Weirdhouse Cinema: Phantasm

kicking it off today with Phantasm. I first saw this movie projected onto a wall when I was in college. I had absolutely no knowledge whatsoever about it going in. I just knew they're showing a horror movie projecting it on a wall. I gotta go see it. And I think it was about the time we got to Reggie Banister in his ice cream Man outfit that I started to really wonder what I had gotten myself in too.

By the end, I was totally amazed. I was, in fact agg and I could not tell you if what I had just watched was a good movie or a bad movie, but either way, I was transfixed. Yes, it is a film that that transfixes one. It's a film that that hypnotizes you, and yeah, I think I you know, I have our time. Remember when I saw this one for the first time, because I think I saw Phantasm to first. I think I saw it on Joe Bob Briggs Monster Vision on T and T back in the day.

I think they would they would show this film quite a lot and at that but at that point I was hooked. And then I started picking up these other Phantasm films, renting them and so forth. But yeah, this is N nine Phantasm. We're going to be discussing this. This is definitely a film with a dreamlike quality to it. It's really it's one we've we've kind of had in the back pocket for a while because it is a quintessential psychotronic film. Um, it just all the this check

off on this one. I would say that it is more than just a dream like quality. So you might compare it to the films of Luccio Fulci years that, you know, this Italian filmmaker who made strange, kind of beautiful but gross horror films that often many scenes feel like a dream because you're like, wait, why are we here, how did we get here? Why is the person doing that? There's a kind of dream logic connecting everything. Phantasm does have that, but I would say it goes a step

farther in that. Unlike full cheese films, Phantasm is literally a recursive series of dreams as best I can tell, I mean, who who knows? Like there are at least four times in the movie where a character appears to wake up from a dream. It is not clear when the dreams started or when the dream ended. What's a dream and what's reality? Yeah, yeah, I think that's that's

a good way of putting it now. I want to also note from from the get go here that this is a film with a both a devoted following and multiple sequels that build on its lore to varying degrees. We're mostly just going to be focusing on the first film on nine Phantasm. I'm going to bring up the sequel a little bit, but for the most part, I haven't seen the other Phantasm films in a long while, and I and I haven't seen the final entry in

the series, sixteen Phantasm Ravager, at all. So yeah, we're mostly going to be discussing Phantasm from seventy nine on its own terms. I have not seen any of the sequels if this were years ago, I might try to mount an attempt to watch them all, kind of like I did when I was like, oh, this is the year I watch all the hell Raiser movies. That was a good use of my time. Uh, But I don't know if I'm going to make it now. I don't

know if I will get past P two. Yeah. P two is a good stopping play in place, So I'll discuss P two in a little bit. I think I think that they're they're they're both very different films, and they're both very very fun and they're in different ways. But coming back to seventy nine Phantasm, let's let's hit the elevator pitch on this one. I'd like to paraphrase the words of one Shack by saying, um, you can

summarize this one as flying balls, dwarves just weird. Phantasm does not shy away from the otherworldly imagery, probably the most iconic of which is the first thing you mentioned, the flying ball. In a way, what Jason's hockey mask is to the Friday Thirteenth series, I believe the ball is to the Phantasm series in that it is not really the human villain, but it is like the symbol of the villain's power. Right. And also it is something just in terms of like elements of the film that

cannot just be passively copied by another film. Like if you have a character a killer, especially in another movie, put on a hockey mask, well, you just cross the line. You're in Jason's territory now, uh, And not necessarily mean that from a legal standpoint, but from just a crea ative standpoint, like you are now clearly in the shadow of Jason. You may have already been in the shadow, but now you stepped entirely within the you know, the

Umbrell shade there. Likewise in with this film, Yeah, flying silver balls of death. You can't just have a flying silver ball of death in your film or your story or what have you without clearly saying yes, I come in the wake of phantasm. Before you even understand the context of the ball, we should describe what the ball is. It's a metal ball that flies through the air, flies

at your face. It attaches itself to your forehead via a couple of little hooks I guess that get in your head, and then it drills into your head and then drains your body entirely of blood. In a jet that shoots out the back of the ball. Yeah, and they're so great because and I love I love just thinking about what makes them great because there, and again largely keeping things relegated to the original film, here, they seem to be machine means, they are pieces of technology.

They're they're very good at what they do, but they can be evaded, they can be to certain degrees outsmarted. And then there's also something about the way they function that feels not only alien in origin, but also maybe alien in function. Like it makes me think of parasitic infections where the parasite goes awry because it's not supposed to be in a human body and it's not supposed

to wind up in the brain. Like you almost feel like this is a machine that was made to interface with a different biological form, and what we're seeing here is it executing its purpose on a body that it wasn't designed for. That's a very good comparison. Yes, this flying metal ball is sort of like the toxoplasma Gandhi of the Red Planet that the aliens in this movie

come from. In fact, I was reading a bit of trivia about this movie, and apparently the idea for Phantasm traces back to a dream that the director Don Costcarelli had when he was a teenager. He dreamed that he was running down these endless corridors, marble corridors that never stopped, and he just kept running and running because he was being chased by a chrome sphere, a floating chrome ball that wanted to penetrate his skull with a needle. And

that's a pretty scary image. I am surprised how well that worked on screen. Yeah, it did, It absolutely does. All right, Well, let's go ahead and hear the trailer for Phantasm. Phantasm. Is it a nightmare? Phantasm? Is it an illusion? Phantasm? Whatever it is. If this one doesn't scare you, you're already dead Phantasm. All right. I love

this trailer, great trailer. I love the line if this one doesn't scare you, you're already dead, because it makes it sound like they should have another message at the end of the movie that says like, are you alive, then we're pleased to hear you enjoyed Phantasm. So we've already compared Phantasm to some Italian horror movies, especially full cheese movies, because of its dream equality and colorful lucid imagery.

But another point of comparison I would like to raise is that Phantasm kind of reminds me of the films of very low budget independent amateur filmmakers, or maybe not necessarily amateur, but but low budget independent filmmakers, even going back to the fifties, like Ed Wood and Roger Corman.

Of course, you know you're gonna have different levels of ability to realize one's vision in there, but it has that same scrappiness that it feels like an improvised production of young people who didn't necessarily always know what they were doing or have all the permits they needed, or have the money to to realize everything in the in

the glossiest possible way. And yet it does kind of come together with an infectious enthusiasm and a kind of irresistible energy, even though it kind of lacks a sense of worldliness or experience. Yeah, absolutely, it does have that that that scrappiness to it. So let's let's get into the individuals behind this scrappiness, because yes, this is a Don Cosarelli picture. Don Cosarelli was born in nineteen fifty four. He is the director, the writer, the cinematographer, and the

film editor on this movie. He was I believe twenty three years old when filming started, in twenty five years old when it was released, and this was his third picture, following Jim the World's Greatest in nineteen seventy six. Is Kinny and Company. Phantasm makes so much more sense once you shared this fact with me, that that Costcarelli was

twenty three when he started making it. It has such early twenties energy, again coming back to that lack of wisdom and worldliness, but at the same time a thing that makes up for it, which is an absolutely like it is a leaky vessel of the essence of fun. It's just like kind of you feel the excitement about

making a movie within this movie. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, it's um there's I think there's a lot to this film that does line up perfectly, this idea of the twenty three year old filmmaker, um of you know, early twenties dreamer who's also exploring exploring some familiar topics. A lot

of horror films deal with sex and death, too. Many horror films probably deal with the dichotomy of sex and death, but this one does so in a I thought a very uh fascinating way, Like you get the feeling of the of of the youth standing you know, outside of childhood but not within the adult world, confronted by the mysteries of death, of of sex and uh and and just trying to figure out what these are and like why and to what extent they are threats to him,

to what extent they are his destiny. We see all of that wound up in the character of Mike. Uh. Yeah, it's uh, it's it's it's really fascinating to to look back on and really gaze long and deep into the phantasm here. So you mentioned that Costcarelli had made a couple of movies before Phantasm that were not horror movies. Uh, though, there is a there's a story that I think comes from the audio commentary track that he recorded for the movie.

But anyway, wherever it comes from, the story is that he got the idea to make a horror film because when he was sitting in an audience that was watching his earlier movie Kenny and Company, which I've never seen.

I don't know what to deal with it is Apparently there's a jump scare moment in it, like a character puts on a scary mask and jumps out, and he watched the way the audience reacted to this jump scare moment, and he was just he was so into it the way that they like they literally jumped from their seats and screamed, and he was like, I gotta make a

whole movie of this. I'm doing horror now. Yeah. I do like that he came into this after having made two non horror films that I think both reviven't seeen either of than either, but I think they both revolved largely around young people in the lives of young people.

