The Tao of the Tall Man

A phantasm has been defined as a "fantastic sequence of haphazardly associative imagery, as in dreams."

But in terms of the Tall Man -- Angus Scrimm's iconic cinematic Bogeyman -- a phantasm can certainly be defined as a nightmare.

In Don Coscarelli's four Phantasm films -- spanning the years 1979 to 2016 -- the Tall Man has destroyed small-town America (not unlike Wal-Mart...), overturned the order of human life itself, and terrorized a triumvirate of heroic friends: Michael (Michael Baldwin), Reggie (Reggie Bannister) and Jody (Bill Thornbury).

Loping in gait, exceedingly grave of visage and utterly imposing in stature, The Tall Man reigns as one of the horror cinemas most fearsome, beloved, and long-lived Bogeyman. But what makes this creepy old ghoul tick? Why has The Tall Man endured as a figure of silver screen fear for so long?

The first answer, of course, rests with the actor essaying the role. The late Scrimm's menacing, growling performances are unforgettable, and that deep tenor voice is positively nightmare-inducing. Yet the character's mystique goes deeper. And so today, we must examine...the Tao of the Tall Man...

1.) He's the Personification of Death; the Personification of Adult "Knowledge:"

In my 2002 book Horror Films of the 1970s I wrote that the original 1979 Phantasm functions on many levels, but most effectively as the heroic dream fantasy of a lonely, sad boy (Michael) who feels haunted by the presence of death and betrayed by life; by reality itself.

This was my manner of accounting for the original film's captivating, almost child-like quality, wherein "something sinister" is lurking at the local cemetery and must be investigated...by a rwelve-year old kid.

I don't mean that brief description of the inventive plot as any sort of put-down. Rather it is my belief that the film beautifully captures the world-view and perspective of a pre-adolescent boy, the film's protagonist and primary participant. I wrote in the book that "every bizarre event that happens in Phantasm can easily be interpreted as having occurred in one of the boy's twisted dreams/nightmares."

In the movie's sad "real life," depicted momentarily at the film's conclusion, Mike's beloved older brother Jody is -- like the boy's parents -- dead and gone. Mike is pretty much alone, at least in terms of biological family.

The preceding dream (the text of the film itself...) in which Jody is alive and well may thus be interpreted as a disturbed kid's anxiety dream. In that lengthy "phantasm," Michael represses knowledge of Jody's death and imagines he can conquer mortality. His enemy is Death Itself, the Tall Man. Michael destroys him; he buries the Tall Man in the ground with his brother's able assistance. But when he wakes up from this heroic dream, Michael sees that his victory was imaginary, illusory; that in real life, death is never defeated. Jody recedes into the wind...growing smaller and smaller in the imagination (and in the frame too...) because of his status as dead. The unchangeable fact here is that Jody is the one who is gone, not some menacing monster.

Mike can't play the hero in real life...only in his dreams. In the film's epilogue, the Tall Man returns for one last attack and that's because in real life death always returns too. The Tall Man takes Michael, and that act represents, perhaps, the ultimate childhood fear. Of being dragged into the darkness of death, kicking and screaming, with no one to help.

Throughout the film, Coscarelli transmits the idea of Mike running away from reality (and into dreams.) The notion is expressed in both the dialogue and the visuals. For instance, Mike literally can't keep up with his brother. "Jody's leaving soon," he notes (rather cryptically...) in the dream, processing his brother's real life death as but a "departure" that he might be able to stop.

And, in one particularly affecting shot, Mike's feeling of abandonment and isolation is portrayed in starkly visual terms. Mike follows desperately after Jody as his older brother rides down a long road on a bike...oblivious to his brother's pursuit. This moment embodies the idea that Jody is on a one-way journey, moving away from Mike. Forever. Mike can run and run, but he can't catch up with Jody. Jody is dead.

In Michael's powerful, movie-long dream, The Tall Man represents inexplicable, baffling adulthood; or even, simply, adult knowledge. For instance, when The Tall Man first appears, he is explicitly connected to the adult mystery of sex. Jody and one of his friends are "lured" into the grave yard by a sexy siren...really the Tall Man (shape-shifted to appear as a gorgeous female). Mike doesn't understand sex, and so he imagines it as something mysterious and fearsome...manifested in his dream as the Tall Man, also the vehicle of Death. After all, both sex and death threaten to take Jody away from Michael, right? Both are elements of life that a child isn't equipped to understand.

The Tall Man is thus the personification of fears surrounding growing-up. Encoded in that term "growing up" is the realization of one's own mortality; and sex, among other things. The Tall Man symbolizes the mysteries of human life that Mike doesn't yet understand...but deeply fears. Further enhancing the dream metaphor, The Tall Man seems to appear frequently in Michael's bedroom...the very place where a boy will worry about death or first grope with the mysteries of sex.

2.) Imagine There's No Heaven. Or He Doesn't Just Kill You:

I have long subscribed to the belief that many of the scariest "monsters" in horror history (on both TV and in film) are those beings that don't actually kill their victims.

