Phantasm (1979)

Director Don Coscarelli's imaginative, low-budget independent horror-sci-fi film was a sleeper film and soon became a major science-fantasy and horror cult hit. This original film was followed by many inferior sequels, Phantasm II (1988), Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead (1994), Phantasm IV: OblIVion (1998) and Phantasm: Ravager (2016). Some of its elements were similar to Invaders From Mars (1953). Its tagline was:

"If This One Doesn't Scare You, You're Already Dead."

Another of the film's taglines humorously referred to the frequent, deadly flying silver spheres or balls: "If you're looking for horror that's got balls...IT'S FOUND YOU." Literally, PHANTASM can be defined as: "The delusion of a disordered mind" - or a spirit or ghost. In fact, the entire film was mostly composed of random, waking and dreaming nightmare encounters with the iconic and malevolent figure of a Tall Man that were suspect and possibly unreal. The scarily-suggestive horror film - with a coming-of-age plot - was about the typical, fearful and disturbed reactions to abandonment, death (symbolized by the main 'adult' character, the Tall Man), and intense loss.

• in the opening prologue - a shocking murder scene, teenaged Tommy (Bill Cone) was making out with a blonde date - the attractive and sexy Lady in Lavender (Kathy Lester), with heavy purple eye shadow. They were lying on the ground and having sex outdoors at the Morningside Mortuary and cemetery. As he sighed, "That was great, baby," Tommy was stabbed to death in the chest with a long knife by his sex partner - her murderous face melded into the Tall Man's (Angus Scrimm) leering grin at the moment of death. However, the murder was ruled as a suicide.

The Opening Sex-Murder Scene of Tommy, Committed By the Lady in Lavender (The Tall Man in Disguise) in a Local Cemetery

• in a small California town in the year 1978, Tommy's death resulted in the break-up of a trio of males who were close friends, including:
  • Jody Pearson (Bill Thornbury), 24 years-old, an on-the-road traveling musician
  • Mike Pearson (Michael Baldwin), Jody's 13 year old younger brother; Mike was being raised by his guardian Jody, since both were parent-less

Mike's Older Guardian Brother Jody Pearson (Bill Thornbury)

Morningside Mortuary Mortician - The Tall Man (Angus Scrimm)

Tommy's Corpse in Coffin

• a funeral was held for Tommy at the gated Morningside Cemetery and Mortuary - consisting of a sprawling lawn of graves with a marble-walled mausoleum managed by the Tall Man (Angus Scrimm). Mike wasn't allowed to attend by Jody, since after the recent death (two years earlier under mysterious circumstances) of Jody and Mike's parents, Mike had experienced nightmares for weeks.
• after the burial ceremony at the gravesite and the guests had left, Mike secretly spied (with binoculars) from the grove on the pale-faced mortuary attendant - a sinister, arachnoid mortician-undertaker named the "Tall Man", with supernatural strength for a slim and gaunt individual. He watched as the mortuary attendant - by himself - picked up the 500 pound coffin and returned it into the back of a hearse, without completing the burial.
• Mike went to visit a local, elderly, wheel-chaired fortune-teller (Mary Ellen Shaw) (and her young blonde granddaughter (Terrie Kalbus)) to share his suspicions and fears about what was bothering him. During the session, Mike first explained how he was experiencing a fear of abandonment by his older brother. [Note: He had overheard Jody's thoughts about sending him away to live with his Aunt.] He also described what he witnessed at the funeral about the eerie mortician. As he fled on his motorcycle, he was flipped onto the ground - after one glance from the mortician - as he rode off.
• the fortune-teller instructed Mike to "play a little game" - he was asked to place his hand in a small black box. Mike panicked as the box gripped his hand - but his fears quickly subsided when it was suggested by the granddaughter that the lesson was that he shouldn't be afraid - one of the film's key themes: ("Don't fear. It was simply a reflection. Fear is the killer...It was all in your mind").
• one evening, Mike followed Jody from the Dunes Cantina accompanied by the Lady in Lavender (a repeat of the opening sequence) to the Morningside Cemetery to have sex. As he was eavesdropping on them, Mike was scared by a small brown-robed dwarfish figure ("It was little and brown, and low to the ground"), and inadvertently alerted Jody to danger - and then the Lady (the Tall Man's alias) inexplicably disappeared.
• during this time in his life, Mike was suffering from an "overactive imagination" plus chilling, surrealistic, dream-like nightmares of the Tall Man and his army of mostly unseen, shrouded, dwarfish creatures (or minions) (similar to the Jawas in Star Wars). That evening, he unexpectedly experienced a frightening and scary dream of the Tall Man above his bed reaching out from the cemetery, with two hooded, demonic killer-dwarves attacking him in his bed. The next evening, while working on his jacked-up car in his garage, Mike was pinned under the dropped car due to one of the dwarves.
• suspicious, (armed with a hunting knife strapped on his leg) Mike broke into the Mortuary later that night through a basement window, and hid in one of the caskets on display when the graveyard's grounds-keeper (Kenneth V. Jones) entered the room. Soon after in the hallway's corridor, a flying metallic sphere or silver pin-ball sailed through the air with deadly spring-loaded blades
• in the film's most memorable scene, Mike was grabbed by the grounds-keeper from behind. When a second sphere was launched by the Tall Man, Mike bit the arm of the grounds-keeper and was released, and he dropped down. The sphere implanted itself into the grounds-keeper's forehead, and then the device bore or drilled into the skull of its victim and extracted or sucked out his brain in a spray of blood. The man collapsed, with evidence of urine from his emptied bladder leaking onto the floor.
• after a chase toward the basement by the haunting Tall Man who appeared in the hallway, Mike hacked off the fingers on the right hand of the mortician when they became caught in the slammed basement door. Mike picked up one of the still-wiggling fingers on the floor before running off from two of the man's shrouded, Jawas-like dwarfish creatures (or minions) and returning home

