WARNING: This essay contains spoilers for Phantasm.
Phantasm is weird and fascinating, a chunky mix of delightfully sinister and distractingly campy, but its style and aesthetic do not suggest subtlety or invite a deeply penetrating reading. The best way to come to grips with it on the first watch-through is just to ride along like you’re on a bumpy, gruesome roller coaster, enjoying the earnestness and strange excess as it passes by. Like any good coaster, it’s jerky and unpredictable, and you should step off at the end with your head a bit mixed up.
There are further ways to think about the film, though, and I’m here to present one of them: a broad, selective analysis that should at least provide a greater appreciation of the film’s unifying neuroses. Think of it as sort of a loose analytical tribute, rather than a rigorous close reading, a love letter to a film that deserves to be thought about, but doesn’t seem designed to facilitate it.
My angle here: that the little suburban universe of Phantasm reflects a state of mind… particularly, that of main character Michael, the thirteen-year old boy who has recently lost his parents and is in constant fear of abandonment by his older brother. While I don’t think the events of the plot are meant to fit together neatly, and I don’t think they’re engineered for closure or explanation (the ghouls are short because of a gravitational difference? Really?), I do think the film makes a lot of sense when mapped to a certain terrain of terrified adolescent psychology.
The question naturally arises, especially in light of the film’s final scene: does the whole film literally take place inside Michael’s head? Is this suburb explicitly his imaginary dreamscape, a la Inception or The Cell? I would say it’s defensible to read it that way. However, it’s complicated by the nature of the villain, the Tall Man, who manifests at every level of the movie’s reality: Michael and Jody’s dreams, the general landscape of the town, and then the outer realm that we only see at the very end of the film. This suggests, at least to me, that even though most of the film takes place in a dream, The Tall Man is not strictly a psychological projection or a dream-villain… he is some sort of evil entity that exists outside all these psychological spaces, who’s managed to infiltrate them and break down the barriers between objective and subjective realities. It may be Michael’s dreamscape, but the Tall Man is at least partly in control.
We are given a few distinct hints that “psychogeography” is a fruitful way of looking at Phantasm. After the first funeral scene, there’s a moment with a weirdly-tanned side character who never appears again in the film. He questions Jody on his decision to stay in this crappy town. Jody suggests that he’s there because of Michael, but yes, he hates it… thus, we get an explicit connection between the town and Michael, and an emotional baseline—paralysis and trauma—is established. Jody even says he’s planning to leave, which invokes the contradictory possibilities of escape and abandonment.
This conversation is repeated, in certain respects, at the end of the film, when a suddenly-reincarnated Reggie suggests they go “on the road.” Thus, the film is bookended with indications that the town is a gestation chamber for Michael’s psychological trauma, from which escape is a distant but promising possibility.
Whether you see this town as a hermetically-sealed psychic universe, or just think of it as a normal municipality in some remote corner of suburbia, it’s nice to have a big picture. I’ve undertaken a quick cartography exercise and drawn a map of what I think it might look like, taking into account some of the details: the Continue reading PHANTASM: A PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY
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De Palma’s Phantom is not content with a sole source: strands from “Frankenstein,” “The Picture of Dorian Grey,” “The Devil and Daniel Webster,” and Psycho are woven into a glittering glam horror extravaganza staging of “Faust.”