And then he moves on into horror. A lot of people had jumped right into the horror, and so I think that's another reason that Phantasm works so well, is that it it's not just obsessed with like, let's get some gore up there on the screen, Like there is also this attention to, uh, this the central youth character in the in the film, and what he's thinking and

what he now he's processing everything. Another way that Costcarrelli's vision feels it is distinctly young to me is the way the movie tries to pack in a lot of elements that are not necessarily they don't necessarily like fit smoothly, but he's just trying to get a lot of stuff

in there. And I think part of that is also explained by another trivia fact I read about the movie, which is that um he apparently at one point talked about how he remembered when he was a kid, he would see like ads and trailers for horror movies that would seem really exciting, but then when you would go, why the actual movie of just be people sitting around talking for most of the movie. There were actually very

few scares in them. The scares were already in the trailer, and he wanted to make a movie that had a scary moment at least every five minutes. That is just packed with with little scares and weird things. And it kind of reminds me of the story of Roger Corman telling Charles B. Griffith, Okay, when you write Attack of the Crab Monsters, the important thing is it has to

have action or horror on every page. Yeah. Phantasm doesn't really hold anything back, and it keeps you on your toes that way it is, and I think also builds into that dreamline quality. If things are making sense and seeming normal, how long are they going to do that? What can happen? And eventually you feel like anything can happen at any moment. Now, this film, like we said, the scrappiness of it, it was made for. I think

it's been estimated for around three hundred thousand. Though um, I think the estimation there is kind of rough because I don't think they were really keeping super you know, accurate records. Uh ended up grossing millions though, Uh it was a success with with with audiences and some critics. I was looking back, I noticed that Ebert was not a big fan of Phantasm and like Phantasm to even less. But Michael Weldon of the Psychotronic film Guides, Uh, he

loved it. It's one of his favorites. He celebrated it as quote a unique, confascinating horror hit with more satisfying surprises than you could find in a dozen other recent offerings. And that was written and I think eighty three. So this, this film really established Casarelli within the horror realm. He followed this up with three's Beast Master, which I think is also a pretty solid film in my opinion anyway,

and certainly one that is a chief cult status. You got some stars for that one, right, Uh, who who's in it? Ripped horn? Ripped horn? Is in it? Um the beast Master. They got the beast Master for it, which is ideal since it's about the beast Master. What Mark Singer? Yeah, yeah, so yeah, we we We talked about beast Master two on a past episode of Weird House. So if you want more beast Master, actually go back to that one. But again, I think eighty three beast

Master pretty solid. Uh. In In Coscarelli's defense, he did not direct beast Master two. That was somebody else, right now. Coscarelli did come back to direct and write Phantasm two in Phantasm three Lord of the Dead in and Phantasm four Oblivion in. His non Phantasm directional credits also include Survival Quest in eighty eight Bubba Ho Tap in two thousand and two. He did a Masters of Horror episode uh titled in Incident On and Off a Mountain Road

from two thousand and five. Both that in Bubba Ho Tap are based on Joe Landsdale stories. He did John Dies at the End in twelve, and he also directed the Dio music video The Last in Line in four, a Dio music video, I Gotta look that up after this. Yeah, I'm not familiar with their their music video, so I've I read a few more Internet trivia anecdotes about about Don Coscarelli in the making of this movie, one of which again contributing to the general idea of budgetary scrappiness.

Apparently they they really juiced every last drop they could get out of their camera and equipment rentals. So one of the stories is that they would shoot on the weekends. I think that took them like over a year to shoot this movie because they were pretty much just shooting on weekends and they would rent their camera equipment on Fridays and return it on Mondays. So they're they're technically only paying for one business day of rental, but then

they would use it all weekend. Another thing is some of the stories about the production make it sound like they were not practicing industry safety standards for for SAE stunts and and kind of dangerous uh the achievement of dangerous shots. So there were stories of the director like personally doing camera work for like filming some of the car chase sequences uh in and not the best way. Like one thing they did is you know, usually when you see characters inside a car and a movie talking. Uh,

the car is not actually moving. They'll have you know, them sitting in a stationary car, and then they will somehow simulate the movement of the outside world around the car. If it's at night, they might just like move lights around where they might have a rear projection or something like that. Uh. That that's often how they do it. In this movie, they just they just actually had characters driving the cars and they were acting at the same time.

That's not usually a great idea. But another story is that there's a scene in the movie where there's like a car chase where one of the characters, Jodi, is shooting a gun at another car that's chasing them. And I think they actually did film this with moving cars, with the director sort of like sitting on the trunk of a moving car filming. Uh you know, the actor playing Jody popping up out of the window and shooting

at the car behind them with a shotgun. Right. I think it had blanks, But even that can be dangerous that. I love realistic effects too, but uh, movie production note. You know, no movie is worth somebody actually getting hurt or killed. You know, practice safety on sets. People now This was very much a Costcarelli family labor of love here because the producer on this was Dat Coscarelli, who was also dad investment counselor at the time, who helped his son fund the film and later served as EP

on Don's other films. And then mom was also involved. Kate Cosarelli, who lived seven through nine. She did make up, production, design, wardrobe. She uh. She also this is super interesting. She was already a novelist apparently, if I'm understanding this correctly, She wrote books like Leading Lady, Fame and Fortune, but she herself wrote the novelization of Phantasm based on her son's screenplay, which I think is that's that's adorable. I love that

she had to knife fight Alan Dean Foster for the rights. Yeah. I don't know how how that went down, but it's yeah, it's apparently I was looking around for any signs of apparently a very sought after book, uh for a die hard Phantasm fans, But I did run across a few quotes here and there her talking about at adapting it and you know, picking up on little details in the film and working those out, so uh, yeah, it was it seemed like a labor of love for her. All right,

let's get into the cast we mentioned Mike. Mike is the youth. Mike is the central character and Phantasm and Mike was played by A. Michael Baldwin born nineteen sixty three, apparently son of animator Gerald Baldwin, and Will worked on a number of older animated shows. Uh So. A. Michael Baldwin was a child actor who appeared as early as nineteen seventy six and episodes of Star Ski and Hutch and Eight Is Enough. Later on, he started as Ug

and Kenny and Company from seventy six. That's Doun's one of Don's previous films, and his post Phantasm acting career is is pretty phantasm heavy, and I believe he went on to teach acting. Um, none of this matters though, because he's I think he's absolutely perfect and phantasm. He's this believably awkward and childlike but still you know, clearly,

you know, be beyond the limits of childhood. He's. But he's also even though he's awkward, he's still charismatic enough to serve as the hero of the film, and you know, to be this action based character when it's right. Uh So, Yeah, I absolutely love a Michael Baldwin's performance here, and I can understand why fans were disappointed that his role was recast in Phantasm too. I'm gonna ask a question about Mike, but this also applies to Jody and especially Reggie. How

old is anybody in this movie supposed to be? Yeah, it's a little a little foggy, right because Mike, for instance, I, you know, I think it would be reasonable to think of him as like as as being a high school graduate. We haven't, but we have no idea like where he is in terms of high school. I assume he's done. Like we don't see we don't I don't think we really see much in the way of friends. There are a few people here and there. There's no I don't

think mentioned of school. I don't remember anything about like his plans for the future. But in a way that's kind of perfect, like that it's perfect for this this kind of character who is adrift in the very early stages of adulthood, that has no concept of like what the future means for him, and he's already a feeling himself detached or partially detached from the protective aura of childhood. That's interesting, You read him as as a high school graduate.

I don't know. So he drives a car that you can't tell if he's supposed to be doing that legally, um, and he like knows how to fix cars and things like that, and there are other things that would suggest

he's older. But sometimes also he actually his character is supposed to be twelve, Yes, definitely, but how much of that is he like just kind of an immature, you know, young adult like, but it is very vague, and I think that's one of the things that works about it, Like he's he's a child, but he's he's a youth, but he's he's not he's certainly I don't think we would say that he's fully you know, in the area of adulthood yet because on one level, I don't think

he has a job or anything. Uh. And his room, as we'll discuss in a bit, is still very much feels like a fortress of of of childhood. It feels like a place where you were safe, or you should be safe from from sex and death and other complexities of the grown up world. I love Mike's room, especially because he's got I don't know how they achieve this, he's got like a wall sized poster of the surface of the moon with the Earth in the background. Is that supposed to be just a single poster that you

buy somewhere. I don't know how they achieve, but it's it's floor to ceiling. It's gigantic. It's absolutely dope. And then he has this the seventies crocheted blanket. It's like yellow and green, and I love those things. I think I've I've napped with that very blanket before You're wrong. It's not yellow and green. It is white, brown and gold. Oh, that's very good, seventies colors. All right, So that's Mike. But Mike has a brother. Jody's Mike's brother, right, yeah, alright.

