Phantasm

"You play a good game, Boy! But the game is finished! Now you die!"

--The Tall Man

The cadaverous visage of the late actor Angus Scrimm, a man whose very name is as perfect for a supernatural horror villain as any I could conceive, holds forth as the menacing, extraterrestrial cum supernatural dream demon the "Tall Man, " in the original Phantasm, a film so perfectly perfect that it is hard to determine if the director was blessed by the Fates or simply made a pact with the Devil to turn out a picture I have seen repeatedly, and never failed to delight at.

Phantasm takes place in the eerie, Kubrick-like interior of the Morningside Mausoleum, a stately Victorian manse in Somewhere California. But this is just a deceptive facade, as it is a seeming portal to another dimension, a place of shuffling, small, hooded beings that look like killer Star Wars Jawas, and floating balls with spiked hooks to burrow and drill into your brains; and exsanguinate you in a steady stream of your warm red BLOOD.

Tommy (Bill Cone) is killed, knifed to death, making love to some random harlot (Kathy Lester) in Morningside Cemetery, amid the tombstones. However, this is no ordinary woman, of course, but The Tall Man in shape-shifted disguise. His death is made to look like a suicide. His good friends Jody (Bill Thornbury) and Reggie (Reggie Bannister), the latter a balding ice cream man with a ponytail, attend the funeral. Here Jody meets the Tall Man. His little brother, thirteen-year-old Mike (A. Michael Baldwin) sees the Tall Man lift a five-hundred-pound casket full of Tommy's remains into the back of a hearse...by himself. The tempestuous young boy on a dirt bike thus knows something is wrong here. Something, reality itself perhaps, is very, very skewed.

Mike goes to visit the local palm reader (Mary Ellen Shaw), who is a seemingly catatonic old woman with dark glasses who "speaks" through her granddaughter (Terrie Kalbus). In a scene clearly inspired by Frank Herbert's novel Dune (the film adaptation by David Lynch was still a few years in the future) Mike puts his hand in a psychic "pain box," that jumps forward on the table as if to devour him. The granddaughter says "Don't fear, Michael! Don't fear!" Yes. As it says in Dune: "Fear is the mind-killer." And the Tall Man feeds, it seems, on FEAR.

Reality for Mike takes on the weird, half-remembered aspect of a hallucinatory dream. One image that recurs here is of the Tall Man and his menacing, thunderous gait, walking boom-boom-boom while staring straight forward; just to stop, and suddenly turn his head to the side, to stare at Mike, once while enjoying the deep freeze chill from Reggie's ice cream truck.

Jody and Mike realize something weird is happening at Morningside, and valiantly, along with Reggie, go to investigate. To say much more would give away Phantasm and its dark, nightmarish mysteries. Suffice it to say, the squat denizens of the mausoleum are dwellers from the off-world; the film skillfully blends supernatural horrors and science fiction fear flawlessly.

Phantasm spawned lesser sequels. Here, we have grue and gore, but we also have an unflinching cinematic look at death, the fear of the otherworldly beyond, nightmares and supernatural dreamscapes, and the inescapable terror of a Reaper-like revenant, the Tall Man, an embodiment of inexorable death if ever one existed; the sum of all our fears and dread.

I first saw this film as a child. The ending is like a final curtain being drawn to reveal the hideous truth (or perhaps dream) that Mike, the "Boy" (as the Tall Man refers to him) seems to be captured inside, unable, like Nancy at the end of A Nightmare on Elm Street, to awaken from. We are all waiting, searching, and praying about that final awakening, which we know must happen sooner or later--praying for it to be a peaceful transition to realms of light and love, beyond. But, whatever the case, if we journey toward the Light, or cower in the darkness of our primal fears, lost souls seeking solace in the eternal velvet black, one thing is for certain: a Tall Man of our device may come to claim us, and draw us down, and steal our souls, and stop whatever game we're playing, forever.

And that is no phantasm, no illusion. That is the eternal truth.

Boy.

Cult Films and Midnight Movies: "From High Art to Low Trash" Volume 1 by Tom Baker