The Tick-Tock Initiation: PHANTASM (1978)

Tick-Tockality: (pronounced tick-tock-AL-itee): The sense of dread created in a horror film through use of slowing down real time, originally created by John Ford and Howard Hawks and used first in horror by Jacques Tourneur and Val Lewton in The Leopard Man, and perfected in the early films of John Carpenter. The ideal tick-tockalism begins anywhere from 24 hours or less until the climactic anticipatory moment, i.e. Halloween or Carrie's Prom. and the blood red setting sun disappears much more slowly than we are used to, creating a sense of inescapable dread of what's coming at the onset of the darkness, thus capturing the primal fear of cavemen that survives in all children and some adults (i.e. the nightlight)

Maybe you need to have gone to drive-ins lot as a kid to understand the weird power of the setting sun and how the onset of darkness meant the start of a terrifying initiation, depending on the film being shown first. We'd congregate by the swing set, bolstering our courage while discussing other terrifying films, the R-rated ones none of us could see. The sun took forever to disappear and we'd fret. Our fear fueled our imaginations until these R-rated movies glistened with vertigo pelvic dropping terror in our minds.

At home, older, in the digital age, one must improvise, go the other route from a crowded audience of scared teenagers, and go it alone, at 3 AM, with headphones and a darkened room so anything could be right in the room with you and you'd never see or hear it.

I mention this because prior to Phantasm (1979),Don Coscarelli was shooting children's movies, like Kenny and Co, which I started to watch awhile back and found pretty good. Phantasm's genesis began when Don wanted to adapt Something Wicked This Way Comes but then Disney snagged the rights. Rated R as Phantasm may be, it's clearly a kid's nightmare, macabre as Burton or Roald Dahl but with more genuine Grimm Brothers menace, the kind where children are eaten, kicking and screaming. It was okay if we weren't old enough to see the film, the drive-in trailer was creepy and mysterious enough to tug at our lower chakras like serpentine gravity. But we kids loved being scared of these films, we had never been fooled by the illusory sameness of modern civilization. We swam in the wide-awake fear that separates the final girl from her oblivious pack, the fear that made us able to see danger lurking even in the smallest corner of the room, to discern the malevolent spider invisible to adult eyes.


Halloween (1978), which was still circling drive-ins as a second feature in '79, may have launched a thousand imitations, but few of them caught how to make a movie scary on a fun, subconscious tick-tockable level. They just showed the topography--knives, teenagers, blood, masks--and never bothered to capture the full inherent sense of vulnerability and unease in the everyday home environment of their target audience, which takes a good, patient, wise, talented filmmaker who's studied the masters, Hawks and Ford, to learn how to connect shots and dialogue to create a seamless inexorable flow, from which a sense of real community and thus danger can occur. It's that real-time-or-slower pacing that Coscarelli captures, the way autumn nights come early and twilight lingers forever in a vanishing orange glow while the sides of the screen concede to fuzzy darkness, huge twisting trees looming over empty streets, vulnerable yet imposing suburban houses with tons of windows and that incessant but patient score like the slow unwinding of a life.


Like Suspiria, Halloween, Carrie, Dawn of the Dead, Phantasm has found a new cult in the digital age, studied and adored in endless pauses and rewatchings, none of which was possible in 1979. A masterpiece of fuzzy horror - meant to grab you even through a drive in windshield, loud enough to be heard through a fuzzy window box, Phantasm is durable, and now can be used to weirden out a self-curated all-night horror binge, the perfect choice, I've recently found, after JC's Assault on Precinct 13 and before The Fog. Maybe critics who don't like this film never watched it at five AM while coming out of a K-hole. Well, they should, because part of the genius of Coscarelli's whole mythos is that below all the seeming illogic and dream surrealism in the whole series (there's been three sequels.... so far) is an underlying well-thought out mythos based on a kid's twisted notion of what happens after we die, connected to the legitimate fear of some alien conspiracy theorists (i.e. David Icke, Nigel Kerner) that our newly separated souls might be intercepted by a demonic force before we reach the white light. The Tall Man creates underlings by separating body and soul from his corpses, crushing the bodies down to survive in his home dimension's deeper gravity and then transporting them through a tuning fork gateway (the use of sound vibrations to transfer between dimensions is also legitimate weird theory, underlying the building of pyramids by using sound vibration to convert huge stones to weightless floating states). 