It's pretty sure on that, but you know, you know how it goes, okay. So Jody is played by Bill Thornbury born two actor, a musician. Prior to Phantasm, he appeared in Summer School Teachers and an episode of The Rockford Files. Afterward, he appeared in the TV series Secret of Midland Heights, The Lost Empire, and also in Phantasms three through five. He also wrote the song in Phantasm, sitting here at Midnight. Uh, this is a perfectly fine performance.

No notes always, is this when we talk about sitting here at midnight? Or should we save that for the scene in the We should say that because it involves characters and actors we haven't introduced yet. Okay, alright, but really one of the true stars of this film and Phantasm films in general, is the character Reggie, played by the actor Reggie Banister. Born horror action icon and musical legend Reggie Banister. Uh. Reggie is great in this and

all subsequent Phantasm films. Uh. He's the perfect mix of the improbable and the believable. He's cool, but he's like every day cool. He's relatable but can sell the extreme situations and threats happening all around him. Reggie Banister is such a weird and wonderful presence. I could not imagine this movie without him. But every scene where he shows up, it adds an additional level of of humor, just like

because of UM. I don't mean to be insulting in this way, but like the way he looks and the way he's dressed, and everything is almost always funny in this movie. Uh, it's that they give him this ice cream man outfit that we'll we'll have to discuss later. But he also brings a very strange kind of winking attitude to things. For the longest time after I saw this movie, I did not realize this actor was a different guy from Dean Norris. I used to think that

Dean Norris was in Phantasm and he was playing Reggie. Yeah, they have similar looks. He's he kind of looks like Dean Norris with a ponytail and sideburns. I feel like the character of Reggie here is kind of again coming back to this youthful energy. It is like a a child or a young person's idea of an adult who has it all together. You know, they're like, oh, look

at look at uncle Reggie. Man, he's got it not he's He's got this cool job as the ice cream man, and he still has time to jam on front porches. I want to be like Reggie when I grow up. And what of course, when you grow up, you realize, like, oh, man, Reggie's life was kind of a mess at the time. He was going through some stuff. Um, you know, a good guy, but you know, he did not have it all together, but he seemed so cool. Yeah, and he

is within the context that, Yeah, Reggie's cool. Yeah, and part of it is yet you don't know anything else about him, really, I mean, you know a little stuff, but yeah, you don't. You don't have all these other details. In subsequent films, they have to make him more like tragic and you know, revenge focused and so forth. But this and this one, he's just a He's just a dude going about his life and then some stuff starts going down around him and he he gets involved. Is

Reggie supposed to be twenty or fifty? I don't know. It's it's unknown. It's as unknown as the as it would be to the youth who is looking up to him, I guess. But I don't think he's supposed to be too old, right, No, he's just generally adult. But like within the range of adults, that's it's it's up for grabs. Yeah. So the real Reggie Banister was was Slash is Vietnam, that turned actor who started out in these early Cossarelli films.

I think he was in all of his films except for Beast Master and the Masters of Horror episode that I mentioned earlier, like at least had some sort of small role. He branched out into some other works such as l a Law, Silent Night, Deadly Night for wish Master, and many other horror titles over the years. I think a lot of it is like he he had this, he submitted his status as as an icon in the Phantasm films, and that, you know, that got him a lot of work. He's apparently, like you know, does a

lot of conventions or has over the years. Uh. He also put out an album in two thousand and eight titled Naked Truth by the Reggie Banister Band, and uh, yeah, Reggie Rocks. There needs to be an official action figure of him because we have we have action figures of less noble characters. Oh well, I wouldn't. I wasn't gonna say less noble about this, But I've got a great action figure of Tom Atkins from Night of the Creeps. If we've got that, we should get a good Reggie

Banister action figure. Get Reggie on the horn. I'm sure you can work out the licensing on this all right. Since we're talking about a Phantasm film, we're of course also talking about the Tall Man played by Anger Scrim who lived through I love the vibe of Anger Scrim as the Tall Man because it is once again not. It doesn't just totally go down smooth. It doesn't feel like, yes, this guy, you know, he's not Doug Bradley as pin Head or something, just feels like born to play this character.

There's a kind of occasional awkwardness to him, an awkwardness in the way like his posture or the way he'll like reach out for a character and a you know, jump scare or something. But that awkwardness fits like it almost makes the movie better. Yeah, I think part of it to the awkwardness is that he the real Anger Scrim was six four, and they made him seem even taller, you know, by various very practical effects, but one of

them was by putting him in a smaller suit. Uh So, so he looks a little awkward just in the way he's wearing his clothing, and it makes him feel like he's not six four but like seven four or something. So uh Anger Scrim him was it was his acting name, but his real name was Lawrence Rory guy Um. He

adopted the Angus Scrim name for this film. He'd previously been in some other works, including Casarelli's Uh Jim the World's Greatest, and went on to star in all subsequent Phantasm films, as well as appearing and I think often smaller roles in films like The Lost Empire Chopping Mall. He has a very brief cameo in that. I think he's just present. I think he's like a new reporter at a news conference about the new mall robots. I don't remember that at all. It's it's even if you

know it's coming, you can miss it. It's so such a small role. Um. He's also in Subspecies Mind Warp Munchie, I Sell the Dead and John dies at the end. He was He was also the opening narrator on Wes Craven's wish Master. So if you check out the first ten to fifteen minutes of wish Master, which is all you need, um, you'll get a little do from him. He was also a five time Grammy nominated and one time Grammy winner uh for writing liner notes on classical

albums Huh. Yeah. He began his career as a writer and a journalist, though his degree was apparently in drama. Yeah, and apparently the stage name Angus scrim goes back to his college days when he was getting a drama degree. I read that he was doing plays off campus when he technically was not allowed to do that by the

theater department that he was studying at. So he tried to keep his off campus uh theater theater work secret by using a different name, using a stage name, so in case he got mentioned in a review or something, they wouldn't be able to trace it to him. Yeah, it's a great it's a great moniker. I love it, and yeah, I mean Angus Angus s Grim was ultimately like this dude was a horror icon. Like he's as much a part of these phantasm films as Flying silver

Balls and Killer Dwarfs. So you mentioned he's in Munchy. Is that a Groblins movie? Yes, I don't think it's one I've seen, but there were at least a couple of Muncheet movie I think Munchie and then Munchie's or Munchies too. I don't take me to the bank on that one, but yeah, those are Groundlins movies. Okay. A couple of other humans involved in this. We have the Lady in Lavender, who is the tall Man's female form

slash sex incarnation. Uh. She's played by Kathy Lester. Lester is an actor and a musician, but her main roles are this fantas the three Lord of the Dead, and I think she also came back in the sixteen phantas a movie ravager. Oh, and then Sally as a character that pops up in this play by Lynn Eastman Rossy. She was only active, but during that time she appeared in a number of notable or at least notable to US films. The Savage Sasquatch film Night of the Demon

from Night of the Demon, I remember that. I think we watched that one for trailer Talk years ago. Yeah, definitely. There are two time to Sasquatch movies, as we've discussed. There's the Noble Squatch and the Savage Squatch, and this is a Savage Squatsch film. This is where Bigfoot is

killing people. I think I've been torn on whether Night of the Demon is worth covering on this show, because it's got some really funny fun stuff in it, but I think it's also got some really gross bummer stuff too, as a lot of Sasquatch movies do. Uh. Lynn Easman Rossy was also in Project X, this is the Matthew Broderick eight movie from and she was also in Unlawful Entry featuring Kurt Russell, Ray Liotta, and Sonny Carl Davis a k A. Rabbit. Oh it took me a minute

to figure this. Yeah, I know what you're talking about. Transfers. Yes, okay, yeah, transfers to Rabbit. Uh notable performance alright, Um. Getting into the effects here, I mainly wanted to commun the effects are mostly really good in this and hold up with one notable exception, but all the stuff with like the flying silver balls and so forth, I think still look really good. But I want to all out the fact that Gene Corso, who Lived Through, has sound effects credit

on this, shared with lore and Mitchell. But yeah, the sound effects and phantasm are really great and I think certainly helps sell that weird aura of the film, especially the weird are of the flying death spheres. As a sound editor of Corso worked on such films as Queen of Blood, Star Wars, The China Syndrome, Mutant, Predator, Deep Star six, and The Rift Um and then Loraine Mitchell, who also worked on this, worked on some of these films as well, along with Conan the Destroyer and Rambo three.

