Phantasm (1979) is a surreal horror movie, and what if we’ve been looking at the wrong main character?

In this facetious film essay, I’m taking a rambling stroll through Don Coscarelli’s dreamscape to explain why this cult classic is actually a “hangout” fairy tale about an overworked project manager (let’s call her Kathy).

I have a deep appreciation for why this movie doesn’t need to make sense to be perfect. Phantasm is my ultimate comfort movie. Click below to listen to the audio essay, or just scroll down to read the transcript.

Phantasm is a horror movie, but it’s also a fairy tale, and I’m going to tell you why. I’m going to try to get through the synopsis as quickly as I can, then we’ll have a little musical interlude, after which you’ll know—if you haven’t seen this movie—not to listen any further because the spoilers are coming.

Phantasm is the story of an up-and-coming professional from another planet. Her name is Kathy, but she grew up very poor and she only had this one purple dress, so all of her classmates taunted her. They called her the Lavender Lady because they like alliteration in their poetry on the planet that she’s from. I can’t pronounce the name of it, so don’t ask me, but Kathy’s very intelligent and very resilient. She manages to get scholarships, get all the way through undergrad, get an MBA, and gets a job recruiting for an interstellar mining company.

She makes an astounding discovery on a planet called Earth. One thing to know about Kathy’s people is that they can’t die. She discovers that when people on Earth transition into another state of consciousness, Earth people weren’t advanced enough to do the next steps—to shrink them down so they could live in another gravity and live in the next world. So they were just burying their people in the ground. Kathy figured out that you could just get these people out of the ground—they’d be very grateful to have another 50 or 60 years of work to do and go to another planet to live on—and so she got promoted to project manager.

She came to this little town, and she was smart enough that she managed to go to a two-year tech program to look like a funeral director to handle the bodies before she could get to her real science. Everything is going great, her career is on the way up, and she’s not going to be taunted for being poor anymore. But out of defiance, she still wears her beautiful lavender dress. She’s a lovely girl with long blonde hair, but there are two other things to know about Kathy.

In her society, there’s a mating ritual. When she gets very excited at the peak of her excitement during sex with a man, she pulls out a dagger and stabs him. But if she gets really excited, she can’t help it—she shapeshifts into this craggy-looking, very tall older man. She found that she was lonely on Earth while working at Morningside Cemetery and sending the newly freed, newly transitioned workers onto their interstellar mining opportunity.

She goes to the one bar in town—the cantina—and she meets the love of her life, Tommy. They have the greatest sex ever on the grounds of Morningside Cemetery. But when she goes to the part where Tommy says, “That was great, baby,” and she knows it’s love and can’t wait to stab him so he can transition into his next life with her forever, he gets such a horrified look on his face that she gets overly excited and overly agitated. She turns into the Tall Man.

Now she’s got to hide her sorrow, go through with the job of being the funeral director, and she can’t turn back from being the Tall Man. She’s so upset while handling Tommy’s body, lifting him gently into the hearse as you do. Then there’s this brat from Earth named Mike who is riding a dirt bike through her place of employment of all things—just no respect for her culture or his own culture. So she goes after him, finding that she can’t control it as she flips back and forth between Kathy and the Tall Man.

This Mike sends a spy, who is another beautiful blonde female—a girl this time, not a woman—just to mock Kathy. But Kathy is not bisexual, so she doesn’t do the stabbing ritual; she just locks up the young girl. Then Mike has the audacity to break a window into her sanctuary, her place of business at Morningside. He comes in, and her handyman is supposed to stop him, but he doesn’t stop Mike. In her anger, she sends her embalming tool flying through the air, and it drills into her assistant’s head. Blood is pouring out, pee is pouring out, and Mike is seeing all of this.

Now she’s got to find a new assistant. In her rage and anger, she chases Mike, and he slams her fingers in the door and cuts them off. She’s in so much pain—which is a new emotion to her—that she shapeshifts intentionally, turning one of her fingers into a giant fly. But this only serves to make more people come after her because Mike shows the fly to his protective older brother Jody and their friend Reggie the ice cream man. Now everyone is chasing Kathy, and it’s not sure what will be the end of her fairy tale.

