Dream On - PHANTASM

             

Horror movies can mess up a young, impressionable mind, mostly in good ways.  I’ve written about how movie related childhood trauma can mutate from terror into curiosity into obsession, but it doesn’t have to be such a psyche bruising experience.  As a wee tyke, I vividly remember flipping through the TV dial, alone in the den, and finding something wholly inappropriate on HBO.  Now, this was the same channel that left me curled into the fetal position from the overwhelming sights and sounds of MAD MAX, so I should have been smart enough to leave it alone.  This time, though, it didn’t send me screaming to hide in the corner.  Quite the opposite, I was mesmerized.  Nothing overtly scary was happening on screen, no monsters or chainsaws or blood spraying, but I knew something wasn’t right.  The scene was a boy looking around in a graveyard.  That’s all.  My unease wasn’t about what was happening on screen, but what could happen.  The anticipation was both dreadful and fascinating.  A few seconds later, someone came in and changed the channel, denying me my release.  I had no idea where this scene of delicious tension came from, and for years it existed only in reoccurring dreams.  Which is fitting, since the scene turned out to be from Don Coscarelli’s delirious 1979 nightmare, PHANTASM.

The Capsule:

Mike (A. Michael Baldwin), is a typical kid growing up in the ‘70s California suburbs.  He rides a dirt bike, he spies on his older brother, Jody (Bill Thornbury) when he scores with chicks, his best friend is a guitar playing ice cream truck driver (Reggie Bannister).  A lot of people in his small town have been dying lately, though, and when Mike witnesses something strange at Morningside cemetery, life becomes much less typical.  Soon he’s being stalked by hooded growling dwarfs, swatting at giant monster flies, and dodging a cranium drilling silver sphere.  Worst of all, he’s got the attention of The Tall Man (Angus Scrimm), the otherworldly manager of the Morningside mausoleum, who seems to be harvesting corpses to make pint sized slaves.  Can Mike convince his brother and Reggie that this isn’t just a dream before The Tall Man swallows up the whole town?

PHANTASM was part of the horror crop of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, like HALLOWEEN, FRIDAY THE 13^TH, and EVIL DEAD, that was destined for franchise.  It had those indelible, signature elements that you could hang a series on: a standout villain and a unique weapon.  As with Michael and his butcher knife, Jason and his machete, and later, Pinhead and his S&M gear, Phantasm had The Tall Man and his sphere(s).   Out of all the classic horror franchises, PHANTASM had the strangest trajectory.  Fitting, because the original is a serious fucking oddball.

Even among its fellow ‘70s horror movie, PHANTASM is excessively ‘70s,  specifically West Coast ‘70s.  While other movies had their shadowy old houses and shady suburban lanes, PHANTASM  is blasted in glorious Californian sunshine for much of the running time.  Everyone looks like Lief Garrett or a Hardy Boy, except for Reggie, who looks like Reggie Bannister.  All the young women in the movie are blonde and indistinguishable from each other.  It often looks more like a sweet coming of age film or a sex comedy, until the weird shit starts happening.

Even during the weird shit, it’s still a hard film to peg.  There is a strange, meandering, dreamlike tone that doesn’t fit traditional structure.  This wasn’t Coscarelli’s first film.  I think he knew how to do things the conventional way, he just didn’t want to.  There is an anarchistic feel to the movie, it goes where it wants to, and doesn’t have to answer to you.  The opening has a very “we now return our movie, already in progress” vibe.  We know that something nefarious is going on, but Coscarelli takes his sweet time showing you the big picture.  None of the jigsaw pieces seem to fit.  The ultimate revelation of why the Tall Man is crunching down corpses to make zombie dwarf slaves is nuttier than anything we could have expected, and it opens up even more unanswered questions (as far as I can remember, the series never completely explains just what the hell is going on).

As for the franchise’s hallmark murder weapon, the silver sphere makes its appearance just as inexplicable.  It is suddenly just there as Mike is wandering the mausoleum halls, screeching through the air.  No reference, no foreshadowing, just there.  When Mike dives out of the way, it goes for some unlucky schmo coming through a door (a funeral worker? Dad looking for his missing daughter? Homeless guy?) and pegs him right in the forehead.  All questions take a back seat once it starts to do its thing, though, because the Phantasm sphere is the most unique, craziest, and most badass death dealer in horror history.  Elegantly excessive and impossibly complicated, the sphere is essentially a supernatural Rube Goldberg execution machine.  It spikes, it drills, it shoots a fountain of blood out from an opening in the back.  There is no need for it to go through all that trouble to kill someone, but it is awesome that it does.  I can completely understand why Mike just stands there watching instead of running.  That murder ball puts on a show!  One of my gripes with the series farther down the line is that it explained what the spheres really were, and they lost a bit of their magic.  There shouldn’t be an explanation for something so out there.  All you need to know is that it’s a flying brain juicer, and it is glorious.

