Phantasm Review

Phantasm review.

More than four decades after its release Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm remains as effective as it is confusing. It plays like a choose your own adventure story…if you read the book from cover to cover. And it works.

Classic movie reviews will contain spoilers.

Phantasm

Directed by Don Coscarelli

Written by Don Coscarelli

Starring Michael Baldwin, Bill Thornbury, Reggie Bannister, Kathy Lester and Angus Scrimm

Phantasm Review

Phantasm never ceases to be an interesting piece of business.  Time has eroded none of its power…and the more time passes the more obvious the reason for this becomes.  You also get no closer to figuring out whether its, at times, incomprehensible format was intentional or one of those happy accidents found from cutting a long movie down.  Not that it matters at this point.  Phantasm exists as it is.  A classic.

Time can do no harm to Phantasm because of its style…intentional or otherwise.  What exists in reality…what is a dream…what is happening…there’s no way to answer these questions.  At least not with any authority.  The story plays out like you are reading a choose your own adventure novel from cover to cover never making a choice.  A broken narrative that doesn’t fully connect to what you have just seen.  The characters are still there…but their situations jump in and out of sync.

For the purposes of this retrospective…we will choose our own adventure (or interpretation) of Phantasm.  Feel free to choose a completely different path.  There are seemingly no wrong answers.  The story ends with a flourish of scenes that call the previous one into question.  In Phantasm…everything is real and nothing is.  It’s all a nightmare but it’s also happening.  Or none of it is.  So…yeah…pick what you want it to be.  It’s an enjoyable movie no matter where you land.

For the sake of brevity we are going to look at Phantasm through the most traditional interpretation we can.  As a meditation on grief and understanding death.  This is the most obvious and on the surface theme that Phantasm has…but it still might be the most interesting.  Set aside the aliens…the dreams…the strange technology.  No matter your interpretation of the various set pieces and no matter what you parse out as being real…you are left with the story of a boy who is haunted by death.

The Tall Man (Angus Scrimm) is the center of Mike’s (A. Michael Baldwin) horrific adventures.  An iconic horror character, The Tall Man is a mortician with many terrifying (and bewildering) secrets.  Choosing a mortician (and largely setting the movie inside of a funeral home) lends Phantasm much of its memorable imagery.  Mike lost his parents at a young age and is largely defined by his fear that his older brother Jody (Bill Thornbury) will leave him too.

In the film this fear is presented as Jody leaving town…but we learn by the end that Jody has (seemingly) died in a car accident.  Taken as the coping mechanism of a scared kid who has lost his family…Phantasm becomes a chillingly effective study of grief.  Of course, there is a lot more going on here than this narrow view of the material…and four sequels would only further complicate any specific understanding.  That said, viewed through this lens Phantasm becomes its most intriguing.

Mike’s fear of death is the most realistic and grounded aspect of the movie.  His inability to understand what has happened or how it works is terrifying on a personal level.  If we’ve been watching the story unfold through the shattered mind of a traumatized character…it becomes a moving character study.  The best part of Phantasm is that, like anything else you want it to be, it’s all in there. 

What’s also in there is an incredibly effective score.  One year after John Carpenter gave us a Halloween score for the ages, Phantasm gives us another one.  Like Halloween before it, this is a score that can send a shiver up your spine without the need for accompanying images.  An instant mood setter that elevates every scene. 

What makes Phantasm so unique is the conversations that it can elicit.  It isn’t uncommon to watch it with someone and walk away with two divergent opinions on what you’ve watched…but an agreement that it was good.  What feels like a regular narrative soon diverges into multiple paths of dreams and revelations.  Even the conclusion we’ve chosen to focus on here is almost immediately undone by the closing scene.  Or maybe it isn’t.  44 years of existence and 4 sequels of further lore have done nothing to affect the feeling of watching the original. 

The ambiguity of Phantasm is exactly what gives it the unending cult status that it has.  It’s why it has spawned those far out sequels (far out in both time between them and content).  You don’t walk away from Phantasm without questions…and a desire to learn more about its odder aspects.  A never-ending quest to understand what this world is about.  You can interpret that world however you choose…but for the purposes of this review we will return to ours. 

Death is coming for us all.  We can’t understand what it is or where it leads.  Phantasm captures that in a way that no other movie has.  By being confusing, terrifying, emotional, and unexplainable.  How much of it was done on purpose, and what it’s actually doing most of the time, can be argued forever.  That it works cannot.

Scare Value

Phantasm is one of those movies that you can find something incredible in even if you don’t like it. There are some wild ideas here…explained as little as possible. You can walk away from it thinking it’s about nothing…or about something different than the person you watched it with. How much of that is by design…and how much is a happy accident…doesn’t really matter. In the end Phantasm is a unique near masterpiece that will never lose its effectiveness because it is so untethered to anything tangible.

4.5/5

Phantasm Links

Streaming on Shudder

Rent/Buy on VOD from Vudu

Rent/Buy on VOD from Amazon

Buy on Blu-Ray from Amazon

Phantasm Trailer

If you enjoyed this review of Phantasm, check out The Crazies and April Fool’s Day