A great example of a real case near-death experience (NDE) that fits this bill pretty well can be found in Nick Redfern's Final Events. "(Paul) Garratt said that he was confronted by a never-ending, light blue, sandy landscape that was dominated by a writhing mass of an untold number of naked human beings, screaming in what sounded like torturous agony" the sky was filled with pulsing flying saucer crafts, he watched them stop above the people

"then bathed each and every one of them in a green, sickly glow.... small balls of light seemed to fly from the bodies of the people... which were then sucked up into the flying saucers."

"At this point, an eerie and deafening silence overcame the huge mass of people, who duly rose to their feet as one and collectively stumbled and shuffled in hundreds of thousands across the barren landscape--like in a George Romero zombie film--towards a large black-hole that now materialized in the distance." (99)

I don't know if Coscarelli has read up on NDEs, perhaps his vision originated in a zone of his unconscious where the dark (but subjectively interpreted) truth of life after death comes creepily cohered into an impressive mausoleum guarded by balls in the middle of some small American town where the vegetation creeps like darkness at the edges of the screen, little jawas scuttle behind gravestones so fast you wonder if you even saw them, and the Carpenter-esque syths haunt the bones, carrying some of the Halloween dread within the simple slow-build melodics. Because it's all one massive, crazy dream, the sudden wake-ups from nightmares don't carry the feeling of being cheated one gets from films like American Werewolf in London with the Nazi werewolf dream, for example. With Coscarelli, like Lovecraft, Lynch, or Bunuel, dreams are just as valid as the waking life, maybe even more 'true.' For example, in the first film, Mike stops off at a neighborhood fortune teller to consult about his fear's brother Reggie is going to leave him behind in this creepy town. The old lady makes a mysterious box appear before Mike, one of those Dune fear-control tests. The lady's granddaughter is a cute blonde surfer-looking chick. Dude, bust a move! But he pussies out, pays and leaves, and you can tell he goes there a lot, on his bike. Dude, this is some Argento fucked up shit Carpenter would never mess with ('til later), the way the supernatural might exist hiding in plain sight merely a few doors over from your boring life.


Now, you don't need all that parapsychological theorizing to dig the mortal coil dread going on in the Phantasm series, in fact you can just dig the rapid aging of the cast, because the four main principles from the first film -- the kid, A. Michael Baldwin (as Mike, though he's played as older by a different actor in part 2, a decision probably made due to Baldwin's non-movie star face and the bigger budget allowing the hiring of James Le Gros in the role), Bill Thornbury as his older brother Jody, Reggie Bannister, and as the sinister tall man, Angus Scrimm -- all stick around for the subsequent installments, which were released over a 20 year period but within the narrative span only a few weeks or months. These actors don't ever appear in much else, so it's a shock to see what is supposed to be merely a few days or hours later within the overarching narrative take such a massive toll on their faces and body language. We see the myriad worry lines drain Reggie's Jeremy Piven-style charimsa until all that remains is a sad guy trying to get laid in a world full of yellow blood vomit Hell cops, fixing up sheds to look like seduction zones, moseying up to strange women in ghost towns, and wearily quipping after his kills, nursing the bad habit that had gone out of style with the bombing of Last Action Hero. Reggie didn't get that memo, but that's part of the series' charms, the Phantasm series never gets any memo... and thank God.

Young Mike (top); Old Mike (bottom) - IV

Reggie, god of tuning forks

As a guy who has now seen this movie at the age of every character but one.... the last and final one, I feel it now deep in my coil when the last one says at the end of Part III, "it's never over..." Revisiting the series this past week I felt the chill remembrance of when my family (including my then-alive dad) last visited my 97 year-old grandmother for the holidays. She was in a rest home so we rode out the usual Xmas Chicago storm at the O'Hare Sheraton (see my 2007 post from there) a vast, impressive edifice, startlingly empty, the wind howling outside, coyotes ranging across the highways, and impressively inescapable through the giant front windows, and with my dad drinking and staving off his prostate cancer, and grandmother 97 but still able to drive him crazy by merely taking an hour to find a single photo. That horror, the horror, Marley's Ghost Inescapable chain, connecting us all, inextricably along a line of people sitting on a speeding boat, the great grandmother and grandfather already over the side, the chain running out, my dad next, then me, then adieu, "it's never over," though, both the feeling of being keel-hauled underneath the proud tramp steamer of age and time is never over, the powerlessly sliding along the conveyer belt towards the buzz saw. No 'finally over' cowboy for any of us, ever.

