– I had a compunction to try to do something in the horror genre and I started thinking about how our culture handles death; it’s different than in other societies. We have this central figure of a mortician. He dresses in dark clothing, he lurks behind doors, they do procedures on the bodies we don’t know about. The whole embalming thing, if you ever do any research on it, is pretty freaky. It all culminates in this grand funerary service production. It’s strange stuff. It just seemed like it would be a great area in which to make a film. ― Don Coscarelli
And speaking of strange stuff; something really, really strange is going on at the local Morningside Cemetery in a sleepy Oregon suburb. The 13-year-old boy, Mike (A. Michael Baldwin) can tell about a mysterious, elderly, tall, Ebenezer Scrooge’ish mortician, simply called The Tall Man (Angus Scrimm), who steals coffins, puts them in his hearse with his bare hands (!), and drives away. WTF. And yes, there’s a lot of WTF’s here, the whole franchise is a big fat WTF. After spying on him with binoculars, Mike hops on his scooter and follows him to a mansion. And if the place looks familiar, it’s the legendary Dunsmuir House. But that’s only the nice facade of something much more, well, sinister.
His big brother Jody (Bill Thornbury) doesn’t believe what Mike’s saying. That’s until Mike manages to cut of a finger of The Tall Man after his hand gets trapped between a door. Yellow blood spurts. Mike puts the finger in a small box, and as he opens it to show his brother, the finger is alive and crawls like a larva. Oki doki, I believe you! So… where do we go from here? Calling the cops? Yeah, right. The finger turns into a cheap-looking fly with toothpicks as teeth that ends up being shoved down the garbage disposal.
Anyway, Jody is now more than convinced and so is his bandmate and the local ice cream man, Reggie (Reggie Bannister), who makes it really clear as he’s saying while pointing his index finger in the air:
Okay. I see it, I see it all now. What we gotta do is we gotta snag that tall dude and stomp the shit out of him, and we’ll find out what the hell is going on up there. Yeah! We lay that sucker out flat and drive a stake right through his goddamn heart!
If it was just that simple, ’cause that mother’s strong, Mike says. Well, he’ll eventually realize that you should never underestimate a bald ice cream vendor guy with a ponytail. Shantae would agree with that.
And then we, of course, have the iconic crystal balls/spheres, an element that follows and gets some cool upgrades throughout the films. They’re the sentinel drones of The Tall Man, which simply flies straight to the victims and trespassers’ foreheads, drills into their skull and sucks all the blood from their brain. Gnarly. The head of Larry Fessenden would give a sphere a whole field day.
So, what exactly is a Phantasm? It’s The delusion of a distorted mind. A phantom. A spirit. A ghost. It’s what you yourself make it out to be. It can be all from grandpa Seth, Bigfoot, to the haunted skeletons in your closet. In other words, the franchise never gives us a clear answer or a satisfying conclusion, not even close. Only leaving more questions, just like a fever dream would. “I had this weird dream last night,“ ya know.
Don Coscarelli (also known for the alternative Elvis Presley’s coming-of-old-age biopic Bubba Ho-Tep) was only 23 years old when he wrote, directed, produced and edited his passion project Phantasm over the course of one year during chaotic weekends. The calling to make a horror movie came as a lightbolt over Coscarelli’s head when people jumped in their seats over a scene in his previous Halloween-themed comedy-drama film, Kenny & Company (1976). Scaring people is fun, eh? OoOoh yeah! The original plan was to make an adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, but the license had already been sold to Disney.
The original cut for Phantasm was three hours, and Coscarelli had zero plans for a sequel, nor to make another horror film. Which makes me assume that there would perhaps be a better conclusion somewhere in that runtime, lost in the editing, than the more cryptic puzzles we got in the sequels. Who knows.
The budget and its very limited resources are sometimes clearly visible at some points, especially the scene with the fly, which gives a prime example that not everything looks better in 4K. The film’s strengths are the rock-solid cinematography (also done by Coscarelli) and has a unique dark melancholic atmosphere where you almost get the sense that The Tall Man has sucked all the light from the surroundings. Everything feels dead and quiet and just off, as if the few characters we see here is trapped in some obscure purgatory, frozen in time. What’s real, what’s not. Is it all just a dream, or is it just the wind? And what in hell is that unearthly humming sound? Could it actually be the sound of hell itself? The theme track by Fred Myrow really stands out, which could be described as a more somber remix of John Carpenter’s Halloween.
The child actor at the time, A. Michael Baldwin does a good job here, as he, more or less, carries the whole film on his shoulders. The brother-dynamic between Mike and Jody is wholesome enough as they eventually team up to blast The Tall Man where he came from, wherever that is. Reggie also chimes in, who we get to see a lot more of in the sequels.
And that’s Phantasm for you – cryptic slowburn with eerie dreamlike surrealism, sprinkled with eccentric sci-fi elements and a handful of WTFs. Good night and don’t let The Tall Man bite.
Writer and director: Don Coscarelli
Country & year: USA, 1979
Actors: A. Michael Baldwin, Bill Thornbury, Reggie Bannister, Angus Scrimm, Kathy Lester, Terrie Kalbus, Kenneth V. Jones, Susan Harper, Lynn Eastman-Rossi, David Arntzen
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079714/
