Two things they attempted here, one is the usual slasher where a skulking presence moves about in the small town after dark, haunting the whole of space. It offers up the blood sacrifice the genre demands, the Texan locations are nice, a sparse setting for the knife to slash.
But they also had the ambition to not just redo the same horror as every other thing on the shelf but to layer that stage where horror unfolds so that we get the mechanisms that give rise to it. This is a sequel of sorts to the 70s film by the same name that was about the real Texarkana murders that shook the place in the 40s.
So this becomes layered here as events unfolding in a place where gruesome reality of that day is relived each year through fiction, re-entered, thus neutered, through fiction; the original film playing on a drive-in on Halloween night as this one begins. The events aim to relive the original murders so that forgetful spectators will remember again the real impact, this at the behest of a new murderous narrator who fastidiously restages the real thing around town.
The heroine is chosen by him - as the narrative demands - to be the first victim who survives to tell the story, herself an aspiring journalist looking to document truth. So she finds out that it's all happening because a part of the original narrative was omitted in the telling, not given its place in the fiction.
So this is more ambitious than its ilk. One obvious source is Scream. A less obvious is Citizen Kane (don't jeer). The camera tries to swoop into rooms like Welles had it do, there's Kanesque deep focus, even that a journalist is looking to piece together truth from narration we might see as not wholly accidental.
It's not enough to understand Welles as technique he mastered or topics he illustrated though. You must now what for. The filmmaker doesn't so we get obtrusive technique, structure without narrative depth, views without import, in the end it's all strung together in a film schoolish way, and this goes back and even ruins the slasher and sense of place.
It ends with one of the most inane twists.
