In Charles B. Pierce’s proto-slasher film, sound takes center stage alongside a monstrous murderer who was never caught
An unspoken agreement between horror film creators and viewers says that once the creepy violin notes begin, the audience is to provide rapt attention to every detail — every shadow, every creaking floorboard, every tiny whisper of wind — as the soundtrack builds, fades to nothing, then HELLO! Jump scare over. These applause-sign-like cues are a basic linguistic function of horror that thrive on audience participation. But try watching Psycho or Halloween on mute. Without the obligatory crescendos leading to their iconic moments the jumps and scares almost certainly fall flat.
Sometimes the most effective way for a film to invoke fear is by ditching the expected cues altogether. In The Town That Dreaded Sundown (1976), the most infamous scene involves the burlap-sack masked Phantom Killer murdering a teenage girl with a jury-rigged trombone. From a purely visual standpoint, the Phantom checks every requirement for a memorable villain. His eyes bulge forth from the crude slits in the burlap, blaring with the rage of a recently castrated bull. Without a mouth hole cut in his mask, the Phantom’s breath not only becomes the most unnerving aspect of his character, it also becomes the propulsive force of his attacks. As objectively horrifying as it is to see a high schooler with mascara tears plodding down her cheeks be repeatedly stabbed in the back by a hulking man who converted her instrument into a weapon, the most haunting occurrence from the attack is not the sight itself. Instead, the sounds the Phantom Killer creates in the process are what stick out as the defining horror. Some of the most foul musical notes ever captured on film come from that trombone. He empties his lungs through the mouthpiece with each stab; he retracts the slide with gulping inhales that radiate violence from a cellular level. With all of this going on, it may take a second viewing to realize that this scene uses no music or non-diegetic flourishes to build terror. In a nearly silent scene, the notes that emanate from the instrument are little more than rockets of hot air shot through a cold horn, a hollow buzzing that personifies the desperation of his random attacks.
It’s these notes that freeze Texarkana, Arkansas, in The Town That Dreaded Sundown.
Based on the unsolved 1946 case of the Texarkana Moonlight Murders, The Town That Dreaded Sundown centers on a post-World War II Texarkana police force as it follows dead-end leads about the Phantom Killer, whose vicious attacks have paralyzed the town after nightfall. Aside from a possible lunar pattern of targeting teenagers parked in lovers lanes, the investigators have no idea when, where or how he may strike next. His at-large presence gradually shuts the town down. Citizens demand personal police protection for their daily errands; gun stores run out of guns; locksmiths can’t meet all of their appointments. As the film’s narrator summarizes, the townsfolk share one chief concern: “Am I, or someone close to me, his next victim?”
The film’s use of sound is its greatest attribute. These attacks take place in a vacuum where there is no pomp or Hollywood gloss; the assaults are presented in a dressed-down fashion that shows the Phantom to be as desperate as his kills are disturbing. Without even a score to latch onto, every drop of rain, every boot stomp, scream and thump during the murder scenes envelopes you in a helpless trance. Much like leaving a dark theater and returning to blinding daylight, the sensory deprivation is an unrelenting force that temporarily stuns you until the soundtrack returns.
In his first attack, he sneaks up on a couple parked in the pouring rain. The girl thinks she hears something moving outside, but before they have time to react, the Phantom pops open the hood and rips out pieces of the engine. As the camera zooms to his face, his breath again becomes a visual force as the mask pulls against his lips and propels away. You feel every molecule his breath moves. The absence of music becomes most clear when he’s attempting to drag them out of the car. For a few quick seconds, the camera zooms out to show the car from the main road. Rain covers a muffled scream, showing that even from a short distance, no matter how loud you scream, no help is coming — you’re nothing more than a blip of white noise drowned out by the falling rain.
The killer begins to expand his hunting grounds beyond the backroads and into the outskirts of town with increasingly random attacks. Police sting attempts go awry. Characters are killed as soon as they’re introduced. Viewers are given no chance to grow attached to these people on screen. Their fates are sealed as soon as an ominous dateline appears. Simply put, the film allows you nothing to root for. This non-participatory horror style creates an atmosphere in which all you can do is sit back and passively accept their fate. Unlike so many horror films, any will to scream at the characters to run is evaporated as soon as the killer rears his crazed eyes.