What they do to their victims is -- actually -- far worse than death, and promises lasting, spiritual suffering well beyond a quick mortal demise.

Consider the Creeper, in Jeepers Creepers (2001), a monster who steals body parts to replenish his own life. The owners of those appropriated body parts eternally become a part of the horrifying monster; forever at one with Something Evil.

Or recall the cybernetic Borg on Star Trek.: The Next Generation...they don't want to kill you; they want to use your body and your mind against you, and make you serve an "evil" cause as a drone.

Again, that loss of identity, that loss of sovereignty, is much scarier than dying by a painful (but quick...) machete wound.

The Tall Man fits very well into this category of villain or monster. When mortals die, we learn quickly in Coscarelli's films, they are revived (with yellow blood in their veins), crushed to diminutive proportions and re-purposed as slaves, as dwarves on the Tall Man's barren, arid world (which could be Hell, really). The Tall Man thus harvests our human bodies, making us all slaves to his insidious, inhuman agenda.

An eternity spent as a monstrous, prowling, subservient dwarf isn't exactly something to eagerly look forward to, especially if you've been indoctrinated to believe the Kingdom of Heaven awaits in the after-life. As the Tall Man acknowledges in Phantasm II (1988): "You think that when you die, you go to Heaven. You come to us!" Thus the iconic character is frightening to audiences because he promises that the mystery of death is not a mystery at all, but a doorway to eternal servitude, eternal damnation in sub-human form. Yikes!

3.) There's Something Scary About Old People:

Technically, it's called Gerontophobia. And no, it's not nice, and it's not really fair...or even remotely rational.

But -- at least for a very young person, like Mike --- there's something deeply unsettling about very old people. Their ways seem alien. Their values are not yours, necessarily. They seem angry and temperamental. They want you to stay off their lawn, and they always seem to be hovering behind you, watching, making sure you are following "the rules." A kid might even note that they smell of death; they have one foot in the grave already...

Old people are not, in some cases (perhaps because of dementia, or extreme pain...), the trustworthy, capable, helpful adults a young child is familiar and comfortable with (think teachers, and hopefully, parents too.)

Some old people actually look scary too, like witches or monstrous crones. And that's part of The Tall Man's Tao: his frightening appearance as an angry, unapproachable, even inappropriate old man. Even his trademark shout, "Booooy!" is coded specifically to terrify the young; to spark a fear of the elderly...the dying.

4.) Last But Not Least...He's Got Balls:

As far as horror bogeymen go, an important rule is this: the right tool for the right job.

Freddy has his finger knives, Jason has his machete, and Leatherface has his trusty chainsaw.

The Tall Man too is associated with a weapon and, appropriately, it's a literal nightmare weapon (reflecting the dream-like/phantasm nature of the films).

That weapon, of course, is the famous silver sphere, the sentinel...the ball. Many of the franchise's most memorable and gruesome scenes involve these chrome, flying, autonomous things. These devices home in on an unwitting victim, sprout blades, embed themselves in the human skull...then drill into it. Finally, they spit out a torrent of blood, until the victim is dead, dead, dead. The balls are fast, utterly unreal, and even sentient.

In short, the chrome, reflective spheres are among the most inventive horror weapons ever devised and as the keeper of the balls (so-to-speak), the Tall Man controls them.

Personifying death and mortality (through his aged appearance), boasting a tragic past (as we see in 1998's OblIVion), procuring slaves and harnessing the power of the bloody ball, the Tall Man walks tall in the imagination of horror fans.

Movie Trailer: Phantasm Ravager (2016)

Halloween 2016: Phantasm (1979)

In some fashion direct or indirect, all horror films grapple with the ultimate human fear, mortality.  But Don Coscarelli’s landmark 1979 horror Phantasm is a film veritably obsessed with the cessation of life, and also the terrible grief that accompanies death for those left behind on this mortal coil. 

In fact, it is not at all difficult to interpret the film’s events as one teenager’s powerful subconscious fantasy, his sublimation and re-direction of grief as he attempts to make sense of all the death happening around him, in life and in his immediate family.  The film’s almost childish tale of a Fairy Tale monster -- a witch-like “Tall Man” (Angus Scrimm) who enslaves the dead -- is actually but 

Michael’s (Michael Baldwin’s) self-constructed mythology regarding mortality. 

Simply put, it’s easier to deal with that orderly “horror” – a world of monsters and villains and happy endings – than one in which those Michael loves are lost and gone forever.

Surreal and haunting, Phantasm confidently moves and tracks like almost no other horror movie ever made.  It vacillates between scenes of outright terror and ridiculous comedy, and treads into terrains not exactly…realistic.  The universe as expressed in the film doesn’t seem to conform to order or rationality as we understand it, frankly.  But importantly, all of this disorder, chaos and pain feels as though it arises from a deep understanding and sympathy for childhood.  The film’s trademark soundtrack composition -- which repeats frequently and effectively -- adds to the overwhelming sense of a lullaby or trance, one we can’t quite awake from.