I’m just a sitting here at midnight, and I’ll be sitting here till noon. Boo, you see my lady left me lonely; baby left me blue.

So I’ve watched Phantasm at least once a year for the past 40 years or so, maybe more than that. I put it on at night. It’s not always the most linear movie, and I think that’s intentional. As you know, it’s really the story of Mike, the young boy. His parents have both died, he discovers something strange going on at the cemetery, and he gets his brother Jody and their friend Reggie into looking for the Tall Man.

I’ve racked my brains because at the end of the movie, it is revealed to be all a dream and that Jody has died. Normally when there’s a twist in a movie, you can’t tell when it’s happening during the film, but at the end when you see the twist, you can think back to the point in the movie where you should have known that it was all a dream. Now, there is a point where Mike is sleeping, the Tall Man is suddenly standing behind him, and two of the dwarves—the people that they’ve turned into dwarves in order to send them to the low-gravity planet—pop up, and then at the end you see him wake up.

I’ve always thought there’s a point at which Mike visits a fortune teller. We’re seeing a flashback of him working on the awesome car—the Barracuda—under the car, and then Jody is telling his friend Toby (who’s in town for Tommy’s funeral—a lot of guy names here to keep straight) that he’s going to leave Mike. He’s been raising him after their parents died, but he’s ready to get back on the road with his rock band, and he’s saying this right in front of him, which is cruel. But then the next scene, you see Mike running as Jody is riding away on a bicycle with this spaced-out, doofy look on his face. I had often thought that maybe that was the point at which he had died or that represented that he had died.

In the words of Nick from the great Boomer hangout movie The Big Chill, sometimes you just have to let art flow over you. I think of Phantasm as a hangout movie. These guys are playing guitar, riding their bikes, driving their cool car, slinging their ice cream—there’s nothing going on in this town, it’s kind of blissful. I would watch a movie just about these friends hanging out, and that’s the way this movie feels to me because it’s so dreamlike and relaxing. It does just flow over you.

When you start looking at it closely, it’s not a relaxing hangout movie; they’re constantly running and trying to figure out how to defeat the Tall Man. Putting aside all the sequels—I don’t like movies that try to explain too much about movies that have already happened—I think there’s some goings-on with the Tall Man being able to change the past in time and space. At the very end of this movie, he literally pulls Mike through the looking glass, and that’s the end of the movie. You don’t know if Jody actually has died in the world that they’re living in, or if the Tall Man just made everyone think that to discredit Mike so that he could go on with his recruiting scheme, his project management, and his path to CEO on his planet. Why is he shapeshifting into a beautiful woman and a fly? We don’t know—it’s just one of the things that makes Phantasm great.

I do think that it’s a fairy tale. I noticed that in a lot of fairy tales, the parents are dead and the child has to grow up on their own and go through these trials. I think the purpose of that is because growing up is so difficult—it’s physically difficult. I think even more so for boys; they can grow so quickly that the process of growing can be painful. The casting was perfect that they actually had a child who was in the process of becoming a man. You can hear his voice cracking when he screams from the Tall Man frightening him.

He’s going through a fairy tale: there’s the witch in the woods that he goes to to get guidance, there’s this evil wizard who’s possibly got his parents and definitely has his family friend Tommy and has kidnapped them, and it’s up to him. Now the wizard’s got the fortune teller’s granddaughter, who was I think Mike’s only friend of his own age group because there’s nobody in this town, and the two girls Sally and Sue that own the antique store, which is the other business in town besides the bar, the Dairy Queen, and the Funeral Home. He’s got to free these girls, defeat the wizard, and deal with the possibility that he will lose the other trusted adult in his life, Jody, leaving him just with Reggie. Everybody loves Reggie, so that wouldn’t be such a bad fate!

What do you think? Do you think that Phantasm is a fairy tale? Why do you think that fairy tales have that structure, and what is your favorite comforting horror movie or dark-themed movie? It could be a mystery, or an action movie that’s violent. What do you think? Let me know in the comments. Be careful when you’re walking through the cemetery to be respectful; don’t drive your dirt bike over any of the graves. Bye!