Phantasm (1979, Don Coscarelli)

You think when you die, you go to Heaven. You come to us.

There are spoilers here, up to and including the ending. Read with care. Thanks!

What is it? Phantasm, written and directed by Don Coscarelli, starring A. Michael Baldwin, Bill Thornbury, Reggie Bannister, Kathy Lester and Angus Scrimm as The Tall Man.

First viewing? Oh my no. Last seen 10 October 2021.

What’s it about? When his oldest brother Tommy dies, Mike (A. Michael Baldwin) becomes attached to his other brother Jody (Bill Thornbury), fearing that he will abandon him. Mike also becomes suspicious of the local funeral home director (Angus Scrimm) after seeing him single-handedly lift a 500 lb. casket.

What are your thoughts about it? What aren’t my thoughts about it? It’s hard for me to explain what Phantasm means to me, but — fair warning — I’m going to take over two thousand words to try. There won’t be another movie in this series as close to my heart as Phantasm, unless I get around to Jaws¹. I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say it’s core to my being, and I know it’s not hyperbole to say it’s a cornerstone to this Against the ’70s project.

A lot of my horror cinephilia was formed in the late ’70s and early ’80s, thanks to HBO and permissive parents. I saw a lot of stuff I probably shouldn’t have at that age, on the couch, peering through a blanket: An American Werewolf in London (dream sequence!), The Howling (lycanthrope fucking!), The Funhouse (the sex worker scene!), Galaxy of Terror (slug rape!), Dead & Buried (one of the most fucked up endings I’d ever seen as a kid!). Phantasm is an outlier in that, while there’s definitely some inappropriate stuff in terms of sex and gore, I am incredibly thankful that I saw it when I did. Those other examples could be considered scarring; Phantasm was, like U-Mass², educational.

This actually may be the key image from PHANTASM: a young boy watching, peeping on if you will, a funeral from afar.

But to get to that, I need to thread a needle.

See, there’s a number of qualities I exalt above all others when it comes to 1970s cinema, which Phantasm shares with previous entries Death Bed and Laserblast (and possible future entry Messiah of Evil). First, it’s unabashedly of its decade. Films are always a documentary of their time, but some films are more document-ary than others. The hairstyles, the denim, the wallpaper-poster thing of the moon landing on the bedroom wall³, the hangout vibe, the softness of the image — it can’t be mistaken for any other decade. (For an example of the opposite, see Jaws, a film whose 70sness is marked by what’s not there — computers, cell phones, the Internet — than what is.) I don’t value this for mockery’s sake, and I don’t value this (just) for nostalgia. I value it because, as the quote goes, the past is a foreign country. The deeper a film ends up going into its decade signifiers, the more foreign it is, the more I’m transported to another world. And if it’s another world, it’s just as worthy as a source of rpg joy as any fantasy book or science fiction series.

The brown and the beige and the brown and the beige and the brown…

Second, these movies feel handcrafted. That is, literally, like they were adjunct of “arts and crafts,” like homemade jewelry, pet rocks and shrunken apple heads. In this sense, Phantasm is the most macramé horror movie ever. The special effects, like the severed finger, the goopy yellow blood, the purple skin tone on the undead dwarfs, and the crazy alien insect look like they were whipped up in the Pearson’s kitchen. If the Silver Sentinel was made by a major studio today, it would be CG and look perfect — as is, there’s a slight awkwardness in the angle of the blades as they emerge. My apologies for going to this well so often, but I must repeat myself: none of this is a weakness. I’ve recently come to the conclusion that special effects don’t matter; to mangle the words of Roger Ebert, no special effect is bad if the movie is emotionally affecting, and no special effect is good if the movie is boring, mediocre, and/or cynical. Does the severed finger-in-a-box look like a magic trick out of a book I got from a Scholastic book fair? Yes, it does, and it’s great. Sure, it’s bad, even sinful, if you judge movies by how “realistic” they are, by how many “mistakes” they make, or if you confuse sincerity for corniness. But, if you have some sense and taste, they are evidence of both the filmmakers’ humanity and artifacts of their respect for their work.

What’s in the box?? WHAT’S IN THE BOX??!!

This handcrafted quality plays into the third characteristic I admire about these films: oniericism. Very little about the film makes rational sense⁴. Aliens turning corpses into undead dwarven slaves. Alien body parts that turn into little monsters. Aliens that shapeshift back and forth from old men to young women (and apparently nothing else). Technically, this is all held together by the concept of (extremely Giorgio A. Tsoukalos gesturing) “aliens,” but really, it doesn’t hold together at all. The Silver Sentinels are an amazing concept but their sleekness clashes with the aesthetics of the rest of the monsters. And who is the caretaker that works for the Tall Man? His blood is red, so presumably he’s human. Does he know what’s going on? If so, what’s he getting out of it? The feeling is of multiple unconnected ideas forced together like unmatched jigsaw puzzle pieces. But it works because dreams and movies share a trick: they can use your pattern-craving brain to make sense of the incomprehensible.