Tall Man's Hacked Off Fingers in the Slammed Basement Door	One Severed Finger of the Tall Man in a Box
Finger Mutated into Red-Eyed, Wasp-Insect with Teeth	Buzzing Creature Atop Mike's Head

• the next morning, Mike was finally able to get Jody to believe him - with the proof of one of the Tall Man's hacked-off, still-squirming fingers in a box (with spurting, bright yellow blood or embalming fluid). Shockingly, the finger transformed or mutated into a buzzing, flying wasp-like insect that first landed on Mike's head, and then was deposited by Jody in their kitchen's garbage disposal. Their ice-cream vendor friend Reggie (Reggie Bannister) arrived as they were killing the insect - he became a believer in their suspicions and agreed to join in their efforts.
• in the evening, Jody (armed with a .45 caliber pistol, whose philosophy was: "You shoot to kill, or you don't shoot at all") visited the cemetery and mortuary on his own to investigate, but couldn't get any further than the basement when attacked from behind by a hooded dwarf creature. After blasting the dwarf with his hand-gun, Jody escaped and ran back toward the cemetery gate while being followed by one of the mortuary's hearses. Mike (who had followed against orders) rescued Jody in his brother's Plymouth Barracuda at the entrance, and they were both pursued by what seemed to be a driver-less hearse ("There's nobody drivin' that mother!"). After running the hearse off the road by pump-shotgun blasts from Jody's gun, they discovered that the driver was a reanimated, dwarf-sized version of their recently-deceased friend Tommy.

  [Note: The menacing and disturbing Tall Man, possibly from another planet, appeared to be collecting fresh Earthly corpses - a perfect cover for a mortician. The corpses were then crushed (to conserve space) down to dwarf-sized zombies, reanimated or resuscitated and many of them were prepared for transport to his other-worldly dimension. Some of the Tall Man's army of shrouded, Jawas-like dwarfish creatures (or minions) - grave robbers - were used as slave labor to collect and carry off the corpses.]

• the two pad-locked the hooded, shrunken 'Tommy' figure (although it weighed 200 lbs) in the back of the ice cream truck of their friend Reggie. To protect Mike, he was taken to the local antique store in town, where while browsing, he discovered an old 19th century 'animated' photo of the Tall Man driving a horse-drawn hearse in front of the mortuary. Mike demanded to be taken back home. Meanwhile, Jody experienced a brief nightmare of the haunting Tall Man and his abduction by dwarves in the mausoleum.