I have to live with this horror of death because the thing that would eliminate the horror would kill me even quicker and more horribly. Booze, man. Booze, the magic elixir of temporary immortality, that makes adults useless as protectors but great as heros, and brings a nation low under its wondrous heel.

The Tall Man ages

But the beauty of Phantasm is that it's frozen on the surf of childhood, capturing the biggest fear of all for the young, being left utterly alone. We want parents around who leave us alone, but we want to be able to yell for them if we get scared. When there's no one to yell for, no one but the bogey man, that's our worst fear.  Mike's parents are dead but he has a cool big brother. The dad is dead of course but a dad in a horror film was very rare by 1979, and if there were dads around they were drunks, or mean, or scoffing at the supernatural, even when--as in Poltergeist--the supernatural is staring them in the face (see my look at Craig T. Nelson as the transitory figure between good 70s and bad 80s dads here). I had both a dad and a mom but I still rode out the slasher craze years (80-82) terrified to even go upstairs alone. I had to insulate myself with DC WW2 comics, old radio shows, and droning fans and air purifier, to drown out the deafening silence, in which my ears attune ever more precisely as I sleep, until like Roderick Usher I can feel every mouse-sized slasher's scraping, even two buildings away. I like the city because it excuses small apartments with big locks, doors meant to survive any amount of kicking, where the windows stretch far higher than any automaton would climb.

Phantasm would be too wild and weird to trily scare like Halloween were it not for Coscarelli's absorption of Carpenter's method as opposed to his madness. They both are auteurs able to understand what 95% of horror filmmakers never do, how to create the sense of something being at stake, which most filmmakers presume means backstory, origin issues, if you will. Coscarelli and Carpenter know that we need to see whole uninterrupted minutes elapse in their presence, to synchronize ourselves with their rhythms, rather than jumping around in eight different directions like so many horror movies today. No one would ever make a movie like Halloween now because so little actually happens. Carpenter and Hill spend a lot of time establishing what girl is picking up what guy to come over to whomever's house is free of parents at which time, checking in on the phone with each other, etc., it all rolls slowly into late at night, and that's the tick-tock momentum, it's a mirror to the ominous quiet late afternoon that is suddenly black night, as in the scenes with Laurie and Annie driving to their babysitting destinations in Halloween. Without that level of tick-tock involvement there can't be the catharsis. Without the feeling of helplessness engendered by watching people oblivious to danger, there can't be a relish of that helplessness's opposite, the empowered joy of driving with your older brother in his '71 'Cuda with a shotgun in your lap. No wonder that kid got so easily talked into becoming his older mentor's sniper down in DC! I remember feeling invincible going to Phillies games with my best buddy Alan's cool older brother. I felt brave, even when he took us to see my first R-rated movie, Outland (1981) even though I'd been warned about the exploding space miners I was brave, because with this older brother figure around, nothing could harm us, not even a movie.


Maybe all children have to learn to be masochists just to survive, so small and helpless are they. And their first R-rated movie gore is where they benefit from that suffering training. And maybe at worst a kind of group fascism erupts from this boys against the monsters philosophy, ala the 80s or Hitler's Germany. I would have followed that older brother anywhere. My generation was unique in that respect, unique because in our parent's youth R-rated films didn't even exist, and then video arrived during our teenage years, making it possible for us to rent Clockwork Orange and Dawn of the Dead and watch them over breakfast with our moms. But in the window before then, just knowing this stuff was out there, at theaters, that we couldn't get into, launched a vertigo body drop thrill in our spines. The most terrifying commercial ever for me in that regard was Torso (1973). The raspy male voice that used to hiss "Rated R...." after shocking 2-3 second snippets of scenes---like this sexy girl pleading and crawling through the mud in her nightgown while a masked killer advances on her with a hacksaw-- burned into my soul, and I'd get that sickly sexual twisting feeling, the type I only get now from looking over a dangerous ledge or plunging down a log flume.

But with VHS, that giddy terror gave way (for me at least) into depression from watching bloody horror movies instead of being outside playing two-hand touch with the neighbor kids. No amount of pan and scan TV room horror could ever compete with the dread of what we had imagined these movies would be like. Instead of a build-up of dread and then catharsis we had the catharsis first, and then a long period of sustained if low-level depression, as if we had already seen too much, and were losing something we barely knew was there in the first place: our faith in our fellow man and the feeling of being safe in our suburban houses at night.

