Phantasm (1979)

Director: Don Coscarelli

Screenplay: Don Coscarelli

Cast: Angus Scrimm as The Tall Man; A. Michael Baldwin as Mike Pearson; Bill Thornbury as Jody Pearson; Reggie Bannister as Reggie; Kathy Lester as the Lady in Lavender; Bill Cone as Tommy; Mary Ellen Shaw as the Fortune Teller; Terrie Kalbus as the Fortune Teller's Granddaughter

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #139

Synopsis: Having lost his parents not that long before, Mike (A. Michael Baldwin) is worried his older brother Jody (Bill Thornbury) will leave him. This concern is amplified when he witnesses, after the funeral of one of Jody's friend, the undertaker (Angus Scrimm) lift the coffin from the open grave by himself and place it in a hearse. This "Tall Man" is a maleficent being, part of a sinister series of sights including hooded dwarfs, a mysterious woman in lavender (Kathy Lester) who seduces young men and kills them, and silver spheres that float in the air and produce harmful weapons from their forms. With his older brother Jody and Reggie (Reggie Bannister), the hippy iceman cream and friend of the brothers dragged into this by pure accident, Mike attempts to confront this horrible conspiracy at the funeral home in their home town.

And thus begins Phantasm, that rare franchise where even when a bigger budgeted sequel come to be, has been always in the hands of its original creator Don Coscarelli. Even when he passed directing what may be the final entry, Phantasm: Ravenger (2016), in favour for David Hartman to take the chair he has had direct involvement in all of the five films. Looking ahead, it's a question whether this franchise and his decision to make them a connected, large scale mythology is actually successful for me personally, as much of a risky gamble as would a studio milking the success of the first film their own way. What's interesting though is that, returning in 2016, this is the only franchise (excluding remakes and staying in one single world in chronological order) to have spanned from when most of these iconic horror films of the seventies and eighties first came from, American independent genre films or creations from very small studios and figures like New Line Cinema (A Nightmare On Elm Street) or Moustapha Akkad (Halloween). It has witnessed the boom of gory genre cinema in the eighties (Phantasm II), the decline in the early nineties (Phantasm III), the straight to video era (Phantasm IV), and now the retrospectives of these films, streaming culture, cult film viewings and a selective screen theatrical tour (Phantasm V). Whether the series works altogether depends on the viewer, but I appreciate the wide scale of time within American horror cinema it has passed through regardless of my final opinion on the collective franchise trajectory.

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The first can thankfully stand by itself, and what's fascinating is that, after its director first began by making a drama and a comedy for his two features, Coscarelli decided to make a horror movie that sincerely tackles death and the grieving process. Phantasm is a film which pushes at its obvious restrictions, that it story mainly has to take place around the funeral home but with the advantage that its tone is rich nonetheless. It's a unique film, obsessed with a premise that cuts into people with a real fear and predating Coscarelli's later film Bubba Ho-Tep (2002) that was about old men dealing with their own aging mortalities. With Phantasm however it's from the perspective of a young boy, Mike's journey through the film played out as much as a dream representing his fears of separation from his brother as it is real and morbid.

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With the advantage of how good the cast is - Angus Scrimm as the Tall Man, Baldwin and Thornbury, and Reggie Bannister who would become to Phantasm what Bruce Campbell would to the Evil Dead films - it plays like a nightmare from a young boy's perspective entirely. Where the source of evil is just a very tall undertaken who wears a black suit, a figure who merely walks calmly out of the shadows to snatch people away. Something that evokes primordial fears of childhood that grow more serious as one becomes a teenager. That shouldn't discount how fun the film is as well, as capable for humour and moments of character interaction which feel sincere and affable, but is a film whose atmospheric music by Fred Myrow and Malcolm Seagrave fits the already ethereal tone. That the film is openly more stranger than this, when the hooded dwarves and dimensional portals are involved, isn't a detriment to this but is a build up for a film that eventually starts to slide in and out of reality. So drastic at points it's difficult to tell what is merely Mike's anxieties and what's actually chasing him and the people close to him.

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Weird is apt as Phantasm in structure is a haze, shifting between dream sequences and narrative with unpredictability. As such a film unintentionally straying off narrative as its also done on purpose to represent the emotional concerns laying at its heart. That the film openly blurs genre is as much a factor. Part old gothic horror, the funeral horror like an Italian genre film setting but real architecture, to the older Fortune Teller who makes a brief appearance and places Mike through an actual supernatural encounter warning him of the future (and franchise long narrative) he would find himself in). Crashing into suburban American and then the sci-fi starts to abruptly appear as well adding to the bizarreness. I'd argue the later films pared this material a little bit too much down as there are details more rewarding here because of this unconventional potpourri of influences, details which show Phantasm's origins from the strange melting pot of seventies independent horror cinema but still rewarding, particularly the inclusion of the Lady of Lavender, a figure who could've been borrowed from an old turn of the century horror tale as a tempter of people to their doom, placed within a seventies modern small town and managing to be able to still seduce guys at the bar.

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With the late Angus Scrimm the centre of it, an older character actor who could've appeared in an old fifties western, this feels like a film fed from the old American b-movies from the forties onwards, taking its cues from a still untapped psychotronic well. One deep enough that it works effectively as much for psychological effect as well as being creepy in its oddness. Considering the importance of Mike's perspective as a character, ultimately the one whose viewpoint is in the middle of all this film's events, its appropriate in terms of a film dealing with fears of the mortal threads of life against the adolescent fever imagery that the material is barely touched upon in great detail, even the iconic silver spheres only seen twice or so, but has so much potency it lead to an iconic reputation.

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Personal Opinion:

A film that upon reflection for this review is growing qualities as I contemplate it, in hindsight to having gotten through most of the sequels which have their varying qualities, realising the virtues that mean more with the original feature that they came from. This is especially as I've not watched any of these films since my early twenties or even younger, over ten years, when once there was only four entries not five. To revisit Phantasm which virtually no memories in the slightest of any of them barring the ending of Phantasm III (1993) is like seeing the film from virgin eyes, and it appeals to me both for its home-grown qualities and that ultimately, it's a horror film as its meant to be, a campfire tale of human emotion that also happens to be an oddball crowd pleaser.

Abstract Spectrum: Fantastique/Psychotronic/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low

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