Source: IMDB. Spoilers ahoy.
It was my senior year of college at Rutgers. I’d spent four years hitting them books, and was ready and raring to face the real world! Except I wasn’t ready and raring for anything. It was a time of self-discovery, and what I mostly discovered is that I had a drinking problem.
One night, I ate a hearty spaghetti dinner and settled down to watch a few movies. Willie Wonka and The Chocolate Factory, Tim Burton’s Batman, and National Lampoon’s Vacation.
While watching, I drank half a bottle of Jack Daniels. I mixed it with Coca Cola. When I ran out of Coke, I mixed it with chlorinated tap water, which tasted gross but by that point I didn’t care because I was one of those suave European guys with a cool accent I’d seen on TV, a connoisseur of hard liquor.
I had a sudden hankering for fresh air, so I went for a stroll and got picked up by the cops, who said they’d gotten calls about a drunk guy staggering through the streets. They drove me to my dorm, where I settled down for an enjoyable night of vomiting all over myself.
It was a coping mechanism. Getting drunk was better than dealing with my life. I had no idea what I wanted to do after I graduated. I’d already made a whole slew of questionable decisions. English major, no internship, graduating into the worst job market in years.
It felt like things were ending. That’s because they were ending. My time at Rutgers was grinding to a halt, and I had no idea what awaited me. SPOILER: it involved lots of retail. At that point, I was still a kid. But I was becoming something else.
*
The main character of Phantasm is Mike, a teenager whose parents have died. Mike is fixated on older brother Jody, who isn’t much of a parental figure, but sure looks good in his Rolling Stones t-shirt and jeans when he’s picking up the ladies at the tavern frequented by the local fuck-ups.
People have been vanishing. Mike suspects the Tall Man, a weirdo funeral director who lives in an enormous white house. The Tall Man can lift a five hundred pound coffin and put it into the back of a hearse. The Tall Man can alter his appearance to look like a sultry blonde, which allows him to stab unsuspecting doofuses to death after sex, usually in a cemetery.
Mike goes to a fortune teller’s house, where we learn that the filmmakers read Dune. More importantly, we learn that Mike read Dune. This scene is a tell, because what happens in her parlor isn’t possible. Objects don’t appear and disappear.
She tells him not to be afraid. Except there’s a lot to be afraid about. The Tall Man is stalking Mike, even though Mike starts it by breaking into the funeral home. His minions include tiny people in black robes and a silver ball with blades that flies around, attaches itself to your head, and sucks out all your blood like it’s drinking a Slurpee.
Our heroes are Mike, Jody, and Reggie. Reggie is an ice cream man who plays a mean guitar. There’s also Myrtle, who apparently lives in Mike and Jody’s house. She appears once, frightening Reggie, and then we never see her again. I suspect that she’s Mike’s real-life caregiver, but more on that later.
The movie has a pattern. Jody will unwittingly (???) put his brother in danger by doing things like locking him in his room, making him a sitting duck, but Mike will escape and come to his brother’s rescue.
It almost seems like a form of wish-fulfillment. The fact that The Tall Man can transform into a sultry woman, and Jody likes the ladies, is interesting also. Women are a threat for Mike, because he’s afraid one of them will take his brother away.
Phantasm has a double twist ending. I liked the first twist, which is that Mike imagined the whole thing. Jody died in a car accident, probably after a few too many at the local tavern, and he made it all up as a coping mechanism. In the real world Myrtle, who appears once and then vanishes, is Mike’s caregiver.
This is consistent with the movie’s subtext. Mike is a smart kid who reads a lot of science fiction. I won’t say the Tall Man’s plot is ludicrous. It’s similar to the plot of Michel Faber’s body horror novel Under The Skin.
What it comes down to is that pretending Jody died defending Earth from aliens who want to shrink us down to three feet so that we can slave away on a higher gravity world is preferable to Jody getting pickled at the local bar and driving his car into the local tree.
As a person well-versed in the intricacies of bullshitting myself, I empathize with Mike. He isn’t a kid, but he’s not an adult either. He can’t drink or legally drive, even though he does both. He has nobody. He constantly follows Jody around, who to him represents normalcy and stability. Wouldn’t you?
He doesn’t want his brother to go, but he’s already gone.
I really need to watch this movie. I've had people recommend it, and then keep forgetting it exists. It sounds a lot sadder than than I expected, though.
Best review of Phantasm ever.