So many horror fans (rightly) love and cherish Phantasm because of the horror, because of the flying silver “ball” and the gore it creates in its monstrous wake.  Yet for me the film is actually a horror character-piece of the highest magnitude, and actually a tender, even whimsical reminder of how the world might appear to a sad and lonely adolescent. 

 “I just don't get off on funerals, man, they give me the creeps.” 

The shadow of death hovers behind Michael.

In Phantasm, a lonely kid, Michael, investigates the creepy-goings on at Morningside Funeral Home.  In particular, the Tall Man seems to be ensnaring young, able-bodied men with a sexy siren, and then leading them to their bloody doom.  But death is not the end of their journey, Michael learns.  Instead, he discovers that the Tall Man is crushing down the corpses to half-size and reviving them as slave labor for his arid, Hellish other world.

Michael attempts to convince his older brother, Jody (Bill Thornbury), of this bizarre truth, but Jody is burned out and skeptical.  Since their parents died, he’s been caring for Michael full time, and wants to leave town.  Michael knows this, and is deathly afraid of abandonment.  But soon, however, Jody is swayed by Michael’s evidence and together with a friend, Reggie (Reggie Bannister), the trio launches a frontal assault on the Tall Man…

After the Tall Man is defeated, Michael awakes from the long dream to face hard reality.  Not only are his parents dead, but Jody is gone too.  He died in a car crash.  Now Reggie promises to take care of him, but the specter of death is not yet gone from Michael’s life…

“First he took Mom and Dad, then he took Jody, now he's after me.” 

Surrounded by the trappings of death

In terms of psychology, we now understand that an adolescent’s understanding of death rivals that of an adult.  In other words, an adolescent is old enough to understand the idea of permanence, and also the idea that anyone, not just the very old, can die at any time.  Furthermore, we know that in many cases, adolescents react more intensely to death than adults do.  And lastly, that the two most difficult deaths for a teenager to cope with are those of his parents and that of a sibling. 

In some instances, however, teenagers do not react to such losses as expected, with tears and outright declarations of sadness or pain.  Instead, they may not confront their grief at all.  Rather they sublimate and deny it, even crafting complex stories and belief systems around the death of their loved ones, such as the fiction that they are somehow responsible or guilty for those deaths.

We are confronted in Phantasm, then, with a young protagonist, Michael, who has seen the death of both his parents, and also -- as we learn at film’s end -- the death of his brother, Jody.   Instead of coping outright with the grief, however, his mind has fashioned a phantasm, a dream which to attempts to “re-order” his disordered life.  In this story, Michael and Jody are still a team, defeating monsters and solving the mystery of Morningside.  In this dream, death has become embodied in a person, the Tall Man, and as something that Michael, importantly, can combat and defeat.

Michael (left, background) is left behind, while Jody heads...where?

But even in the dream, Michael can’t quite completely banish the specter of mortality, the fear of being left behind.   In one scene, we see him running in the background of a frame, attempting to keep up with Jody (on a bike). But Jody, oddly unaware, pulls further and further away.  In this evocative shot, the camera  leaves Michael in the dust.  Soon he stands alone in the frame, and it’s clear his fear is real.  He is being left behind.  Growing smaller and smaller in the frame.  “It’s Jody again,” he notes at one point, “I found out that he’s leaving.”

In terms of grappling with the idea of death, the film proper actually opens with it, as a friend of Jody’s named Tommy is killed.  Michael observes the funeral from a distance, with a set of binoculars.  This particular shot stresses the importance of how Michael sees, and later scenes in the film are similarly composed to reflect the same thing: effectively highlighting Michael’s eyes (as he sees through a crack in an open coffin, for instance) as he views the world.  This visual framing is our cue that the film itself is Michael’s “phantasm,” his way of perceiving and interpreting the things he experiences. 

How Michael sees #1

And what does Michael see?  Again and again, the film depicts not just a fear of death, but the various and sundry trappings of death.  We see mortuaries, caskets, funerals, hearses, graves and other elements of what could only be termed, politely, “the death industry.” 

As adults, these things are accepted, perhaps reluctantly, as part of the landscape, and don’t necessarily have the power to frighten or disturb us.  We know such things exist, and we deal with them. But because Michael is obsessed with death, the film reflects his fetish most vividly, creating a world where the trappings of death are visible and prominent in nearly every frame, and suffused with a dark malevolence.  The funeral director is a monstrous crone (The Tall Man), the graveyard is a place of darkness, danger and entrapment.  The hearse is a vehicle for the enslaved “dead” dwarves employed by the Tall Man, and so on.  The Tall Man hovers in the background of some shots like the Angel of Death himself.  He marshals all these familiar trappings of death and renders them frightening once more.  They serve him.

How Michael sees #2

The implication here is, perhaps, that as adults we accept the “death industry” and its trappings. But for Michael, they symbolize constant, nightmarish reminders of what he has lost.  They are monoliths constantly highlighting the unacceptability and permanence of death, yet hardly noticed by adult eyes.  Michael has not yet matured to the point where he accepts the presence of death in his life.

