Texarkana Moonlight Murders

Texarkana, 1946: the Phantom Killer strikes. He hunts the lovers' lanes. He may visit your farm late at night. Before his reign of terror ends, this hooded ghost will kill five victims. The good people of Texarkana will live in fear. Law enforcement will come up empty-handed time after time. And, in 1976, the pseudo-documentary The Town That Dreaded Sundown tells their story. First off, great title. I rented this movie years ago on VHS. The sound quality was horrible. But the scratchy yellow print only added to the grittiness of the story. There are lots of reasons to seek it out. Ben Johnson as a Texas Ranger, for one. See Gilligan's Island's Mary Ann (Dawn Wells) get attacked. The killer is scary and raw. It's more Dragnet than Halloween. The vibe of the pic is lurid, tabloid, and rural at its core. A few comic sequences don't work at all. But the trashy, drive-in, fun-o-meter dives into the red most of the time. Chilling. That mask! That breathing! That trombone! By the way, the Phantom Killer was never caught.

The Andromeda Strain

Early Michael Crichton is the best, and none come better than 1969's The Andromeda Strain. Taut, chilling, and totally believable -- Crichton's breakout science fiction/techno/medical thriller holds up over forty years after it was written. Crichton presents the story as a false document, which is one reason it doesn't feel dated despite revolutions in biology and medicine. It reads like a bio-nightmare from another time, yet its horrors are just as scary and relevant today. Robert Wise's excellent film adaptation holds up equally well (forget about the TV remake, trust me). I once watched the Wise film in a bar in Grinnell, IA with a couple of townies after I had finished my final exams early. A great way to unwind. I haven't seen Soderbergh's Contagion yet. But, as far as bio-terror fiction goes, it will be hard to top the Crichton/Wise efforts for style, tension, and pure entertainment.