While not for everyone, Phantasm is an ode to boyhood, brothers, sci-fi, and not taking any shit.
While I didn't grow up in the 1970s and I was never a boy, it's easy to see how much Phantasm was made to appeal to both those demographics.
Michael, our young teenage main character, is scrappy, tough, and fearless. (In a dark-and-gritty '70s way, too — at one point he fashions a MacGuyver-eque tool by taping a shotgun shell to a hammer.) He's always biking around looking for adventures, and he idolizes his cool-as-hell older brother.
Michael discovers that strange things are afoot at the local cemetery. Our main antagonist, the Tall Man, is an alien who's taking dead bodies, turning them into dwarves, and sending them to his own planet to be used as slaves. These dwarves, by the way, look exactly like Jawas from Star Wars. That's not the only sci-fi reference in the movie, though. Phantasm is classified technically as "science fantasy horror," and in addition to the space-themed plot, there are several other overt references that are fun to catch.
It's Dune heavy from the outset. Early in the film, Michael visits a fortune teller and she has him stick his hand in a small black pain box (no gom jabbar, however). There's a bar literally called Dunes that appears several times throughout the movie, too. When he gets scared, he repeats to himself, "Don't fear."
I mentioned the Jawas already, but we also see on Michael's nightstand the Roger Zelazny book, My Name Is Legion. He's a nerdy guy, but one that knows how to wield a knife and cock a pistol.
The plot is fairly silly, but to return to it: Michael and his brother team up to defeat the Tall Man, who, I will say, is extremely creepy and scary. I won't say I was ever scared during my watch, but there are several scenes that are inventive and that would definitely be frightening-to-a-kid. The eerie score is reminiscent of that from Halloween, which was released the year before.
Seeing Phantasm young would definitely be a game-changer, and I appreciate movies like that. My version of Phantasm is 1987's The Gate, a scary movie for kids that has several scenes seared into my memory for life. The best scene belongs to the menacing metal orb that flies at your face and drills into your head, sort of a mobile lobotomy, releasing a comic amount of bright red blood. Scenes like that leaving us wanting more in the vein of overt horror, but unfortunately the movie is inconsistent with its scares — it's more impressionistic, as we get fleeting images every few minutes that are unsettling. But that may be what some of its fans love about it.
POSTED BY: Haley Zapal, new NoaF contributor and lawyer-turned-copywriter living in Atlanta, Georgia. A co-host of Hugo Award-winning podcast Hugo, Girl!, she posts on Instagram as @cestlahaley. She loves nautical fiction, growing corn and giving them pun names like Timothee Chalamaize, and thinking about fried chicken.