I’ve written above that some aspects of Phantasm seem childish or childlike.  This is not an insult or a put-down.  For instance, Michael and Jody easily destroy the Tall Man, essentially trapping him in a hole in the Earth (a mine shaft).  That this simple, almost cartoon-styled plan works against a Dedicated Agent of Evil reminds us that we are dealing with a child-like intelligence as the primary mover of the action.  We are seeing Michael’s dreams made manifest before our eyes.  We can destroy the devil by burying him up on that mountain! 

How Michael sees #3

It doesn’t make a lot of rational sense unless we consider the action a child’s phantasm.  Similarly, the whole vibe of the movie is something akin to what I described in Horror Films of the 1970s as a Hardy Boy’s mystery where “something sinister” is happening at the local cemetery.   To describe this almost innocent quality of the film another way, I would say that Phantasm understands the adolescent mind, and crafts successfully and movingly a world around that perspective.

I believe this interpretation is borne out, to some degree, by the depiction of the film’s deadly siren, the Lady in Lavender.  She is a mysterious figure promising sex but delivering death.  She is very much a product of a fearful teen’s imagination and fear.  That teen does not yet understand what sex is, or the power of sex as a desire and appetite.  Instead, the “unknowns” of sex become, in the film, disturbingly intermingled with death.  The moans of love-making transform, in short order, into the groaning of a monster lurking in the nearby bushes.  Both sex and death are things that seem to take Jody away from his brother, after all.

Although all the Phantasm sequels surely preclude the possibility that this film is but the dream of a sad, grief-ridden teenager, the interpretation tracks admirably if you take Coscarelli’s original as a standalone effort and not part of a “franchise.”  As I have also written before, I believe this quality of the film (as a teen’s dream) is also made clear by Michael’s unbelievably good survival rate.  He tangles with the Tall Man and his minions no less than four times in the film, and always emerges unscathed, only to prove, finally, victorious in his campaign.  I submit that this “luck” too is a reflection of a youthful mentality: the belief that you are somehow immune to death.  Furthermore, it reflects the idea that we all place ourselves at the center of our fantasies, as the heroes in our own adventures.  Here, Michael deals with death by becoming a superhero of sorts, one who conquers long-lived monsters and solves mysteries.

Our last, wistful view of Jody, from a distance and bound for parts unknown.

I admire the film because its distinctive visuals so beautifully mirror Phantasm's themes.  In some shots, the Tall Man seems to be the shadow of death himself.  And in one haunting composition, Michael sees Jody for the last time (before waking up into a world where he is dead).  Jody stands high in the frame, atop a mountain.  Jody stands on that pinnacle, a heavenly light (like angel wings?) behind him.  It's the distant, final view of a man going to the great beyond, and Coscarelli's imagery captures it with wonder and a degree of lyricism.

Charting the disturbed mental landscape of a grieving boy, Phantasm gets to a very simple and emotional truth about human existence.  It is often easier to live in a fantasy world (even one with monsters, dwarves, giant flies, and alien worlds…) than it is to face head-on the fact that, in the final analysis, we are all going to lose our loved ones.  Because it deals so sensitively and succinctly with that tough, hard-to-accept idea, Phantasm always gets to me on some deep level.  The film makes me ask myself an important question: Why do I like and enjoy horror movies so much?  Why do I love being scared and challenged by them?

With films like Phantasm, am I actually preparing myself, in some way, for the inevitable?

Perhaps so. 

I know only this: I deeply fear death, and sometimes obsess on it, both in relation to the end of my own life, and deaths of those I love.  In Phantasm Michael reveals one way to grieve, or perhaps to escape grieving.  Phantasm makes me wonder about my own solution to the Phantasm equation.  Am I going to be that boy, left behind on the bike while others leave me behind? Or will the Tall Man show up for me first?

At some point, the Tall Man is going to look all of us straight in the eye, commend us for a good game -- now finished -- and remind us it is time to die.  You don’t have to be a teenager to fear that day, and in some way Phantasm helps us to explore meaningfully the ideas of grief, loss, and the inevitability of death.

Tribute: Angus Scrimm (1926 - 2016)

The press is now reporting the death of Angus Scrimm (1926-2016), a horror movie icon, and a gentleman to boot.

Angus Scrimm played the classic villain, The Tall Man in Don Coscarelli's Phantasm (1979), Phantasm II (1988), Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead (1994), Phantasm IV: Oblivion (1998).  and the not-yet released Phantasm: RaVager (2016).  

In that career-making role, Scrimm was a perpetually terrifying presence, embodying the coldness, distance --not to mention extreme height -- of adulthood, at least from a child's perspective.

Mr. Scrimm, formerly a journalist, also had a recurring role on Alias (2001 - 2005), appeared in films such as Subspecies (1990), and recently had an un-credited cameo in Always Watching: A Marble Hornets Story(2015), a found footage horror film about Slenderman, a character who is a step-child, perhaps, of The Tall Man.

