Spheres of Orientation: On Why Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm Series Is More Cerebral than One Might Think

Abstract

One of the things medics and first aiders test for in victims of intracranial trauma is flaws in their neuropsychological orientation, or their degree of alertness to person, place, time, and event—in short, their responsiveness to questions about who they are, where they are, what date it is, and the situation that they are in. Those who watch Don Coscarelli’s four Phantasm films might feel as though they too suffer from such a trauma, from a sense of disorientation stemming from the strange recurrent images in the series of an unearthly mortician whose suits do not fit and who steals cadavers in order to reanimate them; of the dwarf minions who slavishly follow this villain’s orders; of the metal orbs that float about a mausoleum’s corridors, targeting intruders for destruction; and of the access-ways that the orbs, if caught, open up to another dimension, a desert wilderness in which inhuman shapes shamble about unseeingly. The Phantasm series thus seems anomalous in the tradition of continuity filmmaking, as it conforms to a cause-and-effect mode of storytelling that, rather than wrapping up its narrative mysteries in a rationally or emotionally satisfying way, raises more and more questions throughout the course of the exposition about just what is going on in these films. To summarize the incredibly anti-elucidative story arc of the series might run thus: the Tall Man (Angus Scrimm), a mysterious undertaker from another dimension, travels from town to town in order to steal the corpses from their cemeteries; crush them down into an army of “Lurkers,” or mindless dwarf underlings; transplant their cerebra into “Sentinels,” or flying weaponizable metallic spheres; and use them all to either wage an intergalactic war or repopulate the earth with zombie slaves.