But between the moments of terror come strange comedic interludes. Few films ride the crests between sheer terror and awkward slapstick comedy quite like The Town That Dreaded Sundown. It mercilessly bounces between gruesome murders and godawful gags that create a disorienting guise over the film’s dark core. Director Charles B. Pierce was not afraid to insert Keystone Cop-like police chases — or appear in the film as the bumbling patrolman A.C. “Sparkplug” Benson, for that matter — soon after murder scenes to drop all lingering tension. But these odd diversions aid the horror elements, purposefully or not, to catch the audience with its guard down when the killer strikes. It becomes a police comedy and a high school drama for longer stretches than anticipated. The police deploy armed officers as couples on stakeouts hoping to lure the Phantom out. Sparkplug dons makeup, his finest hat and dress, a Tommy gun and one overinflated balloon boob. Sergeant Griffin (Jimmy Clem) decides to cuddle up to make the “date” look less like a stakeout and pops one of Sparkplug’s balloons in the process. The scene is so disarming that when it cuts to the school dance your perception of the film has skewed to comedy. Then every time the Phantom returns he’s stronger, more deranged, more lethal. With this fluid sense of mood and pacing, the pivots back into horror are stark heel turns that enhance the killer’s ability to strike fear into a town’s collective gut in a matter of seconds. It hooks you with the happy, then drags you through the mud when the killer attacks.
Fear and dread turn to desperation when the national media follows famed Texas Ranger J.D. Morales (Ben Johnson) into the quiet town to cover the case. His endgame is simple: “I plan on catching him. Or killing him.” Soon a cash reward is offered for information leading to the Phantom’s arrest. Multiple people claim to be the killer. Rumors overflow. Sparkplug drives a car into a pond. Despite a city-wide curfew at night, teenagers still park on backroads with the gumption to believe that nothing could ever happen to them. Awful things like that only happen in movies, they seem to say. And perhaps that’s why the killings ring so brutally true. The non-participatory assaults don’t feel like movie killings. By stripping away all of the Hollywood aspects during the attacks there is no dissociation from reality to rely on. The Phantom’s victims are mostly helpless, and they can’t do much but listen to his breathing as he decides their fate.
In reality, the attacks played out differently. Whereas in the film, the only sounds from the killer are his belabored breaths and screams, the actual Phantom spoke through his mask. Of his first surviving male victim, he demanded him to “take off [his] fucking pants” while shining a flashlight in his eyes. The film portrays him as a biter who chews on women’s breasts and backs, but a doctor specifies he does not rape any of his victims. The real Phantom sexually assaulted at least one victim with the barrel of his pistol, cracked her boyfriend’s skull open and put him in a coma for four days. Between February and May, 1946, he wounded three people and murdered five, including shooting a 15-year-old saxophonist in the head and the heart. Her 16-year-old boyfriend was shot four times and died on the side of the road crawling for help. Another couple, aged 29 and 17, were both shot in the back of the head while parked together. Then a married couple was attacked in their home, and as the film accurately depicts, the husband was shot through a window while reading the newspaper. The wife was shot in the face twice, but she survived after she managed to escape to a neighbor’s house.
Most experts believe the killer was Youell Swinney, a man with a previous record of robbery, assault, counterfeiting and car theft. He was arrested as a suspect but never formally charged as the killer. According to the Texarkana Gazette, Swinney told the arresting officer who nabbed him for attempting to sell a stolen car in June 1946, “Hell, I know that you want me for more than just stealing cars.” He also asked if he would “get the chair,” an extreme punishment for car theft. His wife, Peggy Swinney, was also arrested after being discovered in connection with a stolen car related to one of the murders. She provided inconsistent but detailed evidence to investigators that he was the killer, but as his spouse, she was not forced to testify against him in court. Swinney never admitted to anything — even after the police dosed him with enough truth serum to knock him out before he could say a word. Other suspects remain, but James Presley’s 2014 book, The Phantom Killer: Unlocking the Mystery of the Texarkana Serial Murders: A Story of a Town in Terror, attempts to prove Swinney was the definite culprit.
Swinney spent years behind bars, but not for the killings. He died of cancer in 1994.
But perhaps the most troubling part of the events that inspired this film lie in how it is remembered at its point of origin. Every year the city of Texarkana hosts a Halloween screening of The Town That Dreaded Sundown at Spring Lake Park, a location where two teenagers were shot and killed on April 13, 1946. The thought of tossing a picnic blanket over a patch of grass where the murders could possibly have occurred in order to watch a film about said murders is so dark that you almost can’t help but laugh. It begs the question of at what point does an urban legend based on actual blood simply become a fabric of a town’s foundation? Maybe it’s when it seems so distant that laughter seems like a passable reaction to the crimes. Naivety and self-assured safety were as much of a villain as the Phantom. But as the film suggests many times, the killer was never apprehended and thick-soled brown boots appear in the theater line at the end of the film. The ideal horror viewing experience raises the adrenaline, collapses your comfort zone and ultimately reassures you that you’re going to be just fine, but where does the line between fictionalized horror and a literal reign of terror meet? Wherever it is, there probably isn’t a soundtrack.
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