I last saw Mr. Scrimm in person at the Monsterfest Convention in 2012, here in Charlotte, N.C. It's a cliche to state that someone is a scholar and a gentleman, but that's actually a perfect description of this kind, literate and yet imposing man and his intellect. He was a man of words and letters, as well as moving, effective performance.

Horror has lost a classic actor and boogeyman today, but to paraphrase The Tall Man, now that he has gone from this mortal coil...he comes to us. 

It is now for the audiences who have loved Angus Scrimm to render him truly immortal, by watching and re-experiencing his work.  Rest in Peace, Angus Scrimm.

The Films of 1988: Phantasm II

Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm (1979) is a brilliantly-crafted horror movie, and a classic of the genre too, in no small part because it appears to operate on multiple levels of meaning and symbolism. 

For example, taken literally, the film is about a horrible ghoul (The Tall Man), and his agenda to strip-mine Earth’s dead. 

On a far more complex level, Phantasm concerns the industry of death itself, from hearses and coffins to graves and mausoleums. Death, we see, is an impersonal, industrial process -- a factory, in some sense -- and the Tall Man is its (cinematic) overseer.

Yet as I’ve written before Phantasm also serves as a sensitive examination of one boy’s reckoning with death as an inescapable fact of life.

Our protagonist, young Michael (Michael Baldwin) dreams of combating the Tall Man (Angus Scrimm), because he is a boogeyman or personality who can be defeated.  Death itself -- the unstoppable, face-less force that took away his brother Jody (Bill Thornbury) -- cannot be destroyed. 

So adolescent Michael conjures a “phantasm” -- a dream -- that is palatable to him in a time of grief and mourning.

In that dream, mortality can be overcome; death can be defeated. The Tall Man can be buried forever.  The film, featuring moments of innocent, almost child-like wonder (witness the giant fly, born from the Tall Man’s blood..), can thus be explained as a boy’s childhood fantasy of beating death once and for all.  A fantasy that, in the denouement, he sees is but mere delusion.

Death always wins.

The sequel, 1988’s Phantasm II, is a very different film, and overall a far more conventional one.  By and large, the metaphor behind the first film -- which involves both man’s desire and inability to defeat death -- is left by the wayside, and the follow-up focuses instead on action, weaponry, and loads of stylish excess.

These predilections make Phantasm II a perfect horror film of the 1980s, an era when escalation was the name of the game, and action replaced, to a large extent, atmosphere.

Here, the action scenes are deliberately stylish and over-the-top, in the mode of Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead franchise, and Raimi himself is name-checked in one crucial scene. Guns, grenades, flame throwers and other weapons dominate the action, and one gets a thorough sense of the Rambo-fication of the franchise. 

At least two suburban houses explode in the film, and one (impressively lensed) moment sees the Tall Man standing in the foreground while all hell breaks loose behind him. He is literally surrounded by hellish fire.

It’s not necessarily a bad tor unsatisfactory approach and Phantasm II is a wholly entertaining rollercoaster of a film, even if it resolutely lacks the intellectual and artistic heft of the 1979 original. 

Where Phantasm II proves most intriguing is not in its crazy, often gruesome action, but rather in its surprisingly effective (and prophetic?) vision of a small-town America decimated by that Bringer of Death, the Tall Man.

I’ve always liked Phantasm II second best in the franchise, judging it a solid, well-made, involving sequel.

But I do miss the absent piece of Phantasm’s creative legacy: the acknowledgment and through-line that the Tall Man, his minions, and Michael’s adventures are all some phantasm that reflects a very real fear in our kind; the fear that death -- like taxes and horror movies sequels -- is utterly inescapable.

“Remember, it was all in your imagination.”

Several years after the death of his brother Jody, and his incarceration in a psychiatric hospital, Michael (James Le Gros) is released and declared cured of his mental illness. He promptly teams up with his old friend, Reggie (Reggie Bannister).

This duo heads out on the road, in pursuit of the Tall Man, itching for a fight.  Michael can find The Tall Man because he shares a mental link with another possible victim, a young woman in Perigord, Oregon named Elizabeth (Paula Irvine).

Along the way to reach and rescue Elizabeth, however, Reggie and Michael pick up a stranger, Alchemy (Samantha Phillips), and must contend with booby traps left by the Tall Man.

Finally, the hunters reach Perigord, where Elizabeth has teamed with a priest, Father Meyers (Kenneth Tigar), to put an end to the Tall Man’s reign of terror once and for all.

“Let’s go shopping.”

While watching a sequel like Phantasm II, or for that matter, James Cameron’s Aliens (1986), I often remember some of the punchy and very smart dialogue from Wes Craven’s Scream 2 (1997). There, Randy Meeks (Jamie Kennedy) explains how all horror genre sequels must ratchet up the body count, feature more elaborate death sequences, and highlight what he terms “carnage candy.”

There’s indeed much carnage candy in Phantasm II.

