The Town That Dreaded Sundown surpasses another 1970s slasher movie, Halloween, with how it capitalizes on the “true story” aspect and depicts a fictional take on true crimes.

John Carpenter’s Halloween is considered to be a pivotal piece of horror cinema that helped inspire many of the basics of the slasher genre. Halloween is an incredible exercise in minimalism, and "The Shape"—also known by his real name, Michael Myers—is still seen as one of the horror genre’s most frightening villains. As director John Carpenter is a connoisseur of cinema, there are a handful of movies that he turned to for inspiration when cultivating both the look and style for Halloween, with 1976’s The Town That Dreaded Sundown being one of them.

Related: Everything We Know About Halloween Kills

The Town That Dreaded Sundown is a slasher movie from 1976 that was directed by Charles B. Pierce and set in the quaint, rural town of Texarkana, Arkansas. A string of murders by a masked assailant known as the Phantom Killer throws the community into a frenzy. It’s easy to see parallels between the communities of Haddonfield, Illinois and Arkansas’ Texarkana. It also feels like there are traces of the menacing Phantom Killer within Halloween’s foreboding figure of Michael Myers, right down to their masks having similar aesthetics. However, one area where the films differ and The Town That Dreaded Sundown actually surpasses Halloween is how it frames its murders around a chilling true story.

The Town That Dreaded Sundown 1976 Phantom Killer Poster

The actual murders within The Town That Dreaded Sundown are frightening, and there are plenty of well-constructed set pieces from the Phantom Killer’s point of view, but they pale in comparison to Carpenter’s work in Halloween. The Town That Dreaded Sundown really stands out with how the movie's Phantom Killer is based on a real serial killer that plagued the Texarkana, Texas region during the 1940s. The film’s marketing goes to painful efforts to illustrate that the threat in this horror movie comes from a real place. The film’s narration proudly boasts that the events of the film have been altered, but are real. The movie’s poster even threatens that the Phantom Killer “still lurks the streets of Texarkana, Ark”, which had residents of the region threaten the film’s director, but to no avail. The Town That Dreaded Sundown taps into the real fear surrounding the unsolved 1946 Texarkana Moonlight Murders, and uses them to its full advantage.

Halloween creates a formidable killer with Michael Myers, but nobody believes that he’s out in the real world and could actually get them. The Town That Dreaded Sundown relishes that uncomfortable ambiguity, and keeps the audience scared even after the movie ends. The film is shot in a very amateur nature with cinéma vérité aesthetics, which further amplify the “true nature” aspect, especially with how it’s actually shot in Texarkana. It’s a tactic not unlike what’s done in the eternally creepy Texas Chain Saw Massacre, which is another horror movie with which The Town That Dreaded Sundown shares a lot in common. In the end, Halloween’s Michael Myers gains a certain strength because he’s a fictional character, but The Town That Dreaded Sundown still found a new way to really get under the audience’s skin.

Next: The Town That Dreaded Sundown: Every Difference Between The Original & Remake

Key Release Dates