Phantasm is a 1979 supernatural horror film written and directed by Don Coscarelli. It stars A. Michael Baldwin, Bill Thornbury, Reggie Bannister, Kathy Lester, and Angus Scrimm. The film was independently produced, being financed by Coscarelli, his father, and local investors; the cast were mostly amateurs and aspiring professionals.
Following its expanded theatrical release, Phantasm would become a box office hit, grossing $22 million internationally. It got mixed reviews from critics, but in the years since its release, Phantasm has become a cult film. It’s on several critics’ lists of the best horror films, being praised by film scholars for its surrealistic qualities and themes of mourning, loss, and sibling relationships. JJ Abrahams is a fan of the movie.
Here is a link to quotes from the film, here are links (<<< this second one’s really bad) to the full movie, and here is a link to the (only first nine chapters, unfortunately, of the) novelization.
Since mourning and loss are major themes in the movie, I think it’s useful to go into the psychoanalysis of mourning. It’s also useful to examine the difference Freud saw between mourning and melancholia. In mourning, the painful process of dealing with the loss of a loved one is eventually gone through, and the mourner can redirect libido to objects other than the lost one; we can see Jody Pearson (Thornbury) largely getting over the loss of his parents and redirecting his feelings towards friends, bandmates like Reggie (Bannister), and women.
Things haven’t been so easy for Jody’s 13-year-old kid brother, Mike (Baldwin), who I would say is experiencing a repressed, unconscious form of melancholia, which involves not only a failure to accept the loss of his and Jody’s parents, but also involves the absorbing of their lost parents into his ego to make them internal objects (which in turn is the basis for object relations theory).
Furthermore, this internalizing also involves taking in those aspects of Mike’s parents that he doesn’t like, and so since those aspects are in him now, he dislikes himself for those aspects. His way of dealing with those disagreeable parts is to split them off and project them into the external world. These expelled objects would be what Melanie Klein called the bad father and the bad mother, those aspects of one’s parents that are frustrating and withholding of gratification.
These would be the Tall Man (Scrimm) and the Lady in Lavender (Lester), symbolically speaking, of course. Her sexual allure is symbolically in the Oedipally-desired parent, and his creepiness is symbolically in the Oedipally-hated parent. Since both are aspects of the same phantasm, they can also be seen to represent Klein’s notion of the combined parent figure, in which a child sees or imagines, in the primal scene, his mom and dad engaging in violent sex, which traumatizes him.
These phantasies (or phantasms) are the unconscious basis of all of the terror that Mike is experiencing as he continues failing to accept the loss of his parents. He’s been having nightmares ever since they died. Since part of him felt the usual frustrations any kid feels towards parents who don’t always do as a kid wishes, he imagines that he somehow ‘willed’ their deaths, and so he’s racked with guilt and self-hate over having ’caused’ their deaths–hence his being terrorized by the Tall Man, or the internalized bad father object, as his punishment for having ‘wished for’ the deaths of his parents. The terror he’s going through is all in his head.
Note that “phantasm” can mean both “spectre” and “fantasy,” or “figment of the imagination.” The Tall Man can be understood in both of these senses. He is a ghost terrorizing the Oregon town in which the film is set, and he is a fantasy in Mike’s mind. That fantasy comes from the internalized object of the bad father in Mike’s mind.
His conflict (and to a lesser extent, Jody’s conflict) with his mom and dad stem from the universal, narcissistic trauma of his love/hate relationship with them. They drove him crazy (presumably with their list of dos and don’ts) while alive, and now he can’t bear to lose them, now that they’re dead. He keeps them present and alive in his mind, in the unrecognizable forms of the Tall Man and the Lady in Lavender, for such is the way that repression works: feelings are pushed into the unconscious mind, then they return to consciousness, but in unrecognizable forms, hiding in plain sight.
What’s good and bad in Mike’s parents is split, in what Klein called the paranoid-schizoid position (“schizoid” referring to this splitting). The Tall Man, as Mike’s bad father, terrorizing him represents the persecutory anxiety the boy feels (“paranoid”) as a result of having rejected (and, as he imagines, having unconsciously wanted the death of) his father.
As with A Nightmare on Elm Street, Phantasm blurs the distinction between dream and reality. Because of this blurring, we can see the supernatural horror and the surrealism of Phantasm as being an allegory of the inner workings and conflicts of the unconscious mind. The dreamlike state that permeates not just this film, but also its sequels (generally regarded as inferior), explains to a great extent their many plot holes and inconsistencies.
