CULT – Phantasm

Published on: 16th August, 2009

CULT - Phantasm  | read this item

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Every good franchise needs an iconic boogeyman. Halloween had Michael Myers, Hellraiser had Pinhead and A Nightmare on Elm Street had Freddy Krueger. And then there is Phantasm. Simply referred to as The Tall Man, its imposing antagonist struck a cord with horror fans as he represented the very essence of death, both as a funeral undertaker and as an embodiment of pure evil. The best monsters are kept in the shadows, as familiarity usually dampens their effect, and the less that is revealed about them the more sinister they seem. Once the villains of the Friday the 13th and Texas Chainsaw Massacre films became the focal point they became less threatening, just as the wisecracking humour of Freddy and Child’s Play’s Chucky eventually reduced the series to parody. Phantasm, the third feature of twenty-two year old Don Coscarelli, knew these rules all to well as the young filmmaker created a gothic creature with a deep, booming voice and an imposing stature. Played with a balanced mix of dark wit and menace by frequent collaborator Angus Scrimm, The Tall Man was an intergalactic body-snatcher who travelled from town to town, transforming its residents into bizarre dwarfs, in his evil plot to take over the world. Whereas many horror villains threatened the lives of a few promiscuous teenagers, Phantasm’s monster threatened the whole of mankind.

The 1970’s saw a transition within the horror genre. Filmmakers had once again embraced the supernatural since the notorious success of both Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist, and American cinema was starting to draw inspiration from their European counterparts, whose surreal storytelling with the likes of Dario Argento’s nightmarish masterpiece Suspiria had penetrated Hollywood and had been embodied in the works of a new generation of experimental directors. The success of Halloween in 1978 prompted many young wannabe filmmakers to produce their own movies with very little budget, resulting in the genre becoming awash with countless independent films. It was an exciting time to be in the movies and it seemed that with a little money and a lot of imagination anything was possible. With this in mind, Phantasm was very much a product of its time, a low budget avant-garde chiller that mixed elements of science fiction and splatter to produce a film the likes of which had never been seen. What could have just been a cheap attempt at exploitation was rich with deep subtexts, such as the importance of family and the inevitability of death, though at the heart of the story was a very simple tale of brotherly love. Perhaps it is all these elements combined which has appealed to horror fans for so long. And as strange as it may have seemed at the time, Phantasm was the logical continuation of the themes explored in the director’s previous work.

Don Coscarelli was born on 17 February 1954 in Tripoli, Libya, eventually settling in Long Beach, California, as a child. As with many future filmmakers, Coscarelli developed an interest in cinema at an early age and began experimenting on various short films. His directorial debut came with the drama Jim the World’s Greatest, a tale of a teenage boy, the titular character, played by Gregory Harrison, fresh from the horror anthology Trilogy of Terror, who struggles living with an alcoholic father (Rory Guy) and abused younger brother (Robbie Wolcott). The film was co-written and shot by Coscarelli and his close friend, Craig Mitchell, for a mere $250,000 but soon attracted the attention of Universal who agreed to distribute it. His next feature was Kenny and Company, which again focused on a few days in the life of a teenager, Kenny (Dan McCann, who the film’s producer, Paul Pepperman, allegedly discovered at a school carnival), over the week leading up to Halloween. This film marked the director’s first collaboration with actors Reggie Bannister and A. Michael Baldwin, both of whom would later work on Phantasm. Bannister had been a folk guitarist during the sixties with the likes of Stone Country and Young Americans, before turning to acting while studying theatre at Long Beach City College, whilst Baldwin was an up-and-coming child actor.

