By Bradley Hanson.

65 years after a masked serial killer terrorized the small town of Texarkana, the so-called ‘moonlight murders’ begin again.

Alfonso Gomez-Rejon has crafted a meta-horror film akin to Wes Craven’s Scream franchise – it’s self-aware and acknowledges the existence of the 1976 original, even basing the narrative around it and paying homage to the original mythology. It’s more a hybrid-sequel and this makes for refreshing viewing given the over-saturation of today’s cash-grabbing reimagining’s.

The sex = death trope remains from the original, relying on the cautionary tales that if you’re good and chaste you won’t fall foul of the Phantom Killer. It’s easy to see the nods to Urban Legend in its histrionic recanting of the terror of the past or Texas Chainsaw Massacre with its rustic, backwoods setting.

The gore is plentiful and certainly pulls no punches, each kill upping the ante. It is in the third act however, that the film begins to come undone – resorting back to the usual Hollywood stalk-and-slash. The whodunit motif has obviously been done to death, and sadly it’s quite easy to establish who indeed did it from quite early on.

The film is well shot and tightly edited, there’s a snappy style that immediately grabs your attention. Gomez-Rejon has since gone on to direct Me And Earl And The Dying Girl, the Sundance breakout hit which started a bidding war, leading the film securing the largest fee paid in Sundance history (scheduled for release this summer through 20th Century Fox) so it’s clear that he is far more than a one-trick pony.

The Town That Dreaded Sundown is released 17th of April by Metrodome.

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