On Film

Revisit the horror of 1979's Phantasm

Phantasm movie poster
Phantasm movie poster

Horror is not my metier.

I get them, the same way I get roller coasters and zip lines, and I can even enjoy them on occasion. I'll take a good psychological thriller -- the sort of movie that strikes me as a "plausible horror" film -- but I tend to be bored by vampires and ghosts and other supernatural manifestations.

Still, I understand why horror endures. Our first stories were horror tales -- "St. George and the Dragon," "Beowulf," "Hansel and Gretel." Because the world is a dangerous place and there is much we can't control, we manufacture scary stories to empower ourselves. In the end, scary movies make us feel good by provoking the emotions of fearfulness in a safe context.

My resistance to them is my problem. No horror will scare you if you decide you don't want to be scared.

All movies are by their very nature resistible; just as you don't have to buy a ticket to any given film, you don't have to make yourself available to any given film's advances. There's always an escape hatch, a well-lighted exit sign the moviegoer can pass under if he wishes.

While a movie might startle you with pop-out ghosts and ringing phones or shock you with escalated levels of gore and violence, the key to a genuinely scary movie is the voluntary enlistment of the audience in the cause. We have to want to be scared.

And maybe I don't want to be. Or maybe I find enough in real life to scare me.

That said, I've always had a soft spot in my heart for Don Coscarelli's 1979 film Phantasm, which I think fairly belongs to that class of horror movies some of us identify as "cheesy."

It's one of the movies I have a very clear recollection of seeing in the theater; I remember exactly how my friends and I perceived it on first run. We thought it was hilarious, and we joked that the "Tall Man" -- the mortician villain who is killing townspeople with spinning silver spheres and turning them into dwarf zombies to take over the world -- was about 6 feet tall.

We were wrong about that. The actor who played him, Angus Scrimm, was actually about 6-foot-4. He wore lifts and suits that were too small to enhance the illusion of his height. Turns out Scrimm -- under his real name, Rory Guy -- worked as a publicist and journalist, writing liner notes for Capitol Records and book reviews for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. He died in January -- he was 89 years old.

While the Tall Man became a cult figure -- he was featured in four more Phantasm films -- he never scared us. We kind of adored him and his lethal steel spheres. The whole movie was cheap and crazy and wonderful in the same way that an outsider musician like Wesley Willis or Hasil Adkins can be cheap and crazy and wonderful; there were bits that were remarkably effective and there were bits that were howlingly bad. The plot's incoherence was a feature, not a bug.

My friends and I were the only ones taken by the odd charms of Phantasm. It became one of those "so-bad-it's-good" kitsch items that now and then appear in the culture. While it was pretty badly treated by critics when it was released, a lot of them eventually filed gentler revisionist retrospective reviews. (J.J. Abrams liked it so much he helped remaster and restore the film.)

I didn't make it to Phantasm II when it came out in 1988, or to any of the other sequels. And I have no particular interest in seeing the original again. In part because I remember it fondly and don't want to do any damage to those memories.

Anyway, I mention Phantasm because my friend Reade Mitchell is trying to organize screenings of a remastered version of the original film and the final installment in the franchise next month. The way it works is if enough people go to a website and order advance tickets, they'll hold the screening. If they don't sell enough tickets -- 100, for these movies -- the screening gets canceled and everyone who bought tickets gets his or her money back.

Anyway, the plan is to show the remastered Phantasm at 7:30 p.m. Nov. 14 at the The B&B Chenal 9 IMAX Theatre, 17825 Chenal Parkway, Little Rock. If you want to go to that show, you need to get on the internet and go to tugg.com/events/phantasm-remastered-4l1v. Tickets are $13.50.

Then a week later, on Nov. 21, the plan is to show the new film Phantasm: Ravager at the same theater at the same time. To get tickets for that screening, you'll want to go to tugg.com/events/phantasm-ravager-vkwr.

I doubt I'll be there.

Because horror's not my thing.

Email:

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

blooddirtangels.com

MovieStyle on 10/21/2016

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