The genesis of Phantasm was during a screening of Kenny and Company which Coscarelli attended shortly after its release. One sequence showed the hero being accosted from behind by Pepperman in a monster costume and the director was amazed to see how the audience reacted to the gag. This convinced him that his next feature should be a horror. There were several key inspirations that Coscarelli would utilise while developing the story as he spent two weeks writing in an isolated cabin just outside of Los Angeles, including his fascination with what happens to a person after they die, including post mortems and the funeral ritual. Another influence was a dream that remembered from when he was a teenager where he was chased down a long corridor by a flying steel ball, something which would become the most famous image of Phantasm. Coscarelli once again received the full support of his parents, who had helped fund his two previous films. While his father, D.A. Coscarelli, raised the necessary $300,000 while his mother, Kate Coscarelli (then known as Shirley), helped not only with costume and production design but also makeup. The director once again turned to past collaborators, including Pepperman and actors Bannister, Baldwin, Mary Ellen Shaw, Ken Jones and Terri Kalbus.

To portray The Tall Man, Coscarelli and Pepperman once again approached Rory Guy with the proposition of playing the movie’s mysterious alien. Immediately intrigued by the role, Guy changed his professional name to the more dark and theatrical sounding Angus Scrimm, a moniker which sounds as appealing as Max Schreck or Boris Karloff. Kate Coscarelli borrowed one of her husband’s expensive suits and had it modified by a tailor in order for it to be tight-fitting to the fifty-one year old actor, who had to lose 39lbs in order to have the correct build for the character. Coscarelli admittedly took the name Phantasm from Edgar Allen Poe, who regularly referenced the word in his work, whilst the tone of the film was heavily influenced by Un chien andalou, the 1929 surreal classic by artist Salvador Dalí and director Luis Buñuel that featured an array of disturbing and incomprehensible images. Much of the crew consisted of friends of both Pepperman and Coscarelli, whilst the cinematography and editing duties were performed by the latter in an effort to reduce cost.

The story of Phantasm was told through the eyes of thirteen-year old Mike Pearson (Baldwin), whose parents had recently deceased and his older brother, Jody (Bill Thornbury), had returned home after the death of his childhood friend, Tommy (Bill Cone), who was murdered by a mysterious young woman in the graveyard outside Morningside Cemetery. Mike fears that Jody plans to leave again soon, leaving him alone to fend for himself or face a childhood in foster care. Their close friend of Reggie (Bannister), an ice cream man who spends his spare time playing guitar with Jody. But Mike is convinced that something strange is happening in the graveyard and he knows the tall stranger is behind it all. When the two brothers are almost driven off the road by a hearse driven by a dwarf that has an eerie resemblance to their dead friend, they realise that to uncover the truth they will have to find a way into the mausoleum and stop The Tall Man for good. There are various elements that were featured in Coscarelli’s previous work, such as the narrative being told from a teenage loner’s point-of-view and the absence of a father figure (in Jim the World’s Greatest he is an alcoholic and in Phantasm he is dead), whilst the Halloween aspect of Kenny and Company allowed the director an early chance to experiment with the genre.

The brothers’ pride and joy is their automobile, which both Jody and Mike have worked tirelessly on. Inspired by a car that Coscarelli had seen in his neighbourhood as a child, the filmmakers had initially wanted to purchase a 1971 Plymouth Barracuda but eventually had to settle for a Plymouth Hemi Cuda, with Thornbury’s brother painting the car after the producers had it modified. Incidentally, Thornbury would also teach his young co-star how to drive in the car in between takes. One important aspect of the movie were the spheres that The Tall Man used to protect the mausoleum. This impressive invention was a steel ball that flew through the air, embedding two blades into its victims face before a drill would dig into their forehead. These devices were constructed by Willard Green, the proprietor of Turntable Rentals and Sales in Hollywood which specialised in revolving platforms for which cars could be showcased. Coscarelli and Pepperman approached the artist regarding designing the spheres, with the director providing drawings of what he required. Using these sketches, Green constructed three several globes, each of which performed a different purpose. One would be used for full shots, while another had two blades and a working drill attached. The third was half a sphere with a tube that ran down the actor’s arm, for which the blood would be pumped out. Green’s work would come to a cost of $900.