The Caretaker is played by Kenneth V. Jones, who was the excitable, victory-obsessed flag football coach in Coscarelli’s KENNY & COMPANY.

It’s not just the monsters that make the film dream-like; even the “mundane” aspects of the story are odd. Jody straight up talks about abandoning his little brother when their parents and older brother are dead. There’s very little sense of what the brothers’ everyday life is like, other than riding bikes and motorcycles, fixing cars, playing tunes, and drinking in bars. Mike appears to have no friends other than his brother. There’s no school and no work⁵. (I guess I can think of worse day-to-day existences.) The location isn’t specified; it looks California but feels Minnesota. (Okay, not Minnesota, but definitely midwest.) This inbetweeness makes everything seem off. Mike can get just about anywhere on bike or foot, but the Tall Man’s mausoleum appears to be too big for a small town⁶. Every location is like it was beamed in from a different movie: the Pearson’s suburban house with a circular driveway; the old fortuneteller’s beaten-down, haunted-looking abode; the small town main street with Reggie’s ice cream shop; the ramshackle bar where Jody goes to get away; the Tall Man’s magisterial mausoleum. To top it all off, the Tall Man is defeated by being lured into a giant pit on the outskirts of town, one that wasn’t even hinted at earlier in the film. It’s as if conjured out of nothing by Jody.

It might be my Californian upbringing talking, but I think this ranch-style house has just as much a “fairy tale” quality as the mausoleum and the fortuneteller’s house.

But as I said at the top, a lot of movies are of their time, handcrafted and dream-like. Two things set Phantasm apart, that are closely linked, that explain why this film continues to be so important to me. The first is that the protagonist is a kid. It’s one thing when you’re eight years old and you watch a horror movie about horny teenagers doing horny teenager stuff, but it hits different when the movie is about a regular kid not that much older than you⁷. Movies that center non-superpowered kids in the middle of genuine danger are hard to come by⁸. I suspect most adults, especially parents, don’t want to see that. But I can’t express how thrilling it was as a kid to see Mike, way in over his head against grave-robbing aliens, as he investigated the mausoleum by himself, drove a motorcycle, worked on cars and fired a gun (!). There’s a moment where Mike is locked in his room by Jody, and we watch as Mike thinks through the problem of how to get out then does so, explosively. The Tall Man keeps coming after him, but Mike proves too wily, too slippery, too underestimated to be caught by the lumbering interdimensional ghoul.

And then the movie ends on the unthinkable: the monsters get Mike.

There’s probably a whole paragraph or more that could be written about how Mike meets his end through a broken mirror — the ego and its annihilation — but this shit is long enough.

This shouldn’t have been a surprise, though, and not just because that’s a classic ’70s downer ending. No, it shouldn’t have been a surprise because this is the logical conclusion. The film begins with Jody keeping Mike away from Tommy’s funeral, and Mike going anyway, watching from afar like a peeping tom. But he’s not peeping to learn about the birds and the bees. He’s peeping to learn about death. (Even when he is peeping on Jody’s tryst with the Lady in Lavender, he’s actually just seeing death in a different guise.) Death is all around Mike, and, as a kid, he doesn’t quite understand it. His parents are gone, his only brother is gone, and he’s been left in the care of his brother’s best friend, a prematurely balding ice cream salesman⁹. He’s trying to answer some basic questions, even if they are unanswerable: Why have my loved ones died and left me alone? Where is my family now? And what will happen to me when I die?

Eros and Thanatos 79. (Zoom in on the tombstone. Also, h/t Steve Carlson)

Phantasm has made-up answers for these questions, ones that are pulpy and silly and Grimm and Gorey. Your loved ones died because no one escapes The Tall Man. The Tall Man has taken the corpses of your family, squished them down, and brought them back to some kind of abhorrent life. (The implication here is that there is no such thing as a soul, just animated bodies and inanimate ones.) He has then sent them to another dimension to work forever on a planet that is always, shall we say, hellishly hot. And one day, he’ll do the same to you.

Dopesmoker is an awesome album.

