Armchair Commentary: Jan. Horror Spotlight Film: Phantasm

In 1977, a 22-year old Southern California filmmaker and a 51-year old character actor created a legacy of nightmarish films that are unequaled in their commitment from both Star and Director. Freddy, Jason, Chucky and all the others have soldiered on long after their respective creators passed them by for sometimes-greener pastures. But in the 30-years since it first arrived on movie screens, PHANTASM creator Don Coscarelli and Star Angus Scrimm have never wavered in their commitment to the terror of The Tall Man.

It took Coscarelli and company almost two years to shoot and edit PHANTASM, with cast and crew working on the film over weekends to keep the costs low. Truly a labor of love for all those involved, what the film world got a hold of in the spring of 1979 was perhaps the rarest of all things—a truly original horror film.

PHANTASM is really the story of a boy—Mike Pearson (A. Michael Baldwin). Mike has already lost his parents and now he’s obsessed with losing his older brother Jody (Bill Thornbury). For Jody’s part, he’s having a difficult time being tied down as a surrogate father to Mike. When the film begins, Jody and his best friend Reggie (Reggie Bannister) try to shield Mike from another death as they forbid him attending the funeral of a friend. Mike sneaks to the cemetery anyway and soon discovers strange goings on amongst the tombstones. As Mike begins to unravel the mystery surrounding the Morningside Funeral Parlor he uncovers a bizarre realm presided over by a menacing Tall Man and his midget minions.

The thing that Coscarelli’s film imbues in its viewers is a profound sense of dread and the confounding possibility that the entirety of the production is taking place in the mind of 13-year-old Mike as some heightened form of psychosomatic separation anxiety. It would take further sequels for the realities of the first film to truly be explored, the history of The Tall Man, his motivations behind stealing the dead and the truth about what really happens behind the walls of the Morningside Funeral Home.

Interestingly, if the film is indeed all held in the subconscious of young Jody, then Coscarelli himself has free reign over the surrealistic world he sets forth. In other words, the filmmaker is not beholden to the constraints of reality—even celluloid reality. The film certainly has all the hallmarks of a childhood dream. Mike shows up often to save the day, he packs a chrome plated pistol, drives his brothers supped up Hemi ‘Cuda and tools through graveyards on the back of his motorcycle—all things that might run through the mind of your average 13-year old boy. But, the air of unease that permeates the film leaves viewers unsure, until the final moments, exactly what the actuality of the situation is.

Indeed, the final frames of PHANTASM are the stuff of cinematic legend, and Coscarelli is given little credit for the influence those moments had on Sean Cunningham’s FRIDAY THE 13TH and Wes Craven’s A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET. In fact, over the years, Coscarelli has been shown very little respect for a series that he has personally overseen. Perhaps it is because the PHANTASM films were never flashy, or filled with exorbitant amounts of blood, gore and naked bodies. The PHANTASM films are psychological science fiction horror and they exist to leave your head scratching in their wake. Taken as a whole, the four films that make up the series—even in their inherent unevenness—provide a broad scope into a world created within the mind of a visionary filmmaker.

On a side note, because the length of the original production was so long and varied, Coscarelli ended up with multitudes of additional footage and discarded plot devices—a bonus, since the filmmaker has been able to insert “lost” footage and alternate takes from the original film into flashback sequences in the subsequent sequels—a technique that Coscarelli does so well, it’s almost hard to believe he wasn’t planning it from the very beginning.