#09 Phantasm (Don Coscarelli, 1979)

I knew this would happen: as we get into the top ten, I’m increasingly confronted with films that I dearly love, but whose significance/appeal I’m loathe to try to put into words.

So I’ll go out on a limb here and assume that everyone who has seen Don Coscarelli’s “Phantasm” already knows what it is that makes it one of the best-loved independent American horror movies of all time. Here are merely a few of the things that I like about it.

I realise this is not exactly an original observation, but I love the way that, beyond its primary function as a wildly imaginative sci-fi/horror film, “Phantasm” is really a beautiful meditation on growing up, dealing with death and loss, and the emergence from childhood into life as an independent adult. Please don’t stop reading there though, there are psychotic alien dwarves and graveyard sex-murders too.

The first time I watched the film, I guess I didn’t quite pick up on this, being too taken aback by all the crazy ideas and images. But as I looked back on it, I began to realise that the moments that stuck in my head the most weren’t all the now-famous horror/weirdness set pieces, but, like, the bit where Jody and Reggie sit on their porch playing guitar, or the heart-breaking scene in which young Mike literally runs behind his big brother’s departing car, terrified that he won’t come back.

Coscarelli’s film portrays this strange, sad family of orphaned brothers with a matter-of-fact gentleness and believability that is rare in any kind of movie, and particularly in the kind of middle-brow indie/arthouse fare that strives to wear such virtues on its sleeve. We don’t need any heavy-handed back story or chest-beating ‘blood is thicker than water’ speeches to persuade us that these guys constitute a family who have been through some tough times together: they ARE a family. We see them care for each other, and we in turn care for them.

What is also great is the way that the film’s incredibly imaginative, bizarro-horror plotline actually plays directly into these aforementioned themes, without the film ever feeling the need to signpost the connections for us. In the name of full disclosure, I’ll admit that I owe parts of the following analysis to Stephen Thrower’s review of the film in his (essential, incredible, etc) book Nightmare USA - but once put into words, one realises how implicit a sub-conscious understanding of it is to any viewing of “Phantasm”.

So get this: it is Mike’s attachment to his dead loved ones, and the loss and loneliness he has experienced as a result of their passing (as represented by his obsessive investigation of the Tall Man’s funereal, death-fixated realm) that puts him in danger of being stuck in a perpetual childhood (literally crushed down to a miniature size slave and thrown through the inter-dimensional dwarf-portal). Only by escaping his morbid introspection (overcoming the Tall Man, rescuing his surviving brothers and destroying the mortuary) can he escape the shadow of death that hangs over his family, and emerge from the cocoon of protection that they are no longer able to give him, into adulthood.

From the ‘childish’ nature of Mike’s older brothers’ chosen professions (ice cream vender, rock musician) to the way that his sexual awakening, watching his brother make out with a mysterious girl in the graveyard, is interrupted by supernatural emissaries of death/evil, this struggle to escape the dream that is childhood (or death?) seems to permeate every aspect of the film, inevitably tugging the heart-strings of the overgrown adolescents who lurk not so deep within all us movie/music nerds.

As befits a film that so thoroughly mixes up ideas of fantasy and reality, “Phantasm” is also one of the absolute best examples of the kind of ‘weird world’ aesthetic that I’ve talked in previous reviews about loving so much in low budget horror films. With few concessions to real-life geography, “Phantasm” seems to take place entirely in some anonymous, dreamlike suburb, bordered on all sides by darkened woods and hills. Wherever Mike roams, on his bike, by car or on foot, he seems to return to the same few central locations again and again, with the Tall Man’s hyper-real Victorian mortuary looming large. Even the bar that Jody drives out to to hang out and pick up girls is sublimely weird – a kind of deserted, roadside theme bar based within a heavily decorated porta-cabin, scarcely much bigger that the muscle-car their only customer arrives in.

Everywhere, “Phantasm” is marked with the kind of wonderful, wilful eccentricity that only a regional, independently produced movie can provide. Would a studio-produced film, or the work of some industry guys trying to make a buck, have allowed us the pleasures of the scene where Mike visits the mute fortune-teller and her grand-daughter, and the unexpected tribute to Frank Herbert’s “Dune” that ensues? Or the aforementioned front-porch jam session? If not an out-and-out crazy movie, certainly not an amateurish or illogical one, “Phantasm” nonetheless draws you into the atmosphere of, well, a dream – a place just to the left of conventional filmic reality, where anything could happen next.

“Phantasm” is maybe the most successful example I can think of a filmmaker using the framework of the horror genre to explore – ugh, forgive me – difficult, real life issues, communicating a sense of understanding and compassion that knocks every tedious ‘issue’ movie out there into a cocked hat. I can only speak for myself here, but personally I find an emotional resonance within “Phantasm” that is comparable only to that of François Truffaut’s early films.

And unlike “Jules et Jim”, “Phantasm” has psychotic dwarfs and graveyard sex murders too.

Case closed. I love you, Don Coscarelli.