way the film ends. It’s a great horror thriller in the same vein as Frailty but with a little more detective work mixed in.
Look for Longlegs in theaters on July 12, 2024.
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