Charles Bryant Pierce (June 16, 1938 – March 5, 2010) was an American film director, screenwriter, producer, set decorator, cinematographer, and actor.

Pierce directed thirteen films over the span of 26 years, but is best known for his cult hits The Legend of Boggy Creek (1973) and The Town That Dreaded Sundown (1976).

An Arkansas resident most of his life, Pierce made his directorial debut with Boggy Creek, a faux documentary-style film inspired by the legend of the Bigfoot-like Fouke Monster.

Pierce followed that with several inexpensive, regional films set in the southern United States, including The Town That Dreaded Sundown, based on the true story of the Phantom Killer murders in Texarkana.

[4] There he was a childhood friend and neighbor of future film and television director Harry Thomason,[4] and the two made home movies together in their backyards using an old 8 mm camera.

[6] Pierce continued working in production jobs at television stations in Arkansas, Louisiana and Texas until 1969, when he moved to Texarkana, bought a 16 mm camera and started an advertising agency.

Pierce developed commercials for the company that played throughout the Southwestern United States, using mostly footage he shot of trucks on the highway and farming equipment being used.

[8][9] Prior to his directorial debut, Pierce worked as a set decorator for television shows like the Western series Hondo and for films like Waco (1966) and Coffy (1973).

[21] Several similarly styled films about strange and allegedly true phenomena were released in subsequent years due to success of The Legend of Boggy Creek.

[22] Julius E. "Smokey" Crabtree, a Fouke resident who appeared as himself in the film, became disgruntled with the production company and filed a lawsuit against Pierce and his financial supporters.

Following the success of The Legend of Boggy Creek, Pierce was encouraged to film a sequel, but resisted because he wanted to prove himself as a filmmaker rather than duplicate the same idea.

[19] He continued to make inexpensive regional films set in the southern United States, primarily targeting small-town and rural audiences.

It featured Slim Pickens and the first major performance of Jaclyn Smith, who went on to play Kelly Garrett in the television series Charlie's Angels.

[19] He received some criticism for the graphic violence portrayed in the film, particularly one scene where the killer ties a woman to a tree, attaches a knife to the end of a trombone, then repeatedly stabs her while playing the instrument.

[25] Pierce appeared in The Town That Dreaded Sundown as police Patrolman A.C. "Spark Plug" Benson, an idiotic comic relief character.

Working with a multimillion-dollar budget, Pierce shot the film in the Florida locations Hillsborough River State Park and New Port Richey.

[28] The next year he co-wrote and directed The Evictors (1979), another documentary-style horror film about a young couple who move into a rural Louisiana farmhouse and find their lives endangered by a series of strange events.

Pierce was inspired to write the script after reading a true story in a detective magazine about a Kansas family who murdered somebody trying to evict them from the property.

American International Pictures had been encouraging him to make a Boggy Creek sequel for years because they believed it would be financially profitable, but he was resistant to the idea.

In his own Boggy Creek II: And the Legend Continues, Pierce starred as an anthropologist who brings three students on an expedition into the bayou to track down the creature.

[24] Boggy Creek II was featured in a 1999 episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000, a comedy television series in which the characters watch and make jokes about bad films.

[24] In 1987, he directed Hawken's Breed, a Western film starring Peter Fonda as a drifter who meets and rescues a young Shawnee woman.

[24] It proved to be Pierce's final directorial effort, although he continued working as a set decorator for several television shows including MacGyver, Remington Steele, The Twilight Zone and Fresno, a Carol Burnett miniseries parodying prime time soap operas.

[24] Around 2008, while developing the horror film The Wild Man of the Navidad, directors Duane Graves and Justin Meeks sought out Pierce, who they cited as a major influence on their work.

[4] Director Harry Thomason, Pierce's childhood friend and neighbor, praised him for finding success independently at a time when the film industry was so controlled by major studios.

[4] Daniel Myrick, co-director of the documentary-style The Blair Witch Project (1999), said he was strongly influenced by The Legend of Boggy Creek, which was one of his favorite films growing up.

[15][22] Myrick said he and fellow Blair Witch director Eduardo Sánchez wanted to "tap into the primal fear generated by the fact-or-fiction format like Legend of Boggy Creek".

[39] Pierce briefly married Cindy Butler, who appeared in several of his movies - The Town That Dreaded Sundown, Grayeagle and Boggy Creek II: And the Legend Continues; they also later divorced.