D2D entry #51: Phantasm (1979, Don Coscarelli)
(Featured in Dusk to Dawn #2.)
“Don’t fear.”
This may be a sentiment admittedly cribbed from Dune, but it does seem to sum up the general theme/tone of Coscarelli’s breakthrough film. It’s significant that this advice is offered to protagonist Jody, and even more so that Jody is thirteen years old, hovering on the edge of what Tori Amos called “those formative years.” Phantasm is above all a child’s-eye film, one that views death as something outside comprehension (the space between this and The Spirit of the Beehive is smaller than most people will recognize). Here, death is frightening not because any peripheral pain or fright but because it’s unknowable, implacable and ultimately inevitable, and the Tall Man is imposing not because he’s huge but because he’s everywhere. To this end, the closing moments can be seen as a coming of age, with Jody reaching the point where death becomes a part of life and thus less frightening. We mourn, we deal, we accept however painfully, but we recognize that’s it no more bizarre than any other part of life. (I think I’m going to pretend that the sequels don’t exist - this ending probably works best if Phantasm is entirely self-contained.)
The film moves not with the standard American nightmare pacing, with fright and shock leaping out of every corner, but with the dreamy half-speed motions of a first-rate Eurohorror. Narrative sense is subsumed to atmosphere and a sense of reality irrevocably altered. Coscarelli obviously doesn’t have a big budget with which to work, but he does manage to project a rough-hewn elegance to certain images (like Jody disappearing into the pale glow of an ice-cream van’s headlights).
Also, this film is occasionally slyly funny. My favorite (possibly accidental) gag is when Jody is following his brother Michael into a graveyard where Michael plans to make it with a lovely blonde, not knowing that this blonde also caused the death of a recently deceased friend of his. As Jody walks, he passes a tombstone with the word “Bush” on it. A more concise and amusing summation of the sex/death connection probably doesn’t exist.