The film begins at night, with a young man named Tommy making love with the Lady in Lavender in Morningside Cemetery. She takes a knife and stabs him to death, then changes into the form of the Tall Man. The juxtaposition of sex and death (or of Eros and Thanatos), as well as of the Lady in Lavender (or bad mother transference) and of the Tall Man (or bad father transference) allegorizes and personifies the unconscious processes described above.
Tommy has not just had the Oedipally-desired mother transference, he’s also experienced the combined parent figure, whom he penetrated and was penetrated by with a phallic knife (Indeed, in the novelization, the stabbing is described thus: “Quickly she sank [the knife] as hard and fast into his heart as he had plunged his body into hers.”). He later can be understood to be a kind of brother-figure for Mike, the way Reggie will be understood to be by the end of the film when we learn of Jody’s death, since we learn that Jody, Reggie, and Tommy were supposed to be a kind of Crosby, Stills, and Nash-style band of singers and guitar strummers (“It’s a hell of a way to end a trio,” Jody says of Tommy’s death to Reggie on the day of the funeral). The togetherness of the three young men suggests a tripling of Jody for Mike.
Because of the trauma Mike has suffered from his and Jody’s parents’ deaths, the boy has terrible fears of abandonment, and so he follows his older brother everywhere around town. Jody in fact plans on leaving Mike in the custody of his aunt, which of course the boy will hate, but Jody wants his freedom to pursue making music with Reggie, and leave that dull town.
Part of Mike’s fears of losing Jody the way he lost their parents can be seen as expressed in nightmare form: the stabbing of Tommy, and later of Reggie, the two victims being symbolic brothers. Mike’s unconscious mind is thus displacing the status of brother onto two men who aren’t his biological brothers, in order to ease the anxiety of facing up to the loss of his actual brother, Jody.
Mike’s melancholia, expressed musically through the haunting synthesizer theme in E minor, demonstrates the self-hate Freud wrote about in his paper on the subject (link above) in how the boy subjects himself to dangerous situations. His hanging out in the cemetery at night where the Tall Man’s crushed dwarves are, his going in the mausoleum, and even his rather precocious (for a 13-year-old) riding around on a motorbike (and, at one point, driving Jody’s car) all demonstrate at least potentially self-destructive behaviour, indicative of Freud’s death drive, something people who hate themselves might do, because they have bad internal objects haunting them.
After Tommy’s funeral, his death understood (but not believed, according to the novelization) to be a suicide, and it’s understood just how heavy his coffin is, Mike comes to the cemetery and sees the Tall Man pick up, carry, and put the coffin in a hearse all by himself. Mike is so amazed at the mortician’s superhuman strength that he whispers, “What the fuck?” and wants to tell a local fortune teller (played by Mary Ellen Shaw) about it. The height and strength of the Tall Man (especially as compared with the height of his dwarves) reinforces him being representative of the bad father, who from the point of view of a child, is much bigger and stronger.
The fortune teller, who has reassured Mike that if Jody leaves, they’ll go together, is an old lady. As such, she is as much a symbolic mother to Mike as the Tall Man is a symbolic father. (Her granddaughter, played by Terrie Kalbus, is a symbolic sister.) That the fortune teller is amused at Mike’s fear from feeling his hand trapped and hurt in a magic box indicates that she, like the Lady in Lavender, is a bad mother figure, too.
That the box seems to be taking away Mike’s hand and is scaring him (the losing of his hand would have been a symbolic castration) is indicative of castration anxiety, and castration at the hands of the bad father (or here, of the bad mother) can in turn be representative of corporal punishment. To overcome his melancholia, Mike must overcome his fear and unconscious hate of his dead parents. Only then will their bad internal objects stop tormenting him. Hence, the granddaughter (Sarah in the novelization) tells him not to be afraid, and only when he controls his fear does the box, a yonic symbol, release his hand.
The old and young women want Mike to understand that it’s fear itself that is his problem. A funny thing, though, happens soon after, for the granddaughter goes to the cemetery and enters the mausoleum; and when she finds a room in it with containers holding the Tall Man’s crushed dwarves (as we’ll eventually learn), she finds herself overcome with terror, and screams. We don’t see or hear from her again. The fear she warned Mike about became her very problem.