One dilemma the filmmakers faced was how exactly these were supposed to fly. There were two methods which the filmmakers used. One was with the help of a crew member who had been a baseball pitcher in high school, who was required to stand behind the camera and throw a clear plastic ball that had been fitted with mirror and filled with sand down the corridor passed the lens, which was then played back in reverse to create the illusion that the sphere was flying towards the camera. Another, more simple, method involved crew members levitating the balls with strings and gently swinging them towards the actors. The sound effects that would accompany the spheres were created (uncredited) by Christopher L. Stone, who also designed the voices of the dwarfs by manipulating his own through a Vocoder and a Marshall Time Modulator. Most of the feature was shot in a warehouse which was divided into two sections, one was for the Morningside mausoleum whilst the other was for the automobile sequences, including the scene where Reggie’s ice cream van is overturned. The external shots of Morningside were filmed at the beautiful Dunsmuir House & Gardens in Oakland, California, where scenes from the the James Bond flick A View to a Kill would later be made, along with the Mike Myers comedy So I Married an Axe Murderer.

One bizarre aspect of the story, which was lost on Scrimm until he saw the finished edit, was the inclusion of the Lady in Lavender, (Kathy Lester) who is revealed to be an alter ego of The Tall Man, which he uses to seduce the young men of the town. As the scene was due to be filmed, Lester was greeted by an over-enthusiastic crew, prompting the actress to request a closed set for her nude scene. Sensing her anxiety, Coscarelli suggested a body double, resulting in the shot of the Lady in Lavender’s breasts being played by Laura Mann. Cone, who played the role of the unfortunate Tommy, was a guitar player in Bannister’s group and had expressed several times how he wanted to die in a movie. Most of the crew were called upon to perform almost every duty at some point due to a shortage of manpower, with not only Coscarelli and the cast performing various tasks, such as moving equipment from scene to scene, but others such as sound man Michael Gross who, in between takes that involved the recording of dialogue, would wander around the set and shoot footage with a super-8 camera. In one sequence, where Mike and Jody are walking through the corridors of the mausoleum, the two actors were replaced by best boy grip Stephen Chandler and key grip George W. Singer Jr.

The various complex special effects shots were created through low budget ingenuity, with The Tall Man’s home world simply being a wall in the mausoleum set that had been painted red and filled with smoke, while the scene featuring the severed fingers that wriggled across the ground were created by the crew constructing an elevated floor for which the puppeteers would work from below, where they animated the appendages by moving the fingers with wire strings whilst viewing the action above via a mirror. Mirrors became a hindrance with the actual shooting of the sphere during the scene where it drills into the head of Ken Jones. After three days of being unable to light the balls properly, the filmmakers realised that to accomplish the shot they would instead have to illuminate the objects that were reflected in its surface. In order to avoid unwanted light shining off of the ball, a portion of a wall was erected and a small hole drilled though for which the camera lens could film. Another cheap-yet-effective shot saw the door flying off of its hinges to reveal The Tall Man. This simple effect was achieved by Pepperman, who had worked extensively on the special effects, holding onto the door that had not been attached to the wall and, while wearing a crash helmet to protect his head, jumped backwards onto the ground with the door landing on top.

The principal photography on Phantasm lasted almost a year, with Coscarelli wanting to shoot the three hours worth of material he had written (some of which would later surface in the third sequel). The production would commence each weekend for one or two days of filming and then the director would spend the next five days editing the footage and planning the next shoot. Their hard work paid off as Phantasm was a huge hit when it was released in North America in the spring of 1979. It was a season of popular horror films, including George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, the science fiction-horror hybrid Alien and The Amityville Horror scoring big at the box office. Phantasm would earn a respectable revenue and later attract a cult following on home video, with a sequel eventually arriving nine years later, reuniting the director and stars Bannister and Scrimm, though due to studio politics with Universal Baldwin remained absent. Over the years, the movie has become a favourite among genre fans (or phans as they are often known), with The Tall Man securing his place in horror movie history.

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