THE PHANTASM FILMS (1979-2016) ONE OF MY FAVORITE HORROR FRANCHISES

Halloween is almost here, so just a few more days to squeeze in some seasonal posts.

PHANTASM – Don Coscarelli wrote and directed four of the five films in the Phantasm franchise but let David Hartman write and direct the last one in 2016.

The first Phantasm movie back in 1979 was rated X for violence, which makes me and my fellow fans of the Terrifier features and short films laugh our asses off. 

With this movie franchise Don Coscarelli forever changed the way we look at funeral homes. And funeral home directors. Actor Angus Scrimm (1926-2016) owned the role of the sinister mortician the Tall Man as surely as Robert Englund owns the role of Freddy Krueger. 

For newbies to the Phantasm films, let me point out that the Tall Man ran the Morningside Cemetery and Funeral Home business. Some of the loved ones of dearly departed people who became mutated slaves for the Tall Man began to notice strange things about the mortician. Things like carrying a full coffin by himself when he thought nobody was watching. 

Besides Scrimm, Reggie Bannister, Michael Baldwin, Bill Thornbury and Kathy Lester were among the stars of the original 1979 Phantasm. The nature of death and the inscrutable truth about life and reality itself were the running themes of the franchise.  

What lies beyond death? And what kind of fate awaits us there? Phantasm provided a very grim and merciless possibility that owed a tiny bit to the 1895 work The King in Yellow. The Tall Man represented everything humanity fears about the Great Beyond from the most primal level to the most cerebral.

When thinking about Phantasm movies, what comes to mind are coffins, graves, mortuaries, the Lady in Lavender, sex in a graveyard and flying metal balls sporting blades that can slice into your forehead, then pump out blood and brain matter.

Angus Scrimm’s depiction of the being called the Tall Man added him to the movie monster pantheon alongside the likes of Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster, Freddy Krueger, Pinhead, La Llorona and Michael Myers. Scrimm perfectly captured the creepy vibe given off by some morticians (no offense) and the slowly revealed lore behind the Morningside Cemetery and Funeral Home was nicely crafted.

Phantasm II (1988) gave us the Tall Man and his transformed, undead underlings digging up and stealing every corpse in a town’s cemetery. Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead (1994) treated viewers to additional lore that greatly enhanced the franchise’s universe.

Most of that lore surrounded the unearthly but sentient thing that adopted the very tall form of Jebediah Morningside, the founder of the Morningside mortuary businesses in the 1800s. We also learned how each time the Tall Man seems destroyed the thing from the other side of the grave simply emerges from the threshold wearing another fully formed copy of the long dead Jebediah’s body. 

Phantasm IV: Oblivion (1998) largely accentuated the whole mind-blow aspect of the reality-defying events of the film series. “Something in the wind” references have replaced deja vu remarks among me and my friends.   

Phantasm V: Ravager (2016) was a disappointment and was more like Phantasm IV: Part TWO rather than a satisfying finale to the saga. Angus Scrimm’s death that year gave the movie a sense of grandeur and finality that the production didn’t really earn on its own. 

For better or worse writer/director Don Coscarelli never sold out just to get financing, though; never let the horrifying Tall Man become an outer-space joke like Jason Voorhees and other horror icons eventually did. The downside to that artistic integrity is that it left Coscarelli assembling financing in a catch-as-catch-can manner that meant Phantasm lovers only got five films over a thirty-seven-year period. 

If you’re a fan of the Hellraiser or Nightmare on Elm Street franchises you would probably really enjoy the Phantasm series of movies.

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