Jody's Nightmare of His Own Abduction by the Tall Man and Dwarves

• on Mike's drive home with Jody's friends - two store workers Sally (Lynn Eastman) and her girlfriend Sue (Susan Harper), Mike came upon Reggie's empty, overturned ice-cream truck, and noticed the broken padlock. Suddenly, their car was surrounded by a group of hooded dwarves who attacked the teens. Mike fought off the dwarves and was able to escape through the car's rear broken window before he was able to run home, but remained unaware of the fate of the girls (who were driven off) or Reggie.
• Jody was resolute to return alone to the mortuary-mausoleum and kill the Tall Man, and refused to take Mike with him. On his own after ingeniously escaping from his locked room, an armed Mike followed, but was immediately kidnapped by the Tall Man who was standing at the door of his house as Mike exited. Mike was driven away in the back of the Tall Man's hearse to the cemetery. From inside the vehicle, he shot out the rear window and one of the tires, allowing him to escape, and causing the hearse to crash into a tree and explode in a fiery ball of flames.
• once inside the mausoleum-mortuary, both Mike and Jody suspected that the Tall Man was responsible for their parents' deaths - they discovered separately that their parent's coffin in their family crypt was empty. The two were again targeted by a silver sphere, shot down by Jody. Reggie suddenly appeared and told Mike and Jody that he had been hiding in a casket in the mortuary and had freed the two girls (and a few others) he found locked in a room.
• in a brightly lit storage room, the threesome found stacks of blue storage barrels or canisters holding the bodies of dwarves. The Tall Man had prepared their corpses to soon be transported to another alien planet or world, to continue to be used for slave labor. There was a bridge, portal or gateway (vacuum passage) between Earth and another alien planet, consisting of two vertical silver poles. Mike was temporarily sucked in when he stuck his hand between the poles, and found himself on the alien planet with red-hot intense heat. He was pulled back into the store room by his two pals. He then explained: "They're usin' 'em for slaves. The dwarfs. And they got to crush 'em 'cause of the gravity. And the heat. And this is the door to their planet."

Stacks of Blue Storage Barrels	Looking in at Storage Room	Two Vertical Poles - Gateway to Another Alien Planet
Mike Grabbed and Sucked In	Tumbling Toward Alien Planet	Dwarves on Red-Hot Surface of Planet

• during an unexpected power outage, the trio became separated. Outside during an intense windstorm, Reggie appeared to be stabbed to death by the Lady in Lavender (the Tall Man's frequent disguise), while Jody and Mike escaped as the mausoleum-mortuary glowed, vaporized and vanished.
• the two boys felt that they had to defend their town and all of mankind against these forces of Evil. Their devised plan was to lure and then trap the Tall Man inside an old, deserted, 1,000 foot deep mine shaft outside of town. During a chase after Mike toward the mine shaft in a remote area (with the warning barrier removed), Mike avoided letting fear overtake him. The evil Tall Man fell into the open deep shaft, was covered over with an avalanche of large boulders and sealed inside
• however, in the shocking twist ending, it was all revealed to be another of Mike's nightmarish dreams, as he suddenly awoke during a thunderstorm next to his friend Reggie in front of a roaring fire. It was explained to Mike that his brother Jody had died in a car wreck two weeks earlier - along with his parents:

Mike: I hear the sounds. I know those rocks aren't gonna hold him. Not for long.
Reggie: Hey, you had a dream. Just a nightmare. What do you expect? You've hardly slept since the funeral last week.
Mike: I know those rocks aren't gonna hold him. First he took Mom and Dad, then he took Jody, now he's after me.
Reggie: Mike, that Tall Man of yours did not take Jody away. Jody died in a car wreck. Mike, you had a bad dream. Now, I know you're scared, but you're not alone. I'll take care of you. I know I can't ever take Jody's place, but I'm sure as hell gonna try.
Mike: Seems so real.
Reggie: You know, partner, what we need is a change of scenery. Why don't you and me hit the road for a couple of weeks?
Mike: Where will we go?
Reggie: Well, I don't know. I guess we can figure that one out when we get there.
Mike: OK.
Reggie: Well, get on upstairs, get your gear together, 'cause we leave when the sun comes up.

Tall Man in Mike's Bedroom, Snatching Mike Through His Closet Bedroom Mirror

• and then somehow in the conclusion, the Tall Man materialized in Mike's bedroom as he was packing for a road trip - seen in a reflection on a full-length closet door mirror. The Tall Man menacingly called out: "Boy!" - and a pair of large hands from one of the Tall Man's dwarf minions grabbed Mike's head and pulled him into and through the shattering bedroom mirror - an ending similar to the shock finale-epilogue of A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). The film abruptly ended with the blood-red final credits on a black background