I think in general audiences really underestimate how much difference a good audio element makes in a horror movie good good sound effects, atmospheric sound design, and good music. Would this movie be remembered anything like the way it is if it did not have the quality of sound effects and music that it does. Yeah, I think I think that's that's a great question. And I'm not sure it would have because, yeah, the sound effects are great, but

you have music is wonderful as well iconic. Really. The music is credited to Fred Myro, who lived ninety nine through and Malcolm C. Gray, who lived through two thousand and one. Sea Gray's only film credits are for the Phantasm theme, but but Myro has more of a history as a well. First of all, a third generation musical professional, his father Joseph Myro wrote you make Me Feel So

Young that song um. He and Myro also worked on Phantasm Too and Phantasm three, but his other scores include nineteen seventy three Soilent Green and Scarecrow, You Got My You Got the Gears Turn in On. Some mild thematic connections between Phantasm and Soilent Green. Both involve a discovery of a secret science fiction manufacturing process where one of the ingredients is people. That's an interest. You know, it's

interesting you can think of these various films. You think, a season of the Witch, Halloween, three films about at least slightly about uh, industrial malfeasance, some sort of um like evil industrial plot to mass produce something that is destructive to humanity. Yeah. But anyway, the Phantasm score absolutely great. I have no reservations about saying that the theme is catchy and creepy, perfectly matching the dreamlin quality of the film.

And even outside of the main Phantasm theme song, there are all these wonderful hypnotic soundscapes as well. Uh so you have get synth and guitar, and there we also have just gongs and chimes and symbols and bells creating this this wonderful hallucinatory effect. I agree, love all that stuff. There is one thing I noticed. I didn't compare them side to side to see exactly how similar they are,

but I did hear some strong overlap between. I think it was the main synth theme from Phantasm and one of the tunes that is used in John Carpenter's The Fog. Though of course I'm not alleging musical plagiarism or anything. You know, there are only so many notes, so you're gonna get some similar eerie tunes. But I I heard that kinship. Of course the fog didn't come out to night. Wait what my god? You're right, I had the order inverted in my head, so if there is any inspiration,

it would have gone the other way. Yeah, but like I said, there's only so many notes you can play. All right, well, let's let's jump into phantasm. Well mercifully breaking our streak of movies that begin by looking at the stars in space, this film does not begin in space. Instead, it's just phantasm in red letters on a black background, and then we cut to an establishing shot of a mansion. It's a oh, I did not look up architectural styles. Do you know what? Do you know what style of

house this is? Is like a big white mansion with columns out front, three columns and sort of a wrap around veranda. I believe, yeah, old American. I think it's the architectural styling here. And then we're just straight on from this to an absolutely hilariously awkward sex scene in a cemetery featuring a dude who looks like Lemmy from motor Head and a lady with blonde hair and purple eye makeup, lady and lavender. We find out, yes, she's

a recurring character. In fact, we find out she is just a sort of a glamour a mirage, and in fact she is Anger Scrim, but just in a different form. And we see that because okay, they're they're having sex in a cemetery. And then suddenly the lady pulls out a dagger and she stabs Lemmy. She stabs the dude, and then through the magic of film editing, she transforms into an old man and it is Angus Scrim. We

will see him many more times in the film. The soundtrack in the scene is symbols and whooshing wind noises. Uh So, it's weird mix of like kind of cool atmosphere. But the staging of the sex scene is so funny. Yeah, it's it's absurd. I mean, obviously, depictions of human sex and film should always be considered with a grain of salt, but this one feels like it was constructed via youthful hearsay about what the grown up world of sexuality actually

consists of. You know, it's one of these where it's like full clothing, um, strange positioning, if you were to try and figure out the details of human sexuality based on this scene, you would be left with just a lot of questions about how everything lines up. Yeah, I don't want to get I'm not gonna get gross. I don't wanna get too specific about the mechanics of horror

movie sex. But it is greatly confusing at what angles these two people's bodies are supposed to be positioned, And it just it makes you It feels like something like Ralph Wiggham would would explain, you know. And then the baby looked at me. Yeah, I have no idea. Yeah, it's it's absurd, but it also again, I think it falls in line with a youthful energy of the film. You know. It's like, like, what is sex? What is death? Uh?

Mike doesn't know? Uh, And and part of this film is Mike's dream quest to to try and figure that out. But okay, lady and Lavender is actually anger scrim she kills Slimmy and then it's morning. Uh in the cemetery and we're back at the mansion, but it's daylight, and we here we meet two of our main characters. By the way, we see a sign says it's Morning Side Morning Side Cemetery, and we meet our main characters, Jody and Reggie. Jody is tall, handsome, big mane of messy hair.

Reggie is, uh, he's shorter, he's wearing cool sunglasses. And I was gonna say, uh, so he's like bald in front with a horseshoe of hair and then a ponytail. So I was gonna say it's like business in front, party and back, but really it's more like closed for business in front, party and back and close to a business mostly on the top as well. It's a substantial bald bald pattern there. Um, but still eric very cool. Look, he's got some nice sideburns there that come to a

nice little, you know, goring point. I mean, there's no denying Reggie's cool. Yeah. So they meet up and they say, hey, Tommy's gone hell of a way to Indo Trio. So Tommy, I think, meaning the guy from the opening scene who got stabbed was their friend. They believe he committed suicide. I don't know why, uh they think that, but that's what what they have been led to believe. Do you Rob, did you detect that they were supposed to all be

in a band together. Yeah, I kind of got that vibe, but I don't remember if there was a specific line that that actually cemented that concept. I mean, clearly Jody looked like a dude that was in a band. It's just a question of was he in a band with these two. Jody looks like he would fit right in in a one piece disco jumpsuit doing a musical number

in like a variety show. Yeah. Anyway, we go into a nice creepy atmospheric scene where Jody walks around alone in the halls of the funeral home, and the halls are lined with white marble covered in a weird pattern of blue veins. I love the atmosphere of the the inside of the funeral home. Yeah, I mean it's in many ways, it's an obvious set and and yet the uniformity,

I think gives it a nice otherworldly vibe. And and you know this, it feels sterile and like a place between and at the same time it does feel authentically like a mausoleum, like a mini mausoleums also have that vibe, except I don't think it's quite as the ones I've been in anyway, it doesn't feel quite as monotonous. It's not quite as uniform. You do have some little details that are that differentiate one area from another. It might be flowers in front of these remains, etcetera. But yeah,

this this whole vibe here. It feels just enough like a mausoleum that it doesn't feel like they're on a spaceship, but it also kind of feels like they're on a spaceship. I have questions about how this mausoleum is supposed to work, because I think we see later that, like many mausoleums, it has these vaults. They're built into the walls, they have like a name on them, and then what appears

to be some kind of covering or door. But later we see that you can just open them up like a file cabinet, and there is a like a file cabinet drawer, and then there's a coffin inside which you could presumably just open up and see the body. Yeah, yeah, I I I'm not sure I've never opened one up, but this, if you take this movie at face value, it it's telling you that, yeah, these are just like more drawers you can just roll on open and look

at the body. I am not an expert in the funerary Arts and Sciences, but I think there would be problems with that design anyway. So Jody's walking around and here's these strange sounds that in the subtitles for the version of the movie I watched it called the sounds warbling. I would call it squawking or growling, maybe snarling. And of course in a bit, we'll find out what is

making that sound, right, uh, and we see that. Let's see Jody visits the grave of his parents, we find out they've passed away, and then we meet Mike, Jody's little brother, who is just tearing through the grass of the cemetery on a dirt bike. It's like he's riding a chainsaw. Uh. Trivia fact I found is that the motorbike used here is called a Hodaka road toad. But he's literally just driving like between the grave markers. Yeah, some kind of psychomania vibes to this, uh, this motorcycle

right here. And he also hears the weird chittering and snarling sounds. And we see a few glimpses of what appeared to be little figures in dark cloaks dashing behind gravestones. Oh, the dwarves and I think we're supposed to understand that Mike is sort of a little engineer, like he has

an affinity for machines. We see him later repairing Jody's muscle car at multiple points, uh and uh, Like there's a part where he's working on the engine while Jody is just standing there talking to a friend like, Yeah, I'm gonna ditch this kid and get out of town. Um anyway, Jody inside the funeral home goes investigating the weird sounds, but he doesn't quite figure it out. Instead, there's a great jump scare where we first hear Angus scrim talk. He like comes up behind him and slaps

down on his shoulders as the funeral it's about to begin. Yes, now I started noticing a pattern. I don't know if you picked up on the same thing, Rob, Like in the funeral scene, there's a very symmetrical shot where we see the church service filmed from straight down the back of the aisle where it's like a perfectly balanced frame. There are people sitting in the pews on both sides and the columns lining on both sides, so it's it's

