Morningside: if you lived here, you'd be dead by now

When we're small, we feel powerless.  And yet, we have the freedom to imagine, to create our own worlds and live in them, something that a lot of people sadly lose as they grow older.  The downside to that mental freedom is that we tend to populate our worlds with monsters.

Movie monsters and threats tend to reflect adolescent and adult fears.  The fear of invasion, home or the body itself; the fear of disease, of loss.  Many horror texts touch on the fear of the poor, of the working class; when this is done well (Night of the Living Dead), a good film-maker can explore the nature of class conflict.  When it's done badly, you end up with Eden Lake or Them, revolting films about how horrible all poor children are.

But few films really touch on the deep fears of children in a way that strikes a chord with our memories and experiences.  The Babadook is one; I'll be writing about that example soon.  Wes Craven's New Nightmare is another.  These are texts that present childhood terror as being about something more than just the monster in the closet, which is ironic as they both feature some of the best screen monsters of all time.

Tonight, the Celluloid Screams festival is showing one of the greatest horror movies to examine this theme: Phantasm.  Tragically,it's on at 2:30AM and I don't see myself being able to make that, especially given the state of my car at the moment; it seems a little too metafictional to go to a horror movie event with a car that might break down at any moment, miles from anywhere (which is entirely possible, if I take a long and inexplicable detour over the moors, rather than just driving the five minutes direct route home).  Also, 2:30 AM.

Naturally, spoilers will follow.

Phantasm is the story of Michael, a troubled child with a tragic backstory.  It appears that his parents died in car accident.  His older brother Jody has to return from living a rather vague travelling party lifestyle to look after him in small town America.  And this is the quietest small town ever; it seems to be an eternal summer's day when everyone else is on holiday, the schools and shops are closed, a distinctly unsettling 1979 early closing Thursday for ever and ever.  Jody's frustration at being imprisoned here radiates from the screen; he spends all his time working on a very fast car, riding his bike, or drinking at what looks like the only bar in town.  Michael isn't oblivious to this and spends much of the early part of the movie in a state of anxiety that his only relative is about to leave without him; the terror of abandonment runs through every scene.  I've read some reports that suggest that this was the original focus of the film and that the supernatural elements fell into place almost accidentally.

Everything so far in the movie has the texture of a dream; the kind where you run to meet your friends but they've long gone and you're left alone.  Everyone has that dream, right?  Everyone?  Um?

And this is where it gets really good.  This is where one of the great (under-rated) cinematic monsters shows up.

Best.  Eyebrow.  Ever.

See, Michael becomes convinced that there's something weird in the local cemetery.  He starts spying on the mausoleum there and discovers the chief undertaker is (a) ridiculously tall and (b) inhumanly strong.  Oh, and the bodies are vanishing from the graves.  And peculiar little hooded figures keep running through there at night.  And someone's stabbing young men to death during late night graveyard sex.

So then it all goes wild and I'll leave you to discover more for yourself; I'll not even mention the spheres.   You'll know them when you see them.  They are FANTASTIC.  Or the old witch lady who seems to control reality.  Or the tuning fork gateway.  Or what's in the barrels.  Or the Lavender Lady.  Or the Wasp Finger.

But I will mention Reggie.  He's the ice-cream man.  He's balding and puzzled and resolutely normal, a working class hero who refuses to give in.  He stoically accepts all the crazy stuff and joins with Mike and Jody to defeat...well what?  The Tall Man?  Really?  Is that REALLY what this movie is about?

No more spoilers, but towards the end, the action starts to follow the logic of a dream rather than the logic of cinematic narrative.  Each terror Mike must face seems symbolic; the sexually alluring Lavender Lady, the clawing hands of the earth, the Tall Man himself, waiting at the end of the journey.  Possibly.  The terrors we face as we move from childhood are all waiting in the forest at the end of this story.

Well, not quite the end.  The final terror, the one Mike has to face at the very conclusion; that's something worse than a supernatural undertaker.  Much worse.  I suppose some people might find the revelations dull or predictable or just plain silly; personally, I think the ending is moving and powerful.  Look at the way the characters are filmed at the conclusion of the last fight scene.  The camera is telling you something about the story, the distance between the brothers.  It's quite beautiful and I never get tired of watching it.

Some of the movie may seem cliched; I reckon that this is where many of those cliches were actually born, the final shot in particular (which is VERY similar to a much more famous final moment from another much more popular film, made a couple of years later).

I love this film, so much.  It doesn't bother with explanations.  This is happening.  Deal with it.  All these years later, there are still questions; who's the old Witch Lady and how does she make things vanish into thin air?  What is the Tall Man, exactly?  Where's the Red World (you'll see)?  And what exactly was happening all along?

Don Coscarelli, the mind behind this movie, abruptly altered the VERY end moments in order to dilute the emotional charge.  We'd originally have ended with a return to reality.  The dream would have ended.  Forget that!  Coscarelli went with diving further into the nightmare and as a result, we got four sequels.  They aren't quite as great as the original, but they're imaginative, gory, silly, entertaining and they uphold the tradition of ditching narrative sense, cause/effect and exposition (except when the script deliberately starts contradicting itself).  They have largely the same cast from the original and the story continues in real time.  Phantasm 5 was completed a few months ago; it's rumoured to be the final conclusion to the sequence.

I am unrealistically excited about this.  You've been warned.

The fourth movie brilliantly used unseen footage from the original to create a peculiar sense of doubt about the narrative; how much of this is "happening" and how much is the traumatised night terrors of a small boy in 1979?  I've always thought that the best interpretation is a simple one; remember how confusing and nightmarish the adult world sometimes seemed when you were young?

Oh, those final lines:

Ice-cream man...it's all in his head.

and

It's just the wind.

Gives me the chills every time.  Van drives off into the small town 1970s night, red tail lights the last thing we see.  Minimalist theme kicks in.  Turn the lights on.






ERRATA: last time I talked about John Carpenter directing Halloween 3.  He didn't.  He was the producer.  Tommy Lee Wallace directed the movie.  I doubt he'll ever read this, so I think we got away with it.  Don't tell the horror film police.