The cumulative success of The Exorcist (1973), Jaws (1975), The Omen (1976) and Halloween (1978) gave Hollywood the nerve to go big budget with a genre that had for decades contented itself with a subsistence diet of table scraps. As the 70s edged into the 80s, handsomely mounted horrors such as John Badham's revisionist Dracula (1979), Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980) and John Irvin's Ghost Story (1981) seemed to beg for a middle-of-the-road legitimacy even while condescending to gratuitous grindhouse shocks. Produced amid the stolidity of big ticket horror, the first wave of cash-in sequels (Exorcist II: The Heretic in 1977, Jaws 2 and Damien: Omen II in 1978 and Halloween 2 in 1981) and the lowest common denominator of the burgeoning "slasher" school, Don Coscarelli's pinchpenny but wildly imaginative Phantasm (1979) emerged like a breath of rarified air straight from the coroner's cooler. Produced for $300,000 and shot on weekends from November 1977 to November 1978, Phantasm earned back nearly $12 million when released by Avco-Embassy in the spring of 1979. (As a point of comparison, John Badham's Dracula, which was funded by Universal Studios and cost considerably more, recouped a couple million less.) The film's success baffled most critics, even those predisposed to horror. Alan Frank (no stranger to the genre) found Phantasm an "incoherently plotted shocker that relies on a noisy sound track, gore and murky photography to make its impact" but The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film's Mike Weldon discerned a "horror hit with more satisfying surprises than you could find in a dozen other recent offerings."
Although hardly a formula for success, Phantasm worked a charm then and continues to work nearly thirty years on because the hodgepodge of disparate elements employed by writer-director Coscarelli (who already had two features to his credit by the tender age of 23) is so unprocessed, like the raw feed of a nightmare. Imagine a Hardy Boys mystery produced by Monogram Studios rather than Disney and you'll have the pulse of the thing: two brothers (Bill Thornbury and Mike Baldwin) going it alone after the death of their parents become concerned enough by the apparent suicide of a friend on the grounds of a local cemetery to breach the comforting façade of its funeral home headquarters and lay bare the mystery within. That something unorthodox is being done with the bodies of the recently interred is only the icing on this horror cake; the brothers soon find themselves on the run from a cadaverous stalker (Angus Scrim in the role of his lifetime), hooded dwarf aliens and a flying chrome orb pimped out with an assembly of blades, drills and blood pumps and capable of running down its victims with the pinpoint accuracy of a heat-seeking missile. As was true of the great American cult horrors Night of the Living Dead (1968) and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) that preceded it, Phantasm put every penny of its budget up on the screen... and in the face of its target audience.
Phantasm was last available on DVD in the United States from MGM Home Entertainment in 1999. That Region 1 disc carried over the generous complement of bonuses that had graced New Line Cinema's earlier "Signature Edition" laserdisc. Anchor Bay Entertainment's British arm recently released a Region 2 box set of the film and its sequels, which drew fire (in terms of the original film) from Phantasmists and Video Watchdogs for its akimbo color palette and some ungenerous image cropping. Those demerits have been corrected for ABE's Region 1 transfer, which gets the hues right and adds the anamorphic enhancement lacking on the MGM disc. If film grain is more apparent now, image quality is appreciably heightened, making this the definitive Phantasm DVD from a visual perspective. Purists may balk at the absence of the original monaural soundtrack, replaced here by a Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround track and more gimmicky 5.1 Dolby Surround and 5.1 DTS tracks (which, to be fair, don't really oversell Phantasm's evocative soundscape).
Although the audio commentary shared by Coscarelli and his principal actors is the one we've been hearing since the early 90s, Anchor Bay warms the chill of familiarity with the 2005 featurette "Phantasmagoria" (35m 52s). Directed by Jake West (Pumpkinhead: Ashes to Ashes) and produced for the UK multi-disc set, the mini-doc catches up with cast and crew, who reminisce, laugh and impart some interesting trivia about the making of the film. Floor sweepings from these interviews are recycled for "Actors Having a Ball" (4m 39s), which is more of the same but not unwelcome. Not greatly missed from earlier discs is the irritating promo from Australia (where Phantasm was shown as The Never-Dead to distinguish it from Richard Franklin's 1976 softcore sex fantasy Fantasm), audio supplements of the Phantasm theme done disco-style for the United Kingdom and Bill Thornbury's "Sittin' Here at Midnight" or a stills gallery of fan art. Definitely missed is the gallery of Phantasm merchandise, including the Varèse Saraband soundtrack, various laser discs, model kits, masks and a the cover of a Japanese novelization all likely jettisoned to free up some space for trailers for Coscarelli's Kenny & Company (1977), Survival Quest (1989), Phantasm III (1994) and other titles in the Anchor Bay catalogue. Seen again are a 1979 TV interview with Coscarelli and Scrimm, deleted scenes, on-set home movies, radio spots, still gallery, a fun 1988 promotion for Fangoria magazine starring Scrimm and convention footage that have accompanied every edition of Phantasm but which continue, like the feature itself, to make for damned good entertainment.
For more information about Phantasm, visit Anchor Bay. To order Phantasm, go to TCM Shopping.
by Richard Harland Smith
