Review of Phantasm (1979) by David C — 06 Oct 2016

As individual parts, Phantasm has a lot going for it. For a film made on a budget of just $300,000, it's a surprisingly beautiful film in terms of how each shot is composed. Don Coscarelli has crafted a visually stunning film here, with each scene featuring masterful lighting for this dreamlike tale. Scenes along a nighttime road are lit and have an eerie endless void quality to them, whereas the brightly lit rooms of a mysterious funeral home has an oddly sci-fi element. The horror element here is actually pretty subtle for such an outrageous kind of horror. There's no loud musical cues to greet the various horrors that await protagonists Mike (Michael Baldwin) and Jody (Bill Thornbury): instead, the scares are built slowly, and feel earned when they're delivered.

It works in parts like this, but as a whole, it lacks something. The cast consists largely of amateurs, leading to acting that feels stilted, and not always in the charming way (excluding Angus Scrimm, who makes for a delightfully creepy Tall Man). The story itself, dealing with the two aforementioned brothers discovering a mysterious terror haunting a local cemetery after the death of their parents, is pretty simple, but the execution is almost completely incoherent. Perhaps it adds to the dreamlike element of the story, which is fine, but some coherency wouldn't have hurt. There's potential for some nice character development here, seeing as the film largely deals with an adolescent dealing with an unexpected death, but we get little of that too. All the necessary elements for a combination of character and horror are there, but they're the kind of puzzle pieces you have to slam your fist into to fit together.

For all of its faults though, it's a wildly original film, and a stunningly beautiful one as well. That's enough to make it worth a watch, especially for genre fans.