NEWS – The Town That Dreaded Sundown Director Passed Away Earlier This Month

Published on: 26th March, 2010

NEWS - The Town That Dreaded Sundown Director Passed Away Earlier This Month  | read this item

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I don’t know how we didn’t catch wind of this one but I have just discovered that Charles B. Pierce, perhaps most famous to horror fans for his 1976 proto-slasher classic The Town That Dreaded Sundown, passed away earlier this month. Having originally begun in the film industry as a set decorator on a string of B-movies, he made his directorial debut in 1972 with the cult documentary-style flick The Legend of Boggy Creek.

Although his later career would fail to live up to its earlier promise, Pierce will be forever remembered for The Town That Dreaded Sundown, which was based on a spree of murders in Texas during the 1940s and told of a killer known only as The Phantom terrorizing a small community. It would be released a year before John Carpenter’s seminal classic Halloween and three years before the slasher boom. Much has been made of its influence on Steve Miner’s 1981 horror Friday the 13th Part 2, in which its antagonist, Jason Voorhees, would resemble the killer from Pierce’s movie.

His last project as director was 1998’s Chasing the Wind. Pierce died on March 5 in Dover, Tennessee, apparently due to natural causes. He was seventy-one years old.

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