The ad that scorched my 6 year-old mind

This might be okay on some levels, but what we've lost is the rite of initiation, which gives symbolic end to the fearful skittery angst of childhood through one final endurance test, which turns out to be realizing fear of the unknown vastly outweighs fear of the revealed. If the minute after hearing about some gruesome scene you can watch it on your phone in class, well, you don't have time to get scared, so it's just a lot of fake blood and acting. There's no initiatory fear and catharsis, just one more scene in a never-ending media barrage. You might be building a tolerance, but for what? Maybe it will pay off in the end, but there's no ceremony to mark your courage, the way seeing an R-rated horror film did. It was something you could boast of for weeks to come in grade school. It was meant as a communion of sorts, something you saw in a big group, daring and bolstering the more timid in the crew.

Now of course anything even approaching some sort of hazing as a passage to becoming a man is considered a crime, but most frat boys were smart enough to know it was really about engendering the fear of what the hazing might entail that was important, if there's no fear there's nothing, no guts, no feeling of transformation, no need for sticking place-screwed courage. Generating fear helps us escape the shitbird plywood barriers of self, to realize there was never nothing there to fear in the first place, and now that we know there's no one behind the curtain so to speak, our older cooler friends feel obligated to be nice to us, to let us into the cool world. (see also: Dazed and Confused.) Seeing Mike and Jody roaring down the road in their '71 'Cuda (below) brings that back. This was a time when life was dangerous, and most importantly, so were we. (See also my analysis of the best movie about being a kid in that era, Over the Edge).

This. This you can trust.

Though they never specify which small town Phantasm goes down in first, it's awash in desolate suburban blight, dark, twisting woods, empty plains, fire-damaged barns, cobwebs trailing down from street signs, all conspiring into the feeling one has crossed somewhere back from banal day reality into unreal nightmare. These landscapes do exist, even more so now. I saw this desolation most in western Oregon. Every storefront along the road closed and boarded up and not a soul for miles and miles, not a soul to ask directions as the road darkened down deep valleys and twisted around corners dotted with cobwebbed 'under construction' pylons; followed some tall shadow you try to tell yourself is only a tree in the dark of your rearview. Your tank's been on 'E' for an hour and when you see that white light in the distance you know it's a 24-hour Exxon station dropped from the sky by God's Jesus's own flying saucer. Every fellow traveler you meet smiles at you, for they too have survived the swallowed darkness of the empty expanses of highway and the feeling the world has ended and are grateful to see another friendly face, grateful in a profound deep way only spooked lost travelers riding on empty through abandoned countrysides know. You feel delivered unto Him by the smell of gas, a uniformed friendly lady cashier behind a counter, who takes Visa and calls you "hon," instead of a demented yokel chewing tobacco and standing too close and grudgingly peeling off your change from his roll of limp singles. No offense.


To get back to that frame of mind, where the setting sun strikes you with giddy drive-in terror and you long for the woodsman Exxon deliverer, first you have to surrender your 80s guns and your 90s disaffection and your 00s sincerity, back before VHS and Betamax and cable. Return to the time horror movies used electronic synthesizer sounds, like Morricone, Nicolai, and Carpenter, and in doing so created far more dread with a single keyboard than a dozen John Williams-ish overthought orchestras. Return to the time the R-rated movie storytellers worked each other into frenzies of fear, a time kids were all master storytellers, describing events from films unseen but heard about from someone else, lingering over the traumatic scenes and embellishing as needed for petrifying effect. (2) This is what Phantasm is all about, the fractured but impelling rantings of an imaginative child's mind as he tries to sleep the night after his family's first funeral, and keeps embellishing the details of the day at the graveyard; it comes to us already re-spun by a telephone game's worth of spooky child imagination, and yet it still feels true.






NOTES:
1. The 'blanks' --such as the fate of the captured girls (Reggie just says he found them and released them but we never see it) were probably a result of drastic cuts made by Don himself. According to the trivia notes on imdb: "This film's original running time was more than three hours, but writer/ director Don Coscarelli decided that that was far too long for it to hold people's attention and made numerous cuts to the film. Some of the unused footage was located in the late 1990s and became the framework for Phantasm IV: Oblivion. The rest of the footage is believed to be lost. " -Now that'a a damn shame, even if the unused footage is brilliantly mixed into IV and does save it from the edge of crappiness.
2. I'm still finding movies I remember hearing about from other kids, like Five Million Years to Earth, movies I was sure were made up.