Spooky Season Reviews: Phantasm

Hello, Kiddies, as part of my Spooky Season celebrations, I will be sharing reviews of films and books I devour in preparation for All Hallows' Eve, and we're starting with 1979's Phantasm. So let's head back to the mausoleum and see how the movie fares in 2025.

            Phantasm, the 1979 cult classic horror film, is at once a disjointed, dated, oftentimes cringey movie, while at the same time managing to be innovative, genuinely scary, and influential. The film, while tepidly received by critics, was a box office success upon its release in ’79, and spawned multiple sequels (which, like many such films, I can’t recall a single detail from). While panned at the time, it is on the list of many critics as one of the best cult films of all time, and a groundbreaking indie horror film that influenced many that came after it. Does it hold up in 2025?

            As is always the case, it is hard for me to speak for a 21st-century audience, as I am a solidly 20th-century guy, but for this horror aficionado, who first probably saw Phantasm waaaay before an age he should have, Phantasm remains a classic in many ways, with some awesome creepiness (the theme, for my money, is right up there with Carpenter’s Halloween), some iconic moments (flying, bladed spheres to the head, anyone?), and an all-time cool villain in The Tall Man (Angus Scrimm). This of course, is mixed in with a few bad special effects, some terrible acting (to be fair, most of the actors were amateurs), some awkward editing, and a potpourri of seemingly disparate elements, from the Jawa-like little dudes that serve the Tall Man, to the dimensional stanchions that transport anyone that goes through them to some sort of other world, to the finger that turns into a giant fly, to zombie-like creatures that pop out of the ground. This lack of cohesion and explanation, however, is one of the things that have endeared critics and fans to it over decades.

            In the movie, two brothers, Jody and Mike, joined by their friend Reggie, mourn the loss of their friend Tommy. Mike, in the way that only the youth always seem to know when monsters are about, suspects that there is more to their friend’s death, taking it upon himself to investigate the local mortuary and its super-strong, super mysterious mortician, the “Tall Man.” Turns out, Mike was right all along, the Tall Man is an uber-scary, quasi-immortal overlord of an army of creepy robed Jawas, his mortuary is guarded by awesome flying orbs that drain your brain like an orange juicer, and there’s a storage room full of plastic bins full of the shrunken dead, the bodies of those entrusted to the mortuary as their final resting place, only to be turned into the Tall Man’s Lurkers.

            If you love horror, there’s a lot to love here: Angus Scrimm’s Tall Man is an iconic villain, the soundtrack is classic, and the movie has a little bit of everything. If you hate cult classic horror, from its gratuitous nudity, bad acting, occasional bad effects, and its plot that doesn’t always add up, perhaps Phantasm isn’t for you. As for me, it was a great start to Spooky Season. Kinda makes me want to watch the sequels. Kinda.