There’s a reason I watch horror. One of the many things you can’t find online is how popular movies were before the internet days. This is an issue for me because I only just now found out about Phantasm, which was released in 1979. Granted, I lived in a small town, but I did know about The Amityville Horror—everyone knew about The Amityville Horror. The films were released the same year, but Phantasm was an indie production and probably didn’t have reach into my local region. Nobody talked about it at school and I only became conscious of it a few weeks ago. I learned that it was quite a box office success, but the critics didn’t care much for it (and I can see why). It was, however, rediscovered and has become a cult classic. I can see that too. The thing is, it is a bad movie. I’m learning to appreciate such things.
Part of the reason the film bothered me is that I really dislike “but it was all a dream” endings. Even though there’s a final suggestion that some of it “really happened,” or Michael is dreaming within a dream, such endings always make me shrug. Horror, to really work, has to be in that liminal zone between believability while on screen and the deeper knowledge that it’s fiction. Phantasm just had too many strikes against it to be believable. The dwarves were lifted straight from Star Wars’ Jawa. The Tall Man isn’t scary (this is from a current-millennium perspective, granted) and while you’re just trying to get into the horror mood (the music is appropriate) a flying ball of death, a sudden sci-fi element, is thrown in. Of course, the plot takes a kind of sci-fi turn near the end. It didn’t, however, do any heavy lifting.
I was surprised to learn that it became a franchise, no members of which I’d ever heard. It is interesting that speculation exists that the creepypasta stalwart, the Slender Man, was developed from the Tall Man concept. Given that I was seventeen when this movie came out it might be someone of my vintage—but from a different vineyard—would find Tall Man scary. Of course, if I’d seen it when it was first out, and in a theater, I might’ve gotten some chills from it. I could have included it in Holy Horror since there is some Bible in it, but it isn’t used to its full extent for a movie that mostly takes place in and around a funeral home. There is some comfort in knowing that even if your work isn’t great, it can still be rediscovered if enough time passes. And there’s good reason to watch it.