October 3rd - The Tall Man and the Kid

Mike is never too far from Tall Man

This decision to watch Phantasm (1979) early afternoon Sunday was more or less out if a desire to mix things up. Too many Octobers I follow a schedule strategy and so I wanted to go out of order, following no specific routine. I still continue to feel this could have been just a single movie, a dream adventure produced during the sleep of a teenager who missed his brother and so his mind conjured up an alien in the form of The Tall Man, using his funeral home as the perfect location for the bodies he needed, taken from coffins and turned into brown-robed mini-minions to be his slaves, relocating them to his world through a space gate traveling device accessed by way of portal. Trying to explain this to my wife and her reaction was priceless. All the machinations do feel as if they were pulled from certain dreams Coscarelli had, sort of tied together within one singular experience that seems concocted by this grief and imagination gone amok. I can see why folks might ask us with ?! next to their question of just what is so special about this film. Pointing out it's lack of coherent narrative, some horror fans don't get the hype, but I just always groove to it's specific era, all the crazy setpieces and 1977 dialogue shared by California young adults just out of Watergate and Vietnam. I do feel I'm taken into the year of my birth, Coscarelli's weekends of filmmaking to put this whole product together coming to fruition eventually by 1979. And still to this day, the film remains either a classic or curiosity...or puzzling. And the dream ending and yet Tall Man still emerges to surprise the boyyyyyyy...be careful not to give form to the nightmare man.