For example, one unlucky minion of the Tall Man sees a silver sphere burrow inside of him, hollow out his innards, then make its way through his neck, to his mouth. 

Another extremely gory (and accomplished) scene finds the Tall Man’s face disintegrating after being pumped full of hydrochloric acid. 

Clearly, the disgust quotient has been upped significantly since 1979, and now the flying spheres or balls not only drain victims of their blood and gut them from within, they lop off ears, shoot lasers (like a Predator shoulder cannon) and the like.

This “bigger is better” mentality informing sequel is part and parcel of the 1980s genre cinema. Consider, again, Aliens.  The film stresses action over suspense, and pits the original hero, Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) not against one acid-for-blood xenomorphic monstrosity, but a veritable planet-ful of them.

Or consider Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part II (1987), which features -- amusingly -- dueling chainsaws, and entrenched commentary about small-business owners in the Reagan Era.

Phantasm II gets its own dueling chainsaws scene (in which it is proved, for the record, that size doesn’t matter…), and gives its audience full-on battle sequences with Reggie and Michael overcoming dwarf minions by the dozen.

Reggie takes out four of them with a customized shot-gun, with one pull of the trigger.

One early scene -- also perfect for the excesses of the eighties -- also sees Reggie and Michael going “shopping,” buying items from a store and crafting their signature weapons, including a fire extinguisher and the aforementioned shot gun.  They pay for all that they take, and the focus is on making weaponry, so they can take the fight straight to the Tall Man. As Reggie actually says in the film: “Come on, let’s go kick some ass!”

Phantasm II possesses two saving graces; ones that keep the film from being a brain-dead Rambo in the Graveyard film. 

The first is the film’s sense of visual humor/style.  As I noted in my introduction, Sam Raimi is name-checked during one scene in an embalming room. A bag of ashes (Ash?) are thrown in a bag labeled with the director’s name.  This tribute is perfect, because Phantasm II, much like an Evil Dead film, never stops moving, and never remains still for along. Coscarelli’s camera plows through doors, one after the other, in a very Deadite-ish gag that nonetheless works like gangbusters. 

Similarly, Reggie’s run-in with a Graver (another Tall Man minion) is funny, tense, and grotesque.  Coscarelli demonstrates here and throughout the film that he can shift between tones with aplomb, and keep the whole enterprise moving at a crazy, gonzo clip.

More impressive, however, is the subversive idea, just under the surface in Phantasm II, that when Big Time Industry comes to a small town…the small town dies.  Much of the film involves Reggie and Michael pursuing the Tall Man from American ghost town to American ghost town.  Michael observes that “small towns are like people. Some grow old and die a natural death. Others are murdered.”

What murders these small towns is the arrival of the Death Industry, under its CEO, the Tall Man. He arrives, and strip-mines the towns for all their usable (on his terms) resources. He takes over the local mortuary, and before you know it, graveyards are being emptied at a rapid rate. His take-over (with his own employees: dwarves and gravers, namely) literally kills the small towns in short order. The denizens of the town die, and are made slaves.

Not low-wage slaves, either. Just slaves. 

For many years (ten, actually) I lived in a beautiful southern small town; one with beautiful old architecture and a downtown consisting of long-standing mom and pop shops. In the span I lived there, this town was murdered, per Phantasm II’s lingo, by the arrival on the main highway, not far away, of shopping goliaths like Wal Mart, K-Mart and Target.  The downtown shops emptied at an incredible rate until the whole area -- so picturesque and evocative of an earlier era in American history -- became a ghost town, an image like something out Phantasm II.

So perhaps Phantasm II is more than a perfect representative of its gung-ho era -- the hyper-militarized, excessive, action packed 80s.

Perhaps in some way the sequel was forecasting what the future of that world could one day look like, in the 90s and beyond.  Considering the death, in so many places, of old fashioned, small-town America, it’s hard not to view the enthusiastic line of dialogue in the film, “let’s go shopping!” as carrying an ironic, double meaning.

I also find Phantasm II’s undercutting of traditional religious belief to be startling, especially given the traditional nature of the time period from which the film hails. One of the most frightening notions ever put to the horror film is voiced by the Tall Man here.

When confronted with Father Meyers and his Christian faith, The Tall Man mocks religion as fantasy, as delusion.  “You think when you die, you go to Heaven? You come to us!” He taunts. 

It’s a chilling declaration, and promise that the afterlife is not paradise, but slavery.  It’s downright chilling.

Finally, I appreciated Coscarelli's choice to tell Mike and Reggie's story (the 1979 original) through charcoal sketches in Elizabeth's notebook.  I felt, personally, that this was an interesting and artistic way to resurrect images from the first Phantasm.

Phantasm II cannot match the brilliance and artistic depth of the original 1979 film, but in the era of Freddy Krueger and Friday the 13^th sequels, it stakes out a claim for quality by balancing so well its scares and its laughs. The sequel doesn’t open itself up very well to multiple readings, and the “dream” or “rubber reality” concept is half-enunciated. 