  

The most bizarre scene in the whole movie, though, is when Mike goes to an old, blind psychic looking for answers.  The old woman only communicates through her young, blond granddaughter.  Even stranger, she seems to be a Bene Gesserit sister, because she puts Mike through the Pain Box scene from Frank Hurbert’s Dune.  When Mike calmly puts his hand in the box that magically appeared on the table in front of him (perfectly reasonable reaction), the granddaughter encourages him to overcome his fear and not to pull out when he feels excruciating pain.  And though we never learn the deal with the old woman, her proxy warning, “Fear is the killer,” does come up later.  Note, this is five years before David Lynch filmed a virtually identical scene in the movie DUNE, only his wasn't set in a dark living room in California.  I believe this is the only time a director has come up with something stranger than David Lynch. 

 

Another great, weirdo moment occur when Mike finally has the proof to convince Jody he isn’t just dreaming.  It comes in the form of one of the Tall Man’s severed fingers, still wiggling in a pool of yellow blood.  Mike keeps the purloined finger in a box that rattles around all night, until he is about to show his dubious brother.  As expected, the finger isn’t there anymore, because it somehow turned into a giant, razor toothed monster fly that attacks Mike until they shove it down the garbage disposal.  Mike’s Tall Man/killer dwarf stories don't sound so far fetched after that.

 

The movie absolutely nails the disjointed, illogical feel of a dream.  Even without the killer dwarfs and haunted hearses, the story jibes with preteen boy subconscious.  No parents, hanging out with his cool older brother, getting to drive a sweet Hemi Cuda muscle car, fighting off monsters with a knife and a gun.  It also plays into a common kid fear of being abandoned.  Mike already lost his parents, and he is terrified that his brother will ditch him for the bitchin’ life of feather haired troubadour.  

The real star of the movie (and series) is The Tall Man.  He is an incredibly unsettling and memorable horror villain, which is something considering he is, as his name indicates, just a tall man.  Supernatural, probably alien, possibly unstoppable, yes, but still just a dude.  With no creepy mask or gruesome makeup to hide behind, the Tall Man’s power is 100% in the performance of Angus Scrimm.  His deep, gravelly voice booms with total authority, like a sadistic middle school principal.  Though he has a grand, otherworldly mission to perform, Scrimm puts a little twinkle in the Tall Man’s eye that shows he gets a real kick out of his work.  He’s the guy at PhantasmCorp who was eager to stay in body crushing duty, instead of angling for a better paying job like Executive Sphere Manager or Chief of Dwarf Labor.

 

In the end, [Spoiler] it all turns out to be a dream.  Mike was just trying to process his grief over losing his brother in a car accident.  This would normally be a cop out, but when you consider how the movie is staged, it does make sense that…oh shit, the Tall Man just showed up and got him!  So, it wasn’t a dream after all!  Or, the events of the movie were a dream, since Jody is dead and Reggie is still alive, but the underlying evil forces are real.  Or maybe the part where Mike woke up from the dream is a dream, and the Tall Man is just fucking with him.  Maybe it was all because of that crazy, blind psychic?  We may never know, until nine years later when the sequel explains it.  Sort of.

The original PHANTASM stays very true to its name.  Dreams are weird.  They aren’t supposed to make sense.  They are supposed to fill you with dread and fascination.  You are meant to feel discombobulated and unsure.  All these years later, I still get a shiver watching Mike walk through the graveyard in absolute silence.  Don Coscarelli left a scar on my little boy brain than lingers to this day, and I am grateful.  A heightened taste for the surreal can be just the thing when the real world gets too depressing.

C Chaka

Post Script:  Perhaps the strangest thing about PHANTASM is not in the movie at all, but on the IMDB page.  The displayed plot keywords, out of 255, are: fellatio, hot woman, breast, and c cup.  These words do not accurately describe what to expect from this movie, in my opinion.  Has “c cup” ever been a prominent search keyword for a movie?  What kind of perv is running IMDB?  PHANTASM’s dreamlike pacing would alienate casual viewers to begin with, can you imagine how pissed someone would be if they watched it based solely on IMDB’s weird, modest boob obsessed suggestions?