totally symmetrical. We already saw shots like that when Jody was walking through the mausoleum, you know, he'd be framed in doorway with all these decorations that are exactly symmetrical on both sides. The movie seems to be fond of shots like this where the subject is in the middle and then it's just mirror image is on both sides

of the screen. Yeah. Yeah, And I think especially with with this scene, but also with the mausoleum scenes as well, there's this impression of narrowing, you know, as if narrowing towards the death point, which I think lines up nicely with the theme of the movie. And then the idea that you know, we're propelled through it, that Mike is propelled through this world, um, and you know it keeps

the pacing contributes to that as well. Also, I want to point out, I don't know if you noticed this, but in this particular, I assume this is a like an actual church and actual location and they didn't build any of this or or decorated a lot. But there's a weird painting above the altar in this scene that again I assume it's just a legit in church painting, but it has kind of zombies Jesus vibes to it like Jesus has his arms up like Frankenstein. A bit

oh interesting. I didn't notice that. Uh. I was just thinking, what church let phantasm shoot inside? I mean maybe they, I don't know how it went down. Maybe they didn't tell them what the film was about, or maybe they explained the theme and the church was like, yeah, it works for us, as long as you get to Jesus

painting and there, we're very proud of this. Okay. Anyway, So Reggie and Jodie are there for the funeral of their their friend there I guess their bandmate maybe, and Mike, the younger guys trying to peep on the funeral with binoculars. I didn't understand this at all, Like, why isn't he just there instead he's like in the bushes with binoculars watching them carry the coffin. He Mike is a consonant voyeur.

He is just he's just constantly spying on sex and death, as is the you know, the very definition of the of the voyeuristic impulse. Like his brother's meeting some lady, well, Mike's and the bushes, He's gonna see what's happening here, somebody's moving a casket around Mike's and the bushes. He's got the binoculars out. He wants to see how these worlds work, these worlds that he is not yet entered into but seems destined to be a part of. But

because he's spying on the funeral, he's still watching. After all of the uh, the mourners leave and he gets to see something very odd happen the tall man and get scrim after everybody's gone. Instead of, you know, like letting the workers bury the casket, he picks up the casket, takes it back to the hearse and puts it inside. And he's carrying the entire thing by himself. Not only is he most probably evil, he's also cheap. He's not not hiring anybody else to carry these for him. He's

just picking it up himself. We also get a sense of this when we see Jody's body in the casket. Jody looks a little googleish. It's like the tall Man is not doing a good job. And uh, I'm not sorry, not Jody. Uh what's his name? Tom friend? Tommy? Tommy looks googleish, does not look like he's been embalmed to like a to the degree that you would want your loved woman embombed, I would say, but he looks like a movie corpse. So mission accomplished, right, Okay, so we

got the set up. Mike has seen something very weird at the Morningside Cemetery, and after that weird reveal, Mike walks around alone with excellent theme music playing some great seventies horror movie atmosphere. You know, a lot of great horror movies from from this time get so much mileage, like they stick in your mind, not just because of the scary scenes, but because of the eerie scenes where a character is merely sort of walking through the landscape

and the music is playing. I think about the early scenes of going down the sidewalks in Halloween, or the way Mike is just walking around, maybe going to visit, uh the Reverend Mother guyas Helen Mohiam in this movie. Yes, yeah, this is where we get to our wonderful Danagessor at scene straight Dune rip off, and I love it. Uh. Clearly Don was a fan of Dune. In fact, he it's explicit later when Jody goes to a bar, did you notice this in the bar is called Dunes? Bar Yeah. Yeah,

he was obviously a big out of the book. The Lynch adaptation wouldn't come out to eighty four, so yeah, definitely a written sci fi fan. In fact, we see there's another scene where we see a sci fi paperback on Mike's desk or bedside table. Uh, and I looked it up. I forget what it is off hand, but it is a particular sci fi novel that was included. I guess to let you know that Mike's into sci fi, that maybe he's a little more creative, uh than other

people in the community around him. The book was I Am Legion by Rogers Alasnie, how is it? Oh good? My name is Legion? Maybe I don't know. I've never read it, okay, but that sounds right. Yeah. I looked it up and then forgot it. Promptly forgot it. But it has has very cool uh, a little late seventies paperback sci fi cover art. I love it so clearly this scene is just taken from from doing the book. But what would you say is literally supposed to be

happening here? Is this lady is supposed to be a fortune teller. She's like dressed in all black wearing dark sunglasses inside and in a room full of candles, and she speaks through her granddaughter. Yeah yeah, and it's you know, it's already got a creepy vibe that you're probably if you've not seen the film, you're thinking, well, it's not like then they make him put his hand in a box and experience phantom pain. Um, and then tell him that fear is the mind killer. Um. Well, actually all

of that happens. That's exactly what happens in the scene. They don't say mind killer. She says, fear is the killer. Yes, it doesn't quite have the same ring. No, And then I think the box vanishes, right like, straight up vanishes in front of our eyes, the viewer's eyes on the table, yes, suggesting that not only in the pain is the pain in the box and illusion created telepathically by the reverend mother here, but that the box itself is there wasn't

even a box. Now what does all this mean within the context of the film. I don't know what unknown, Well, Mike is told not to fear, he said, The granddaughter says, fear is the killer. Don't fear. That's what grandmother wants you to learn. It was all in your mind. And then Mike says, oh, yeah, I guess it will come. We will come back around to this later. This film does do a pretty good job of if it establishes something, it will come back around to it. Okay, I think

it's time to talk about sitting here at midnight. So at Jody and Mike's house, Jodi is sitting there on the front porch playing a playing a stratocaster plugged into a Fender amp and uh, and then Reggie pulls up. Reggie now is in his workoutfit. He is wearing an ice cream suit. I don't know. He's wearing like a white shirt and white pants with a black bow type and he's driving a truck that says Reggie's ice Cream. And it's got a guitar tucked into one of the

I don't know, the cooler boxes, I guess. And so so Reggie gets out of the car, comes up and plays guitar alongside Jody. They play a song called Sitting Here at Midnight, where the lyrics are I'm just sitting here at midnight, and I'll be sitting here till noon. You see, my lady left me lonely. Yes she did. My baby left me blue. And then they both go oh and then play a riff. It's and I will give him credit. Both actors are actually playing guitars here,

just like moving their hands while the soundtrack plays. I'll also say that a lesser movie would have only played part of the song or would have cut away to done some sort of a montage or something. But now we did get. We get the full short performance of this song right here on the porch, and I dig it. Also, you mentioned that the ice cream truck says Reggie's ice cream somehow that I missed out on that when i've

every time I've watched it. That that's that's an interesting detail, Like, not only is Reggie the ice cream man, he's apparently a business owner his own business. He's really plugged in at the local chamber of commerce. Now we do get a nice weird moment there at the end of the performance with a tuning fork, though, yes, we do well. First of all, after they play I think Jody is not bad, and then Reggie says we're Hot is Love, you know, which makes me think Hot is Love was

the name of their band. Oh man, that's good, that would have totally fit. But so Reggie pulls out a tuning fork. I guess to tune his guitar, but instead we just really zone in on the fork and we listen to it it humming out a tune until Reggie mutes it by putting his two fingers on the end of the of the fork. Times. We will come back to this detail as well. Now, some more stuff happens. We see random like a random blond lady walk into the funeral home and then open a door and light

shines on her and she screams. And there are a few things in the movie that are just like random things happen and I can't really connect them to anything else. So you know, something like that happens. But hey, let's go to the bar with Jody. He's going to go to Dunes Cantina, have a beer and and try to try to make some friends. And Mike is here for this. Mike is watching the whole time. Yes, Mike, oh of course follows Jody everywhere, so he's outside peeping through the

window of the bar. As as Jody's like chatting up a lady, chatting up a blond lady who they're hitting it off, and he doesn't know who she is, but we do because we saw that that horribly awkward opening scene. It's the lady who stabbed Tommy and turned into Anger Scrim. So Jody don't go home with Anger Scrim. But it looks like he's gonna. She leads him off to the cemetery.