Here, for example, Reggie doesn’t remember being attacked by the minions at Michael’s house, even though Michael remembers it. This suggests the scene was a dream.  But it is never explained how Michael parses this experience in the real world.  Was his house actually destroyed by a gas leak? 

It’s awkward and confusing to viewers that Reggie only comes on board with the plan to eliminate the Tall Man after his house also explodes, in the present. If the movie had just treated the first scene as real, it wouldn’t need to create a modern, artificial explanation for Reggie’s loyalty to the cause.

And the film’s end, of course, is a slapdash re-assertion (or regurgitation) of the original’s idea that Michael’s battle with the Tall Man is just a phantasm, not reality.  But it’s more difficult to make that case here than it was in the original film because Michael seems to be sharing a folie a deux with Elizabeth.  Their delusion of a Supernatural (or alien?) Death Merchant is mutual, thus making it unlikely to be just a young person’s fantasy about defeating mortality.

So Phantasm II is great to look at, watch, and experience…but not so great to think about deeply.  If you can accept the sequel on those terms, it remains one of the most entertaining horror sequels of the last half of the 1980s, and one featuring a few superb sequences.  The Tall Man’s denunciation of our faith is one example, and the view of small town America decimated by the Big Death Industry is another.

Movie Trailer: Phantasm II (1988)

You Play a Good Game Boy: The Tao of the Tall Man

A phantasm has been defined as a "fantastic sequence of haphazardly associative imagery, as in dreams."

But in terms of the Tall Man -- Angus Scrimm's iconic cinematic Bogeyman -- a phantasm can certainly be defined as a nightmare.

In Don Coscarelli's four Phantasm films -- spanning the years 1979 to 1998 -- the Tall Man has destroyed small-town America (not unlike Wal-Mart...), overturned the order of human life itself, and terrorized a triumvirate of heroic friends: Michael (Michael Baldwin), Reggie (Reggie Bannister) and Jody (Bill Thornbury).

Loping in gait, exceedingly grave of visage and utterly imposing in stature, The Tall Man reigns as one of the horror cinemas most fearsome, beloved, and long-lived Bogeyman. But what makes this creepy old ghoul tick? Why has The Tall Man endured as a figure of silver screen fear for so long?

The first answer, of course, rests with the actor essaying the role. Scrimm's menacing, growling performances are unforgettable, and that deep tenor voice is positively nightmare-inducing. Yet the character's mystique goes deeper. And so today, we must examine...the Tao of the Tall Man...

1.) He's the Personification of Death; the Personification of Adult "Knowledge:"

In my 2002 book Horror Films of the 1970s I wrote that the original 1979 Phantasm functions on many levels, but most effectively as the heroic dream fantasy of a lonely, sad boy (Michael) who feels haunted by the presence of death and betrayed by life; by reality itself.

This was my manner of accounting for the original film's captivating, almost child-like quality, wherein "something sinister" is lurking at the local cemetery and must be investigated...by a rwelve-year old kid.

I don't mean that brief description of the inventive plot as any sort of put-down. Rather it is my belief that the film beautifully captures the world-view and perspective of a pre-adolescent boy, the film's protagonist and primary participant. I wrote in the book that "every bizarre event that happens in Phantasm can easily be interpreted as having occurred in one of the boy's twisted dreams/nightmares."

In the movie's sad "real life," depicted momentarily at the film's conclusion, Mike's beloved older brother Jody is -- like the boy's parents -- dead and gone. Mike is pretty much alone, at least in terms of biological family.

The preceding dream (the text of the film itself...) in which Jody is alive and well may thus be interpreted as a disturbed kid's anxiety dream. In that lengthy "phantasm," Michael represses knowledge of Jody's death and imagines he can conquer mortality. His enemy is Death Itself, the Tall Man. Michael destroys him; he buries the Tall Man in the ground with his brother's able assistance. But when he wakes up from this heroic dream, Michael sees that his victory was imaginary, illusory; that in real life, death is never defeated. Jody recedes into the wind...growing smaller and smaller in the imagination (and in the frame too...) because of his status as dead. The unchangeable fact here is that Jody is the one who is gone, not some menacing monster.

Mike can't play the hero in real life...only in his dreams. In the film's epilogue, the Tall Man returns for one last attack and that's because in real life death always returns too. The Tall Man takes Michael, and that act represents, perhaps, the ultimate childhood fear. Of being dragged into the darkness of death, kicking and screaming, with no one to help.

Throughout the film, Coscarelli transmits the idea of Mike running away from reality (and into dreams.) The notion is expressed in both the dialogue and the visuals. For instance, Mike literally can't keep up with his brother. "Jody's leaving soon," he notes (rather cryptically...) in the dream, processing his brother's real life death as but a "departure" that he might be able to stop.

And, in one particularly affecting shot, Mike's feeling of abandonment and isolation is portrayed in starkly visual terms. Mike follows desperately after Jody as his older brother rides down a long road on a bike...oblivious to his brother's pursuit. This moment embodies the idea that Jody is on a one-way journey, moving away from Mike. Forever. Mike can run and run, but he can't catch up with Jody. Jody is dead.

