The Town that Dreaded Sundown (2014)

The Town That Dreaded Sundown arrives as a metafictional sequel to a 1976 drive-in relic, and it conducts itself with the grim self-awareness of a slasher that has read too many slasher screenplays. Alfonso Gomez-Rejon directs with real style, all long tracking shots and ominous Texarkana dusk, while Ryan Murphy and Jason Blum hover in the production credits like two producers who found a weird old movie and decided to try something. The premise, a copycat Phantom stalking a town that already made a movie about its own murders, is clever enough. The execution is a Scream derivative in a ten-gallon hat.

On the matter of social consciousness, the ledger is thin. Jami, our final girl, investigates the killings with competence, which is standard genre furniture and not a manifesto. Supporting performers of color appear and are simply absorbed into the genre machinery, no comment offered, no comment required. A brief same-sex encounter between two band members precedes their dispatch, an inclusion that registers as slasher fodder instead of statement. The film's one genuine act of revisionism is narrative: it invents a forgotten sixth victim, a metafictional flourish about who gets remembered, not an argument about history. There is no climate anxiety here, no class war, no sermon on bodies or brains. The Phantom kills for remembrance, not for ideology.

Which leaves us with a tidy, low-yield specimen. The film wants to be about memory and small-town suffocation, and it says so aloud in a third-act monologue, but it never mounts a podium. It is too busy arranging its own twist. A pleasant, stylish, faintly hollow exercise, and a reminder that a movie can be meta without being preachy. The classification is straightforward. The town dreaded sundown. The culture wars did not come up.

{"thematic_tags": ["sequel"]}