I guess the goal is to kill him. Mike is still following them, peeping on everything, and then suddenly everything is interrupted because snarling, warbling noises start up again, and some little creature that looks like a jahwa, like a short figuring brown robes, charges out at him from the darkness, and and Mike runs away, screaming. This interrupts everything. Everybody

runs off, and Jody runs after Mike. There's some really goofy sex jokes in the scene, and I don't feel like describing, but anyway, so Jody ends up running off after after Mike. Yeah, it seems a little bit big cringe e in some respects, but yeah, this is our first glimpse of the dwarves actually scampering about and causing mischief, one of the key aspects of the Phantasm films. Now, is this a good place to talk about the connection between the Dwarves in this movie and the Jaws in

Star Wars. Because we gotta admit in their in the brown robes with the pointy hoods, they look extremely similar. Yeah, there is a strong comparison to be made, very very similar vibes. It of course different, ultimately different energies involved, like Jawas and Star Wars. They are just technological scavengers looking to pick up the pieces and and make a

few deals here and there. They're not evil. They're very neutral creatures and and as we've seen in later installments of Star Wars, and you can have quite good relations with the job was. They're they're they're not indecent folk. Uh, these creature here's the dwarves of phantasm. These are little monsters. Uh that snarling little zombies. Yeah, they are up to no good. They will attack you, they will do god

knows what. Now. I think a lot of people have assumed that these creatures were inspired by the design of the Jawas. But in uh Don costa Ali's defense, they had apparently they had this idea and started shooting the movie before Star Wars came out, So I think it looks like this is just a coincidence. Yeah, and um, and we do. Unlike the Jawas which in which we we never see the Jawas face, we will get to see the face of one of these dwarves later on.

And I should also point out that by the time they make Phantasm Too, uh, in which they had a much bigger budget. By the way, one of the things they use that budget on is always showing the dwarves faces. So the dwarves look extra evil and nasty in that film because their faces are never really they may be there. They is maybe obscured in some scenes, but there a whole lot of scenes where you get to see their little snarling faces. So anyway, coming back to the plot,

here's what some weird stuff happened. So Jody runs off after Mike because Mike was scared and screaming, uh, chased by a necro dwarf and uh. Mike tries to explain to Jodie what happened, and Jody says it was probably just a gopher in heat, okay, uh. And then and then Jody sends Mike home with his car, and then Mike wakes and then Mike like wakes up and he's in his bed with the groovy blanket with the brown,

white and gold stripes. But the tall man is standing over his bed and his bed is in the middle of a cemetery, and then zombies like scream and grab him. So I guess this is a dream and then he wakes up. But like, if this was a dream, how far back does that go? Like how how much of it was a dream? We don't know when the dream sequence started? Yeah, more, when does it end? Is it still going? Is the tall man about to do a jump? Scare right behind you right now, Joe? It might have.

But those questions aside, this is a fabulous scene. This is one that I think is used in the trailer as well, just the symmetrical shut shooting of it, the way it's all framed up, the darkness, and it also just like it sums up a lot of the attitude of phantasm. Like here is Mike, the youth in bed, clearly troubled, and like Death, the personification of Death is like literally at the head of his bed, leering over him, and then these things jump out and start, you know,

presumably about to just tear him in half. Then one of the funniest things is it goes from he's waking up from a dream sequence, and then it goes straight to another scene that feels so dream like. He's it's it looks kind of gauzy, and Mike is wandering down the sidewalk like sucking on a lollypop and check king the change tray and pay phones for change, and then he looks across the street and there's the Tall Man

just walking past like a clothing store. And then there's Reggie's ice cream truck in the foreground, and Reggie is opening up the freezer and pulling ice cream out, and there is fog emanating from the freezer. And then the tall Man stops right behind Reggie and stands in the freezer fog and turns and looks at Mike and does this monstrous sniff. He's like, you know, breathing in uh, looking in something some kind of weird agony or something. Uh. And what what the heck is going on here? Did

this really happen? Is this a dream? What is the tall Man doing when he's sniffing the freezer fog? I don't know. Yeah, it's definitely another great scene that has dreamline qualities, and I think has that strong youth I have of like here here the youth is seeing the true creepy nature of reality. It's lost to all the other adults. Like here's Reggie Reggieta. Notice that's going on

at all. Reggie's just doing his thing, doing his job. Um. I also love how this scene it seems to imply or it's always struck me this way, this being a moment where the tall man is looking right at us the viewer. He's looking right back at Mike. So it's like the abyss staring back. It's game recognizing game here, it's like Mike and the tall Man have a connection. And we'll see another version of this later on in

the picture, Yes we will. But I just want to flag again that I have completely lost track of what's the dream and what's reality by this point in the movie. This is This is probably a good point to mention in Phantasm to again. Universal comes in gives him a bunch of funding to finally make a sequel to Phantasm, and apparently they made some demands, as you might expect when a big studio comes in and gives you a whole bunch of money. Uh, they said, well, we need

some romantic uh interests for our characters, especially for Mike. Um, you can't bring back Baldwin and Reggie Banister. You get to bring back one and the other one you have to recast. So in Phantasm too, they recast Mike, which, given the choice, was the correct choice to make. Like, you don't recast Reggie, you gotta you can't recast Reggie, must have Reggie Banister. Yeah. Yeah. But one of the other apparently, apparently one of the other studio demands was

no dream sequences. Nobody's dreaming in this film. It's I guess what they thought. It was too confusing, and they're like, everything needs to be linear. Nobody has any dreams, which is a weird demand to make on a sequel to this film, a film that, like you said, on one hand, like that's the whole quality of it. It's like we don't know when it's a dream and when it's not. Even the title of the film is Phantasm. It is supposed to be like an illusion, uh, something you're not

sure about. But you also understand where the studio is like, look, this is too much needed to be nice and linear. No dreams, that's a tragedy. I'm gonna have to I wonder if I'll get mad when I watch P two. Oh. PP two is still a lot of fun. It's very much an action film. It's kind of like the Aliens to this film's Alien, but without the consistency of quality. Like Phantasm Too is a dumber film, but also a film that clearly had more money to throw at killer

ball effects and dwarf effects. And also, yeah, Reggie is transformed into a pure action hero. And so it's, uh, it's it's a lot of fun as well, but it's it's very different and definitely, uh, there's something to be said for it's um, it's moving away from the dream imagery for the most part. So the next thing is we're going to spend some time with Mike and Jody

in their house. I love their house. There's a part where Mike is like underneath Jody's muscle car doing repairs on it again because apparently, you know, he's he's got full mechanic training even though he is only twelve or nineteen, and he is, and he is attacked by the necro Dwarves while he is under the car, but then in trying to defend himself, he ends up bonking Jody on

the toe with a hammer. But anyway, this is when we finally get a really good look at their house and all of the the length of the carpet fibers will amaze you. Yeah, there's the secret the scene where I think this is later on, but there's a scene with the stairs in the house where these like floating stairs and they're all carpeted in and you just want to you just want to take your shoes off and and walk on those things. Except they also look like

they would have protruding hidden nails. Well, it is the venties, so it's like everything's everything in the house looks comfy and yet possibly dangerous. Anyway, Mike chills out for a bit in his glorious bedroom with the shot of the moon on the wall and like a John Lennon poster, I think, one of those maps of the world that cuts Asia in half instead of dividing in the pick

ocean um. And we see him tuck a gigantic bowie knife into a sheet strap to his calf and the knife is as thick as his leg, so when he put pulls his pants leg down over it, it looks really funny. Uh. He also packs a crucifix, but this is your classic suiting up scene. It's like when Van Helsing is packing his steaks in his holy water into the kid. But it's time to head off to the Morningside Cemetery at night for some reason, I guess to figure out what's going on with the tall man and

uh and the jaw was so mike Head's over. He breaks through a window to sneak in. He's walking around in the dark with a lighter. He ends up hiding in a coffin in a classic horror movie trope, somebody gotta hide in a coffin because somebody's looking for them while a very blank faced man in a white hat creeps around looking for him. Rob, did you understand that this man in the white hat is supposed to be

of the same species as Anger scrim Um? I think he's more well, you know, it's it's hard this one. This is a point where it's difficult to sort of think about this film completely on its own terms, because knowing what we know about later installments, I feel like

it's clear that this guy is just an underling. But if I were just watching this film for the first time, yeah, I might think this must be this being must be of the same species or origin as the Tall Man, because they're both the they're like they I don't think they exchange any words. They have this kind of like wordless correspondence energy. But the scene here is really cool though, you know, with him hiding in the casket, I feel

like it has genuine tension to it. And this is cool bit where he's he's used the lighter that he was showing off earlier to keep the casket from closing completely because I don't know, maybe it would self lock and then he would be stuck in there and buried

or found later. I wonder if there's there are unused scenes that describe who the man in the white hat is, like maybe he's a human rin Field to the Tall Man, because is Did you read the same thing I did Rob about how the original cut of Phantasm was over three hours long? Oh wow, Well, I guess. I mean that's not out of character with a lot of films

where the initial cut is just really bloated. But if that's the case with this film, I mean, good job on them cutting it down and it being this consistently entertaining. There's not a dull moment in the film. It's like an hour and twentysomething. So if that's true, that would have mean that would have meant we lost half the movie.

