Phantasm, or, Ow, My Balls!

I mentioned that The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was the movie whose reputation terrified me the most as a kid. A very close runner-up was Phantasm. Just the idea of it was enough to give a little boy in the 1970s nightmares.

Which, as it turns out, is appropriate, because the movie was inspired by a nightmare and plays out like one. It follows its own weird dream logic, jumping around between ideas and surreal scenes in a way that seems to make sense to the characters acting them out, but is nonsensical to anyone watching or trying to piece it all together afterwards.

And it’s all kind of charming, even if it’s charming in spite of itself. It’s the kind of movie where if it were any better, it’d be much worse. For most of it, I was thinking that if they’d just tweaked it a little bit to make it a surreal horror-comedy, it would be brilliant. After thinking about it some more, though, I think the ambiguity of whether you’re laughing at it or laughing with it is an essential part of what makes it enjoyable.

Personally, I was immediately charmed by the late 1970s hair. It starts out showing us a guy making love with a lady behind a gravestone in a cemetery, and for some reason he’s removed exactly one shoe. We only see extreme close-ups of their faces and her breasts, and he’s rocking the kind of mustache and soul patch you could only get away with in the 70s, or into the 80s and 90s if you worked in a guitar shop or comic book store.

Shortly after, we learn that he was part of “the trio” along with the Hasselhoffian Jody, and Reggie, a guy with the male pattern baldness tonsure and a long ponytail. Reggie can get away with this because he doesn’t GAF about what you think. He works as an ice cream man and spends most of the movie in a white shirt with black bowtie plus a leather vest.

I wanted to know more about these people and their lives.

Turns out that Jody is the older brother of our main character Mike, a 13 year old boy who reads a lot of science fiction and is also really good at fixing engines. Jody’s also Mike’s guardian, since their parents died a couple of years earlier. Jody is also kind of a douche.

That’s based on his leaving Mike alone in the house for long stretches of time while he goes to the local bar to pick up the one woman who hangs out there. And dismissing Mike’s concerns about weird creatures trying to attack him while he was snooping around the cemetery, by saying it was probably just the kid up the street, using a slur for the mentally disabled. Plus, the guy can’t park worth a damn. He drives around in a black Barracuda that his brother has to maintain, and he pulls right up to the front door of every place he goes. Even though the bar clearly has a sign that says “parking in rear.”

Mike idolizes his older brother anyway, which is probably all that matters, since this is Mike’s movie. He visits the local fortune teller, who communicates via telepathy with her creepy granddaughter, and they both have a little star on their face. The fortune teller reassures Mike that he doesn’t need to worry about Jody abandoning him, and then does a shamelessly blatant rip-off of the gom jabbar scene from Dune.

Mike’s adventures involve creeping around and into the local funeral parlor, being pursued by small cloak-wearing monsters, seeing a graphic murder, and being threatened by the Tall Man who serves as the funeral director. After a night of poor decisions and narrow escapes, he takes a piece of evidence back home. To his credit, Jody looks at it and immediately says, “I believe you.” He formulates a plan that begins with assembling a surprising amount of weaponry for a suburban home, and teaching Mike the basics of Gun Safety According to Charles Bronson.

It’s remarkable that Jody goes so quickly from dismissing Mike — even after finding him in a garage pinned underneath the car that had fallen on him — to believing him, because if there were ever a movie that could keep coasting on none of the adults believing what was happening, it’s Phantasm. It’s all over the place. Who are the bad guys, how many different forms can they take, what is the extent of their powers, what can destroy them? It all seems to be based in the same weird dream logic.

The only consistent thing is that it’s all stuff that a 13-year-old boy in 1979 would think was cool and weird and creepy and bad-ass.

Which is why the killer Phantasm balls in the movie are such an iconic horror movie image, even though they’re disappointingly under-used in this one. I’m sad to report that after 47 years of being scared of this movie, it only uses the ball for one kill.

It’s pretty impressive, though! And one of the scenes (along with a later scene involving a giant fly creature) that made me wonder whether it was intentionally comedic. There’s an effect like blood pouring out of a garden hose, and then a pool of yellow liquid forming around the body, which I thought was doing the victim one final indignity by showing us that he’d pissed himself. (I think it was actually these creatures’ blood, maybe?)

A couple of times, Mike or one of the other characters will deliver a short bit of exposition explaining bizarre things they couldn’t possibly know, as if they’d just figured them out, and everyone else reacts with, “Yes, that makes sense!” And the fact that it doesn’t actually make sense seems all but irrelevant for this movie. None of it makes sense, but that doesn’t seem to matter much.

I’m still not sure how much of the charm is similar to that of Suspiria, where you roll with it because it’s trying something original and also the music is pretty great. The music feels more “inspired by” Goblin than as good as Goblin, but it still contributes a ton to the vibes of “late 70s weird” instead of “clumsy and amateurish.”

Phantasm is a little bit like Reggie himself: you’re tempted to say, “dude, you’re not pulling any of this off at all,” but it just seems like even if he did care, you’d be missing the point entirely. All the wooden performances, disorienting editing, baffling dialogue, moon logic, wacky plot developments, all get smoothed over by the sense that an independent filmmaker is making something sincerely weird and sincere.