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Aaron Sullivan Illustrator
Don Coscarelli’s 1979 film, “Phantasm," is a bizarre classic of the horror genre.
PHANTASM
continued from page 13
such a way that it never flows as
smoothly as your average horror film.
Structurally, the film is to horror
what free jazz is to bebop. Coscarelli
doesn't stick to a single structure to
propel the film, nor to a simple plot
to hold it together. Instead, he moves
freely through a wide range of ideas
and images, many of them not con
nected by anything so limiting as
logic. The plot doesn't hold up to
much scrutiny, but this hardly mat
ters, because the idea is not to create
something lucid, but rather some
thing nightmarish. The choice of the
word "phantasm" as the title was not
an arbitrary one.
Briefly, the film is about two
brothers recovering from the deaths
of their parents two years before.
The younger brother has become
obsessed with the idea that he
might lose his older brother as well,
and follows him like a homesick
puppy. One day he spies while his
brother attends a friend's
funeral, and he gets his first
glimpse of the proprietor of the
local funeral home, the aptly
named Tall Man. From then on the
kid gets suspicious about the funer
al home and its neighboring ceme
tery. He discovers that Tall Man is
actually an alien who reanimates
corpses and turns them into
dwarves so they can be used as slave
labor on his high-gravity planet.
This is all completely absurd, but
it somehow works, because the plot
doesn't require that you pay atten
tion to it, so much as take it seri
ously. The entire film is based
around creating a particular feel, an
oddly creepy mood that doesn't let
up for a moment, even when the
characters crack jokes or the vio
lence finds some release in mind
less bloodletting.
The film accomplishes this mood
through a number of interesting
aesthetic choices. For starts, the
camera hardly ever moves, not even
to pan or tilt. Instead it keeps static,
drawing attention to its lack of
motion when characters walk onto
screen without the audience ever
knowing they are there. The film
takes an old horror cliche, that
nothing can be seen by the charac
ters until it appears on screen, and
pushes it to bizarre lengths, with
characters popping out of the ether
as if they were suddenly transposed
their through some sort of worm
hole.
This would seem like simple,
low-budget amateur film making,
but the style is so consistent that it
seems impossible that it could
have been an accident. The bizarre
look of the film fits with the plot,
whose absurdity mounts with
every passing moment. The analo
gy to free jazz works on this level
as well. In free jazz, a soloist will
go off on whatever melodic fancy
takes them at the moment, often
passing through melody lines
from popular songs or going
through completely new inven
tions regardless of the original
structure of the song. Coscarelli
makes a similar move with the
plot, starting off with what seems
like a straightforward slasher and
then moving off through a variety
of horror trapping, even ending
on the old "It was all a dream (or
was it?)" conceit. In the hands of a
hack it would come off as sloppy
and ineffective. But Coscarelli is
no hack, and "Phantasm" is a
strange, twisted classic.
ryannyburg@ dailyemerald, com
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