And, this, finally, is why Phantasm means so much to me. Phantasm admits the inevitability of death, but absolutely refuses to put a brave face on for it. It straight up says death is scary, and you’re right to avoid it as long as possible. Centuries of art and philosophy tell us that we shouldn’t fear it. You know what? I call bullshit. I don’t think there is anything after death¹⁰. I think the experience of being dead is the same as the non-dreaming parts of being asleep; that is, completely inexperienceable. Have you ever tried to just sit and imagine not existing? It’s like meditation, only it sucks. Why should I welcome this?

(And don’t fucking tell me “Oh, you’ll be dead so you won’t care.” Motherfucker, I won’t be able to care, and I won’t be able to not care. I won’t be able to do or choose anything, I won’t even be me, because I won’t fucking exist. Think this shit through, please.)

I live in a country that has steadfastly refused to rise to the challenge of this pandemic, on a government level and on a personal level. Billions spent on the military to keep us “safe” and a pittance against an enemy that is 50 nanometers wide. Citizens insisting that life should continue exactly as it had before, even if that means throwing people into the meatgrinder. We’re coming up on a million COVID deaths in the United States alone. Nearly a million people who once existed, and now do not. How many of those people would be alive now if those with power actually gave a shit? I’m not immunocompromised, but I suspect that as an old, overweight diabetic, my chances of making it through are worse than most. If I have to die, let it mean something, and not be a pathetic statistic of a pathetic culture.

I don’t think there’s an afterlife. I think this is it, whatever this is. I think the only actions that make sense are taking care of each other and to limit the suffering we inflict on each other. But that’s difficult when the reins of life and death are held by old white men who reside in beautiful white buildings, who only want our labor in an increasingly-warmer world.

Anyway, here’s some game stuff.

What year is this?

How many stars out of five? Five silver sentinels.

Where can I stream it? Phantasm, right now¹¹, is the easiest film to see in this series. Which is hilarious to me, because, until the release of Phantasm II in 1988 (and even after that), this was as cult as cult movies get. As of this writing, you can watch it for free on Amazon Prime, Tubi, Pluto TV, Plex, DirecTV, Peacock, Peacock Premium, Shudder, Shudder via Prime Video, Crackle, Vudu, AMC+ via Prime Video, AMC+ via the Roku Channel, and Spectrum on Demand. You can also rent or buy from Amazon Video, Apple TV, Microsoft Store, Google Play, YouTube, Vudu, and Alamo on Demand. Shit, it might be on the Atari 2600, 8-track cassette and the Goodyear Blimp for all I know. Just not Facebook Watch.

What can we take from it? Phantasm is chock full of fantastic monsters and antagonists, so much so you could probably design an rpg just around this single movie, let alone all the sequels. We’re going to take the most obvious elements, because they demand to be used: The Tall Man and his alter ego, the Lady in Lavender, plus the Silver Sentinels and the Hooded Figures.

All of the gaming statistics below are based on the original Phantasm. The sequels bring a lot of suprising information that changes these foes considerably, but we will not consider them canon for our purposes. Maybe I’ll do an update in the future to take the sequels into consideration.

THE TALL MAN AND THE LADY IN LAVENDER (CREATURE)

Level: 8 (24+ on a d20 to hit them, 24+ on a d20 to avoid being hit by them)

Description: This alien or interdimensional being has (at least) two forms. The first one is known as The Tall Man. The Tall Man is about six and half feet tall, wears a tight-fitting black suit with a white shirt and black tie underneath. His hair is long and going grey in the back, but is balding in the front. At will, The Tall Man can turn into the Lady in Lavender, a young blonde woman in a lavender dress.

Motive: As the Tall Man, to turn the human dead into undead slaves and send them back to the home planet. As the Lady in Lavender, to seduce young men and then murder them.

Environment: The Tall Man needs human corpses to create his slaves, so he uses funeral homes and mausoleums in order to have access to them. The Lady in Lavender usually lurks in bars or anywhere else young horny men can be found.

Health: 30

Damage Inflicted: 8 points (Tall Man: vice-like grip, telekinesis. Lady in Lavender: knife)

Movement: Short

Modifications: As the Lady in Lavender, seduction at level 9.

Combat: The Tall Man prefers to stay out of direct combat whenever possible. He is the lead man in the corpse-harvesting operation, and it all falls apart if he’s killed. Nonetheless, he is superhumanly strong and can also use telekinesis to move heavy objects or even directly blast foes. The Lady in Lavender only attacks if alone with one man. Otherwise, she’ll retreat to keep herself safe.

Interaction: When interacting with those unaware of his true nature, the Tall Man is brusque but otherwise professional in manner. With those aware of his true nature, the Tall Man is smug about his superiority to humans, and feels invulnerable to them. However, since he prefers to avoid combat and his main motive is to obtain corpses from the funeral home, he is open to parley. That said, he will ruthlessly attempt to come out on top in any negotiation. The Lady in Lavender will seem like a normal, if unusually suggestible, young woman, but only to get a young man alone with her. In other situations, she will do everything she can to be inconspicuous.

