Phantasm (franchise)

The original poster for the first film.

Phantasm is an American horror film series that consists of five films, novels, comic books, and merchandise. It's about the Tall Man (Angus Scrimm), a supernatural and malevolent undertaker who turns the dead into dwarf zombies to do his bidding and take over the world. He is opposed by a young boy, Mike (A. Michael Baldwin), who tries to convince his older brother Jody (Bill Thornbury) and family friend Reggie (Reggie Bannister) of the threat. The first film was released in 1979 and received generally positive reviews and has garnered a cult following.

Films

Overview

The original film was released in 1979. The story focuses on 24-year-old musician Jody Pearson, who is raising his 13-year-old brother Mike following the death of their parents, in a small town disturbed by the mysterious deaths of its citizens. Reggie, a family man and ice cream vendor, joins the brothers in their suspicions that the local mortician, dubbed the Tall Man, is responsible for the deaths. Mike relays his fears to a fortune teller and her granddaughter about the possibility of Jody departing and leaving him in the care of his aunt, along with his suspicions about the Tall Man. Mike is shown a small black box and told to put his hand into it. After the box grips his hand, Mike is told not to be afraid and as the panic subsides, the box relaxes its grip. The notion of fear itself as the killer is established and is what propels Mike toward his final confrontation in the film with the Tall Man.

Mike is pursued by minions of the Tall Man, dwarves (which are kept in a small room that houses a gateway device between the two worlds), who are made from the bodies of the recently deceased, and tries to convince his brother of what is happening.

After convincing Jody and Reggie, they find a strange white room with containers in the mausoleum; a gateway to another planet is also there that Mike enters briefly where he sees the dwarves that have hunted him being used as slaves. While trying to escape the Tall Man, Reggie is stabbed and appears to die while Mike and Jody barely escape. They devise a plan to lure the Tall Man into a local deserted mine shaft and trap him inside. After doing so successfully, Mike wakes with a start in his house, lying by the fireplace with Reggie sitting next to him.

Reggie tells Mike he was simply having a nightmare, something that has been a common occurrence since Jody died in a car crash. Mike goes into his room where he is shocked to see the Tall Man is waiting behind the door. In the final scene, one of the Tall Man's dwarf minions pulls Mike through his bedroom mirror.

In Phantasm II, picking up where the first movie left off, the Tall Man and his minions attempt to take Mike, but Reggie manages to save him by blowing up the house. Six years later, the film introduces Liz Reynolds, a young woman whose psychic bond to Mike and the Tall Man manifests in the form of prophetic nightmares. Liz pleads for Mike to find her, as she fears that when her grandfather dies, the Tall Man will take him. Mike, who has been institutionalized after the events of the first film, fakes his recovery to make contact with Liz. When he returns to Morningside Cemetery to exhume the bodies of his parents, Reggie interrupts him and explains that the earlier attack never took place. However, Mike reveals the coffins are empty and urges Reggie to help him hunt down the Tall Man. En route to Reggie's house, Mike has a vision and frantically tries to warn Reggie seconds before an explosion kills Reggie's entire family. Convinced by Mike's futile warning, Reggie agrees to accompany Mike. They break into a hardware store and stock up on supplies and weapons. Traveling country roads, they encounter abandoned towns and pillaged graveyards, as well as a few traps and apparitions the Tall Man has left; one apparition is of a nude deceased young woman. The clues lead them to Périgord, Oregon.

Meanwhile, Liz's grandfather dies, and her sister Jeri disappears during the funeral; while searching for Jeri, Liz finds the Tall Man and flees. The presiding priest, Father Meyers, maddened with fear and alcohol withdrawal, desecrates the grandfather's body with a knife in a desperate attempt to thwart its reanimation, but the corpse rises and kidnaps Liz's grandmother. In the morning, Liz finds a funeral pin in her grandmother's empty bed, and the Tall Man psychically tells Liz to return at night if she wants to rescue her grandmother. Prior to their arrival in Périgord, Mike awakens to find that Reggie has picked up a hitchhiker named Alchemy who eerily resembles the nude apparition. They find Périgord deserted and decrepit. When Liz arrives at the mortuary, she is confronted by Father Meyers, who tries to convince her to escape with him, but he is killed by a flying sphere. She encounters the Tall Man and discovers that her grandmother is now one of his Lurkers; she flees and runs into Mike in the cemetery. Later that night, the Tall Man captures Liz and drives away in his hearse; Mike and Reggie chase after him. After the Tall Man runs them off the road, their car explodes.

At the crematorium, Liz is taken to the furnace room by the Tall Man's mortician assistants, but she escapes and sends one into the furnace. Mike and Reggie break into the mortuary and find the embalming room. While Reggie pours acid into the embalming fluid, Mike discovers a dimensional portal that requires a sphere to open. They then split up to find Liz. Reggie searches the basement, where he fights off a Graver and several Lurkers with a chainsaw and quadruple shotgun. Mike saves Liz from a silver sphere, and, when it becomes embedded in the wall, they use it to access the portal. Before they can destroy the building, the Tall Man surprises them, but they fight him off and pump him full of the acid-contaminated embalming fluid, which causes him to melt. They set the building on fire, escape, and are greeted by Alchemy, who has procured an abandoned hearse. As they ride off, Alchemy reveals herself to not be human, and the hearse swerves wildly, then stops. Reggie, bloody and battered, falls to the ground; Mike and Liz, trapped in the hearse, try to convince themselves that this is all just a dream, but the slot to the driver's cabin opens and reveals the Tall Man, who tells them, "No, it's not." Hands break the rear window and pull Mike and Liz through it, mirroring the ending of the first film.^[1]

In the third film, The Tall Man, is back and once again haunting the thoughts of the now-adult Mike and his friend, ex-Ice Cream vendor Reggie. The two continue their hunt for the mysterious figure and in his path of destruction encounter a variety of dangerous situations, friends and enemies. They also must contend with the resurrected dead plus a growing number of the infamous and deadly silver spheres which aid the Tall Man as he sets his sights on indoctrinating Mike and finishing the fight begun so many years ago.^[2]

The fourth film picks up where the last one ended. Mike travels across dimensions and time fleeing the Tall Man. At the same time, he tries to find the origins of his enemy, and what really happened the night that his brother died. Meanwhile, Reggie (accompanied by a beauty he picked up on the road) battles the spheres and the undead in a quest to find Mike before the Tall Man can complete his transformation.^[3]

Box office

When comparing Phantasm films to other major horror franchises such as Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Hellraiser, Scream, Friday the 13th, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Saw, it is one of the lowest grossing horror films but has gained a cult following.

References