Coscarelli was in his early 20s when he wrote, edited, photographed, and directed Phantasm, although he already had two features under his belt: Jim the World’s Greatest (1976) and Kenny & Co. (1976), both of which were kid-centric films that viewed the world through the eyes of their young protagonists. Coscarelli took that same narrative approach to Phantasm by using two orphaned brothers as his main characters. The narrative’s driving force is 13-year-old Mike (Michael Baldwin), who focuses his undirected youthful energy on following his twenty-something older brother Jody (Bill Thornbury) because he’s terrified that Jody will leave him (their parents died two years earlier and Jody left a promising music career to return to his small hometown to raise Mike). The dramatic core of the film is surprisingly strong, with the brotherly bond between Mike and Jody giving emotional resonance to their later descent into supernatural chaos.

The intrusion of the supernatural into their lives comes in the form of The Tall Man (Angus Scrimm), the exceedingly grim and appropriately named undertaker at the local Morningside Mortuary. Mike spies some unusual goings-on at the mortuary, including The Tall Man’s supernatural strength (he can pick up a loaded casket on his own) and a gaggle of hooded dwarf creatures that prowl about at night. So, what’s a kid to do but break into the mortuary and find out what’s going on? Being older, if not terribly wiser, Jody is skeptical until Mike brings home one of The Tall Man’s dismembered, but still wiggling fingers that later morphs inexplicably into a giant fly that must be dispatched in the garbage disposal (the effects here are quite cheesy, but Coscarelli seems to know this and plays the scene equally for laughs and shivers).

As many know, Phantasm is most famous for its flying sphere-drill, a baseball-sized metallic ball with retractable blades that zips around the marble halls of the mortuary protecting it from late-night intruders. Its purpose is made clear when it thumps into an unsuspecting victim’s face, drills into his forehand, and promptly empties all the blood from his head (this particular scene threatened to earn the film a dreaded X rating, but Coscarelli managed to convinced the ratings board otherwise). The sphere-drill, which is the film’s one indisputably convincing visual effect, is an ingenious horror image that burrows itself into your memory despite having relatively little screen time and only one victim.

Phantasm, like most horror movies, especially of the low-budget variety, was not exactly hailed by critics when it was first released. “Phantasm is billed as a horror movie, but that’s true only to the extent that it’s horrible,” complained one critic at The Washington Post. Vincent Canby of The New York Times was only slightly more charitable in calling it “silly and endearing” and equating it to an 8-year-old making up a ghost story. The film was also routinely lumped in with the various slasher knock-offs that followed in the wake of Halloween (1978) and Friday the 13th (1980) although it has virtually nothing in common with such films outside the generic designator of “horror,” and those who have seen the film through to the end should realize that such a designator is misleading, if not downright incorrect.

Part of Phantasm’s negative critical response may have been due to its rather loose narrative, which doesn’t really gel until the second half. The first half hour, in fact, is sporadic and meandering, if not downright dull. However, once the characters come into their own and we begin to learn what’s really going on in the bowels of Morningside, Phantasm attains a gripping sense of tension and a level of surrealist imagination that makes it more than worthy of its long-standing cult status.

Copyright ©2007 James Kendrick

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