I think they pull some stuff out later in uh some of the sequels, like even like pretty you know, like decades later in some of the sequels, they like, We're able to pull out whole sequences that they didn't use well. Anyway, Mike is attacked by the man in the white hat, but at the same time he is being pursued by the ball. This is when we first

really meet the ball. There is a shiny metal sphere that flies through the air at Mike and it's coming at him to uh to to drive into his face while the man in the white hat is holding him. But Mike bites the guy on the arm and then ducks down. And then the ball hits the guy in the white hat instead, and it I remember when I first saw this, the entire room was just in shock

watching what the ball did. It's it's a roll that beautiful ball footage moment where the drill goes in between the eyes and then it just squirts out a jet of blood from the back of the ball. Yeah, like it's not trying to keep the blood it's just take the blood out of the thing that it is embedded in. It's just absolutely glorious sequence. Uh, one of the coolest, weirdest horror movie deaths you'll ever find an a harm movie.

To take it out of the context of horror movie violence, this device, if it existed would be a wonderful fruit juicer. It looks, you know, flying to the side of a watermelon and then just drain all the watermelon juice straight out. Yeah. I mean you have to stand behind it and I guess catch it all in your mouth. There's something you need a receptacle. Yeah, But that's again that's another quality of the sphere that I like because it doesn't feel like it was designed to function in this world or

in these circumstances. You know, just attaching to things and sucking all the liquid out of them and just blasting the liquid over whatever is behind it. I love it. It's so weird. But there are a lot of effects in this movie that are great low tech, low cost effects, and the ball effects. I think this is a great example because there are scenes where the this metal sphere is actually flying through the air towards the camera and you don't necessarily see any wires or anything. So how

did they do this? I think what they did is they just had somebody stand behind the camera and pitch the ball, or they might have used a pitching machine. In any case, the ball was being a throne or ejected down the hall past the camera, and then they just used the shot in reverse. So the ball is just flying towards the camera from out of nowhere. It looks good. It looks good. How where they did it? Like? These are sequences? Um that that that hold up? Absolutely?

Uh you know that these He's he's totally by this flying silver sphere from another world. Anyway, there's a big chase scene the tall Man chases Mike. At one point Mike manages to before the chase. Before the chase, Joe, you have one of my favorite moments. This is the showdown between Mike and the tall Man. This is the moment is another game recognized game moment where they both they freeze. They kind of Mike kind of like cautiously walks up the tall Man's cautiously walking up and then

and they're kind of mirror images of each other. Um but but kind of like one to one side, one to the other and then boom, Mike runs for it and the tall Man chases after him. And the tall Man he's got a lot of he's got a lot of go, he's got some energy. He may look like he's somewhere between the ages of fifty and eighty. Again, his age is also suitably vague. Um, And of course he's probably he's not of this world anyway, so it

doesn't matter. But yeah, he can move. This leads to the finger sequence, which is a whole like series of scenes which are so so. Mike manages to escape from the tall Man and cut off some of his fingers. It squirts out yellow blood, and his fingers are like still moving around on the floor. Mike takes one of the fingers, takes it home, keeps it in a box, falls asleep on the floating shag carpet stairs with a shotgun in his hand. That's not safe. Um. Then Jody

finds him asleep on the stairs. Uh. Mike explains it to Jody. He's like, here's what happened. I'm going to show you a finger in a box. And then he shows him the finger and then Jody's like, Okay, I'm convinced I appreciated that that he didn't persist in denying it once he saw the finger in the yellow blood

in the box. And then the finger turns into a beatle demon which attacks Jody and Mike, and then they try to kill it in the garbage disposal in the sink, and then Reggie arrives to witness this, and now Reggie's in on the whole demon conspiracy. Uh. And then and then after this, Jody starts giving Mike a gun safety lesson, and then Jody heads off to the funeral home to

investigate things for himself. Yeah, and I love the love how we go from this scene where Jody is giving Mike the gun safety lesson, and then Jody brave goes into the basement of of the mausoleum at night is immediately attacked by dwarves. And there's a scene where a dwarf is on Jody's back and Jody is trying to shoot the dwarf off of his back with a handgun by essentially aiming the gun at his own head. Like it's just so dangerous. It's like, really, you're just giving

pointers on gun safety and now you're doing this. That scene is so funny. But anyway, Jody yes, so he Jody and has this fight with one of the necro dwarves in the funeral home and then he flees. And then this leads into a car chase where Jody and Mike are driving around shooting at a hearse I think that's being driven by one of the creatures, and then

they crash. They get the other car to crash, and they go up to the creature and they pull back its hood and you're wondering, what's its face going to be like? And they realize, oh, no, this was our friend. Tommy's the limmy guy, but he's covered in yellow slime. Oh, and this is great the reveal that the dwarves are the bodies of the dead that have been like compressed

down into um, into little necro dwarves like this. I remember when I when I when I watched one of these films for the first time and realized this, and I was like, oh, my goodness, that's that's genius. That's so beautiful. So they summoned Reggie's ice cream truck, which is now doubling as a body removal truck. So they're putting it in the in the freezer and Reggie by this scene. I think he was dressed like this earlier.

But he looks so funny because he's wearing a black vest over his ice cream outfit, so he looks like a combination of a milkman and a riverboat casino dealer. So Reggie, Jodi, and Mike go back to their house and they have a strategy session. Jody's going, why why, why why are they taking people's bodies and crushing them down to half size. And then Reggie suggests, well, we got to catch the tall man and drive a steak through his heart. I don't know why they think that

would work. Uh. And then Mike, Um, Mike is incredulous. He's like, how do you think we could drive a steak through his heart? That mother is strong, and many times in this movie people use the word mother as a general now to refer to a person or a thing. It will gives so nicely with Mike here though, because because it's like Mike's talking tough. He's talking like like like he thinks an adult should be talking in the situation.

I love it. Okay, Well, we're heading into the final sequence here, so I think Reggie and Jody are going to go investigate the funeral home again, and they're gonna make Mike stay at uh Sally's an antique store. I think these are characters who we should have met before,

but we haven't. Actually, maybe that got cut. The antique store is a nice sequence though, because it's just Mike wandering around looking at strange things in an antique store, and we get some fabulous percussion, like all the gongs and bells. Uh. It's a scene that I yeah, without the music, I guess it might be a little boring, but with the music, it's it's really cool and creepy. Yeah. And he just wanders around looking at things until he finds an old photograph of the Tall Man in the

nineteenth century driving a horse drawn carriage. And then from here he's like, you must take me home immediately. I don't know what this changes. Why does that mean he must leave? You're like, yeah, that didn't they already know that the tall Man was the other world? Like why would he be that surprised? I don't know. So they're driving around and the car gets attacked by the creatures again. Uh, and then let's see Mike goes back home and then Jody locks Mike in his bedroom where he's like, I'm

going to go go to the funeral home. You have to stay here, And then we get one of the moments that actually stuck in my mind the most from when I first saw this movie. It is when Mike comes up with a system to escape being locked in his room, and it is an improvised explosive device that he makes out of a shotgun shell, a hammer, attack,

and some tape. Yeah, absolutely do not do this at yeah, So he like, yeah, he puts attack in the back of a shotgun shell and then tapes it to the end of a hammer, and then like and then swings it at the door, and this makes the shell explode and it shoots sits shot through the door, and then he's able to reach through and and open up the knob or dislodge a screwdriver. I think that Jody jammed in there to prevent the door from opening. I was

trying to figure out what this technique actually work. I have no idea. All I could find was people doing forum posts on it, so I can't vouch for this at all, but people on the forum posts, so some people were saying, yeah, it seems like this would work, except the shot would not explode, you know, going straight forward like it would if it were coming out the barrel of a shotgun. It would explode in all directions because of the lack of a barrel. Please do not

try this out. We are not asking anybody to experiment and and create and generate an answer on this. Do not attempt. But it was all for nothing, really, because Mike gets out and then immediately runs into Anger scrim Ambush at the door. Anger scrims like, I've been waiting for you. So he takes him. Uh. Tallman takes him to the funeral home, where he escapes a hearse by shooting out a window. Meanwhile, Jody's already there. We get a bunch of action. There's like the ball attacks again

and we get ball cam. Jodie comes to the rescue with a shotgun and blows up the ball and uh. And now they got to check out the scary door. So they're they're creeping over to the scary door that we saw the blonde girl open earlier. She sees the light and then she screams, yeah. And this this is the point in the film where if you've never seen it before, you might wonder like how do they how do they keep it going? How do they out the auntie here? But they do, Like the weirdness intensifies in

this scene. Well, first of all, we get jump scare Reggie. Reggie just comes out. Yeah, he's like hey, and they're like, oh, we thought you were dead, but no, he's good. And he reveals that he found Sally and Susie and some other people in there and they're not dead. They're all okay, And he's like, yeah, I snuck him out of windows. Just a whole other story was happening while we were watching. The characters we barely knew are also now safe. So

don't they're they're fine. Yeah, So okay, they want to go in the room. They open up the door and inside the room is full of these black barrels with little glass windows on them. Huh, what's going on there? We get a loud hum And then also in the room with the black barrels, there is some weird furniture.