In Michael's powerful, movie-long dream, The Tall Man represents inexplicable, baffling adulthood; or even, simply, adult knowledge. For instance, when The Tall Man first appears, he is explicitly connected to the adult mystery of sex. Jody and one of his friends are "lured" into the grave yard by a sexy siren...really the Tall Man (shape-shifted to appear as a gorgeous female). Mike doesn't understand sex, and so he imagines it as something mysterious and fearsome...manifested in his dream as the Tall Man, also the vehicle of Death. After all, both sex and death threaten to take Jody away from Michael, right? Both are elements of life that a child isn't equipped to understand.

The Tall Man is thus the personification of fears surrounding growing-up. Encoded in that term "growing up" is the realization of one's own mortality; and sex, among other things. The Tall Man symbolizes the mysteries of human life that Mike doesn't yet understand...but deeply fears. Further enhancing the dream metaphor, The Tall Man seems to appear frequently in Michael's bedroom...the very place where a boy will worry about death or first grope with the mysteries of sex.

2.) Imagine There's No Heaven. Or He Doesn't Just Kill You:

I have long subscribed to the belief that many of the scariest "monsters" in horror history (on both TV and in film) are those beings that don't actually kill their victims.

What they do to their victims is -- actually -- far worse than death, and promises lasting, spiritual suffering well beyond a quick mortal demise.

Consider the Creeper, in Jeepers Creepers (2001), a monster who steals body parts to replenish his own life. The owners of those appropriated body parts eternally become a part of the horrifying monster; forever at one with Something Evil.

Or recall the cybernetic Borg on Star Trek.: The Next Generation...they don't want to kill you; they want to use your body and your mind against you, and make you serve an "evil" cause as a drone.

Again, that loss of identity, that loss of sovereignty, is much scarier than dying by a painful (but quick...) machete wound.

The Tall Man fits very well into this category of villain or monster. When mortals die, we learn quickly in Coscarelli's films, they are revived (with yellow blood in their veins), crushed to diminutive proportions and re-purposed as slaves, as dwarves on the Tall Man's barren, arid world (which could be Hell, really). The Tall Man thus harvests our human bodies, making us all slaves to his insidious, inhuman agenda.

An eternity spent as a monstrous, prowling, subservient dwarf isn't exactly something to eagerly look forward to, especially if you've been indoctrinated to believe the Kingdom of Heaven awaits in the after-life. As the Tall Man acknowledges in Phantasm II (1988): "You think that when you die, you go to Heaven. You come to us!" Thus the iconic character is frightening to audiences because he promises that the mystery of death is not a mystery at all, but a doorway to eternal servitude, eternal damnation in sub-human form. Yikes!

3.) There's Something Scary About Old People:

Technically, it's called Gerontophobia. And no, it's not nice, and it's not really fair...or even remotely rational.

But -- at least for a very young person, like Mike --- there's something deeply unsettling about very old people. Their ways seem alien. Their values are not yours, necessarily. They seem angry and temperamental. They want you to stay off their lawn, and they always seem to be hovering behind you, watching, making sure you are following "the rules." A kid might even note that they smell of death; they have one foot in the grave already...

Old people are not, in some cases (perhaps because of dementia, or extreme pain...), the trustworthy, capable, helpful adults a young child is familiar and comfortable with (think teachers, and hopefully, parents too.)

Some old people actually look scary too, like witches or monstrous crones. And that's part of The Tall Man's Tao: his frightening appearance as an angry, unapproachable, even inappropriate old man. Even his trademark shout, "Booooy!" is coded specifically to terrify the young; to spark a fear of the elderly...the dying.

4.) Last But Not Least...He's Got Balls:

As far as horror bogeymen go, an important rule is this: the right tool for the right job.

Freddy has his finger knives, Jason has his machete, and Leatherface has his trusty chainsaw.

The Tall Man too is associated with a weapon and, appropriately, it's a literal nightmare weapon (reflecting the dream-like/phantasm nature of the films).

That weapon, of course, is the famous silver sphere, the sentinel...the ball. Many of the franchise's most memorable and gruesome scenes involve these chrome, flying, autonomous things. These devices home in on an unwitting victim, sprout blades, embed themselves in the human skull...then drill into it. Finally, they spit out a torrent of blood, until the victim is dead, dead, dead. The balls are fast, utterly unreal, and even sentient.

In short, the chrome, reflective spheres are among the most inventive horror weapons ever devised and as the keeper of the balls (so-to-speak), the Tall Man controls them.

Personifying death and mortality (through his aged appearance), boasting a tragic past (as we see in 1998's OblIVion), procuring slaves and harnessing the power of the bloody ball, the Tall Man walks tall in the imagination of horror fans. Watching Angus Scrimm play this immortal character, one feels that, like Death, the Tall Man has always been with us...and always will.

Or, as the character himself might note: "The funeral is about to begin..."