Use: The PCs enter a small town where they learn that young men are dying at an unusual rate, and people have witnessed strange hooded creatures lurking in the cemetery. What, do the PCs need a road map?

Loot: The Tall Man/Lady in Lavender undoubtedly has some cyphers hidden in their mausoleum base, 1d6 worth, plus at least one artifact.

GM Intrusion: If the PCs damage the Tall Man, he loses a finger or other small appendage. At the least opportune time, this appendage turns into a Level 4 flying bug-like creature that bites for 4 damage.

SILVER SENTINEL (CREATURE)

Level: 4 (18+ on a d20 to hit it, 12+ on a d20 to avoid being hit by it)

Description: A metalllic sphere, approximately six inches in diameter, gleaming silver, that flies through the air by unclear means. It can reveal two blades from a hidden hatch on its surface, which it then attempts to plunge into a victim’s head. Once attached, the Silver Sentinel then produces a drill, which proceeds to then begins to exsanguinate the victim, ejecting the blood through the opposite side of the drill.

Motive: To kill intruders.

Environment: Mausoleums and funeral homes where the Tall Man makes his base.

Health: 4. They are quite brittle, and a hit from a heavy or medium weapon, or a hit from a light weapon with Effort, will shatter them.

Damage Inflicted: If a Silver Sentinel hits, it has plunged its blades into its victim and does 4 points. Each round thereafter, the drill does 8 points as it drains the victims blood and splatters it all over the floor. It takes a Might task against difficulty 4 to remove the Silver Sentinel from a victim. (This task is hindered if the victim is doing it themselves.)

Movement: Long

Modifications: Tracking at level 5

Combat: A Silver Sentinel is small and fast, and any attempt to damage it is hindered two steps, as reflected in the Level above. Silver Sentinels only have one move: hit with the blades, finish ’em off with the drill. If they aren’t doing that, they are attempting to get into position to do that.

Interaction: These particular Silver Sentinels don’t talk, negotiate, or in any way act in a non-hostile mode. They are there to kill.

Use: Silver Sentinels only exist to protect whatever the Tall Man has created for a base of operations.

Loot: Silver Sentinels don’t have loot; however, it’s possible they are loot. What might happen if a character tried to put a broken one back together, or somehow reprogram a captured one?

GM Intrusion: The Silver Sentinel misses the PC’s head, but hits their leg, causing intense pain and rendering the PC unable to move until the Sentinel is removed.

Player Intrusion: The Silver Sentinel, programmed to eliminate human intruders, mistakes one of the Tall Man’s human henchman as an enemy.

HOODED FIGURES (CREATURE)

Level: 3 (9+ on a d20 to hit one, 9+ on a d20 to avoid being hit by one)

Description: The Hooded Figures are just that: child-size beings in dark brown hooded robes… forget it, they look like Jawas. Just say they look like Jawas. Anyway, Hooded Figures are the result of taking normal human corpses and putting them through an unholy process that gives them life, as well as makes them half as big but twice as dense. Underneath the hood, the Hooded Figures look like the humans they once were, but their skin now has a purple pallor, and their blood has been replaced with a thick yellow substance.

Motive: To do the Tall Man’s bidding.

Environment: Graveyards, mausoleums, and funeral homes.

Health: 9

Damage Inflicted: 3 points or Latch

Movement: Short

Modifications: Hiding and stalking at level 4. Hooded Figures also have access to skills their human forms had when alive, such as driving.

Combat: Hooded Figures usually try to overwhelm a target and capture them rather than do damage. If a character fails to avoid being hit by one, the Hooded Figure can choose to do zero damage and latch on to the character instead. Each Hooded Figure that has latched onto a character inflicts one level on hindrance on any task they attempt.

Interaction: Hooded Figures, despite once being human, are incapable of human speech, and instead make roaring sounds, like a lion or other large cat. As slaves under the command of the Tall Man, it is unlikely they can be reasoned with.

Use: Hooded Figures usually stay at whatever base of operations the Tall Man has created, but it’s not impossible that he might send a group of them out under cover of night to do some terrible deed, such as kidnap an important NPC or retrieve some proof of the Tall Man’s true nature.

Loot: Hooded Figures have no loot. (I’m just glad to know the truth.)

GM Intrusion: A Hooded Figure who had been killed previously reanimates at an inopportune time.

Originally published 1/4/22 on Substack.