There's there are just these two metal prongs coming up from the floor and they look inside the barrels and they're like, oh, it's those necro dwarves there they are, And so they're being created in these barrels, I guess, and then or at least created and then like pickled in the barrel, finished in the barrel, or stored in

the barrel for transit, I don't know. And then Mike realizes that the two metal prongs coming up from the floor are actually a transdimensional portal, and he reaches his hand through and then he falls entirely through and sees what's on the other side, and it is a desert planet made of just like stones and gravel with a red sky, where all of the necro dwarves are are lined up in a row going all the way to the horizon as if they're like carrying stuff off. And

then Jody and Reggie save Mike. They pull him out from from the portal, and they put everything together. They figure out ah, the Tall Man is using the human corpses as alien slave labor on another planet, but because of that planet's gravity and uh I guess atmospheric pressure or heat, they have to be crushed down to a smaller size so they can work there as zombies. I absolutely love this. This is a marvelous reveal, like there's another world out there, some sort of giant, high gravity world.

Where crushed down necro dwarves or are being sent to serve as labor. And also they never I don't know if they ever really draw this line or not, but I wonder if that's also why the tall man is so tall, because he comes from one of these worlds with with higher gravity comes to a lower gravity world and it like makes him taller somehow, I don't know. Okay, Well, anyway, there's a bunch of fighting after this lights go out, and then Jody and Mike end up chasing around with

some of the with some of the creatures. Reggie is left behind in the room, and there's a great moment where where Reggie thinks back to the tuning fork because he is looking at the two metal prongs coming up from the floor and he figures out how to do something to them. Uh he he like, he puts his hands on the on the prongs like he did with his fingers on the tuning fork earlier, and that does something. It like opens a portal and then all the wind

starts rushing and he almost gets sucked in. It's a great sequence and I like how it can you know, connects to that moment with the tuning fork earlier in the film, He's like, this is it. I know what this is. I mean, I don't really know what this is, but I know the basic relationship here. I bet if I reach out with both hands and I stopped the vibrations,

I'm going to close this portal. Another trivia thing I saw alleged on the internet is that the idea to connect that to the tuning fork and everything was was an idea that came from Susan, who was Reggie Banister's wife. Well, it was a great idea. So Reggie makes it outside. He sees the lady and laugh under. I think he does not know, like the audience does, that she is actually younger scrim So he goes and tries to help her, but he gets stabbed, and there's general wynd and chaos.

There's you know, the tall man standing over Reggie with a knife and a Reggie apparently dies, and then we get the final showdown where uh, Jody and Mike escape and Jody's like this is so out of nowhere, like not earned at all. Jody's like, there's an old mine shaft up by Singer's Creek thousands of feet down. We just gotta find a way to get him up there, and so he sends Mike into into the house to get Ammo, and Jody says he's going to go remove

warning signs from around the mine shaft. Um but I don't know why they's in Mike into the house because don't they already know that the tall Man knows that's where they live. I don't know. Tallman shows up and attacks Mike in the house. He you know, he says, boy, you play a good game, boy, But now the time is finished. And so they run around chasing and Mike's were repeating the litany against fear, except not really. Instead

he's just saying, don't fear. And they they succeed. They you know, they lure the tall Man into the mine shaft, which does not look like a mind shaft at all. It looks like a square somebody dug a square shaped hole in the dirt. Yeah. This is the one moment in the film where I feel like the effects feel a little bit shoddy, especially when the boulders roll in to fill up the pit after they dropped the tall

Man down. There is not a deal breaker for the movie or anything, but um but yeah, everything else feels fresh and believable. And this is a little like you can see the scenes. You can see the tarp uh there in that sequence, and I was like, are they gonna wake up? And it's all a dream, and you know what happens the next thing, Mike wakes up as if from a dream. And then Mike and Reggie are hanging out next to a roaring fire and they're talking

about how, uh Jodi died. Huh. It's like there were like so instead of Reggie dying, they're saying Jody died and uh. Then they show Mike visiting Jody's grave and then Reggie's like, I'm going to take care of you, Mike, and then Reggie starts playing. He's like, let's go on a road trip. You know, we'll leave when the sun

comes up. You go pack your bags. And Reggie sits there by the fire and starts to play that song sitting here at midnight again and it is violently dissonant with the non diagetic soundtrack that's playing at the same time. Sounds horrible. And then up in Mike's room, the tall man appears in a mirror and he's like boy, and then there's a jump scare and pulls him into the mirror, and that's the end of the movie. I have no idea how to make sense of any of that. It

does does not connect at all. Yeah, I don't know, uh, dreams within dreams or dreams and images caused by by traumas and losses. Because it's like there we start off with the with the growing understanding that that Mike has law both his parents, and then here at the end we get this revelation that he's lost his brother and that the only like parental figure left in his life is Reggie, and um, yeah, it's I don't know, it's it.

It's it's hard to connect all these things together, and yet everything shapes up in a way where you can you kind of buy it. You're like, there's a pattern here. I just can't quite piece it together. But if I watch it enough times, maybe it'll begin to sink in. I have a question about the theory of this movie. Why is the Tall Man doing murders at all? Because we discover in the end that his goal is to create uh Jawa zombies uh to work for him on this this other planet, and he does that just with

human corpses. So he just needs corpses, but he already operates a funeral parlor, So why is he going out of his way to to do murders? Like I guess it would suggest that like at the normal rate of natural death, he is not getting enough bodies to do

what he needs to do. I guess. So. Yeah, like in in the second movie, they add this nice detail where the tall Man moves around from town to town and he leaves just decimated funeral homes and decimated graveyards in his wake, like all the bodies get claimed and

turned into dwarves and send into this other world. Uh so, yeah, maybe he just like juices the numbers a little bit more, and it's like, well, today I could get just thirty dwarves from raiding the cemeteries and you know, getting some some natural deaths rolling in, but I could also juice it a little bit and maybe kill a couple of people on the side. That's just more profits for me. He's trying to hit those Q four numbers. Yeah, I guess.

Also it's like people who in some cases is there's a sense of like people who interfere with the the process here, with the with the scheme, they get killed and turned into zombies, because why why haste a good body when you could turn that into a dwarf as well. But yeah, other times, like he's turning into this uh, this woman to go out and clearly lure people to the cemetery for for for death. But I guess that's just that's ultimately more about this connection between sex and

death in in Mike's mind. But what if he goes to the trouble of doing that and then the person's family decides that they want that that person buried somewhere else. Oh, I don't think the Tall Man would stand for that. He's got to use mafia tactics on grieving families to make sure he gets all of the bodies. I guess so. But it's like a small town like how many how many rival I mean, he's probably put the rival groups out of business, like you're not going to operate a

funeral home in competition with the Tall Man. I guess so, Rob, this has got to be one of our longest episodes ever. We must cap it here. Yeah, we'll go ahead and cap it off here. But yeah, phantasm, it's a it's a lot of fun. It's it's widely available in all formats, but the fan tasm remastered, Blu Ray or digital releases certainly where you want to go for this one. I think I streamed the remastered version of via Prime. But you can again find this film just about anywhere. Uh.

And yeah, it's a load of fun. It's a it's a great Halloween viewing choice. All right, We'll be back next Friday with more Weird House Cinema calibrated for your seasonal Halloween needs. UH. In the meantime, will remind you that we are primarily a science podcast, with our core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Monday's we do listener mail. On Wednesdays we do a short form artifact or monster fact.

On Fridays we do Weird How Cinema. If you're interested in seeing what movies we've covered in the past, there are two places you can go. You can go to some mut music dot com. That's my blog where I just do some very casual blog posts about these movies that we watch. But also if you use letterbox that's L E T T E R B O x D

dot com. We are on there as Weird House. You will find our profile there and you'll find a list of all the movies we've covered on the show, and sometimes there'll be a little hint or a little spoiler of what the next film will be. Huge thanks as

always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.