I never saw the original The Town That Dreaded Sundown, but it possibly would have helped. I thought that the 2014 version was a remake, but apparently The Town That Dreaded Sundown (2014) is a meta-sequel, a movie in which both the original movie and the murders that the original movie was based on exist within the movie. The titular town borders Texas and Arkansas, and every year, they watch the original movie at Halloween at a drive-in, but the Phantom killer is back and so is the fear. The Town That Dreaded Sundown (2014) mainly follows the female protagonist who survives an encounter with the madman and at the Phantom’s urging, decides it is responsibility to uncover the killer’s real motivation and help the town to repent of its sins.
The Town That Dreaded Sundown (2014) is supposed to be set in the twenty-first century, but it had a great retro 70s feel and a sumptuous aesthetic. The cast of The Town That Dreaded Sundown (2014) was superb: Veronica Cartwright, Gary Cole, Edward Herrmann, Denis O’Hare, but alas they only play supporting roles.
Is The Town That Dreaded Sundown (2014) the first slasher film to punish hetero and homosexual sex outside of marriage with murder? The heroine’s deceased parents felt like a dangling thread that was going to be used like Sidney’s in Scream, but it goes nowhere. The heroine rebounded a little quickly from watching her date die, but to be fair, he wasn’t her boyfriend. Ultimately the end is so annoying that you will be angry that you even watched The Town That Dreaded Sundown (2014).

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When I initially saw Spencer Treat Clark, I thought he was the killer. He has a creepy wax doll face appearance when he was parked in the secluded area, but I thought he died. Instead there were two killers, and he WAS one of them. Booooooo! It does not make any sense. If the second killer wanted everyone to know that his father was murdered, how does framing the heroine do that? And once you shot her grandmother from faraway while she was still near her and she would not have gun powder residue on her hands, framing her would not be possible. The whole movie was retroactively trash.