While she’s at the cemetery and mausoleum, Jody is at home, singing and playing his electric guitar on his porch, and Reggie arrives in his ice cream truck with his acoustic guitar and joins in playing the new song Jody has been working on. He’s singing of his lady having left him, and I can’t help linking that idea with how his parents’ death must have felt like an abandonment (hence, Mike’s fears of abandonment). The unconscious Oedipal attachment to Jody’s mother could have easily been displaced to his lady leaving him (his local girlfriend [see the novelization], or his coming sexual encounter with the Lady in Lavender). An expression of his displaced grief in song is one way Jody has been successful in overcoming his grief and loss–something Mike can’t do.
The novelization points out in Chapter Two that Tommy sang and played guitar just like Jody and Reggie–hence I say their trio would have been like Crosby, Stills, and Nash, especially judging by the mellow style of the song we hear the surviving two musicians working on. They only need to work out the vocal harmonies, which would have been three-part had Tommy still been alive, like the harmonies of CSN. As a trio, they would again be a tripling of brothers for Mike, an unconscious wish-fulfillment for a boy so scared of losing any more of his family.
When Jody and Reggie finish playing the song, Reggie takes out a tuning fork and strikes it, then touches it with his fingertips to stop the ringing sound. Immediately after that, we see Sarah, the fortune teller’s granddaughter, walking through a hall in the mausoleum towards the door to the room with the dwarf containers, where she’ll scream.
We learn towards the climax of the movie, when Jody, Mike, and Reggie find that room, that there’s a pair of metal bars sticking up from the floor. These look like a giant tuning fork, but without the connecting bottom. Mike will put his hand between the bars and see it disappear, just as when his hand disappeared in the box; he’ll discover what Sarah must have seen–a hot, hellish world of slave dwarves toiling away for the devil Tall Man. Reggie later will touch the tops of those bars, just as his fingertips touched the tuning fork. This causes a vacuum in the room from which he narrowly escapes.
We are left wondering what connection there could be between the tuning fork, the bars, and the box. Since as I said above, the events of Phantasm are an allegorizing of the goings-on of the unconscious mind, there will be an association of various images that we see, all signifiers of some kind meant to represent certain mental concepts. Since the magic box is a yonic symbol, the tuning fork and metal bars can be seen as phallic. Putting one’s hand in the box or between the bars makes the hand disappear, a symbolic castration.
Touching the tuning fork or bars, and putting one’s hand in the box, is symbolic masturbation. The threat of castration, symbolic of corporal punishment, is parental discipline against a child’s indulgence in forbidden pleasures.
Furthermore, the tuning fork and metal bars can be seen as both phallic and yonic, the spaces in between the “phalli” being yonis; therefore, the tuning fork and metal bars can be associated with the combined parental figure. That Mike’s hand disappears in the in-between “yoni” as well as that of the magic box indicates the vagina dentata of a punitive bad mother, one every bit as threatening as the bad father of the Tall Man, disciplining a child for his Oedipal urges. Recall how the Lady in Lavender, knife in hand, is ready to stab Jody just outside the mausoleum as Reggie is about to touch the bars and cause the vacuum in the room and the storm outside.
All of these elements in combination reinforce the idea that Phantasm is all about unconscious paranoid anxiety that the hated, internalized mother and father are out to punish Mike and Jody for wanting them dead and gone, however repressed that wish may be.
We learn from Chapter Seven of the novelization that Jody doesn’t want to take over his father’s bank. One can imagine some nasty argument between Jody and his parents over whether or not he should pursue a career in music rather than take over the family business. Jody’s wish to be free of his parents’ dictates surely contributed to an unconscious wish on his part to be rid of them…and so their deaths would have been a source of unconscious guilt for him as well as for Mike.
While Jody is visiting the bank in Chapter Seven of the novelization, he’s in the suit he had on during Tommy’s funeral, and apart from giving the management of his dead father’s bank to George Norby until Mike is old enough to take over, Jody also has a brief, intimate moment with Suzy, an employee there who likes him in that suit and, being of a traditional woman’s mindset, hopes her boyfriend will be the new boss of the bank. One of the film’s outtakes shows her with him in the office that was his dad’s.
Being an aspiring musician, though, Jody doesn’t want to be part of the money-obsessed, capitalist world. As I said above, I imagine his dad being upset with him for not wanting to do that. This conflict can be linked to the later scene of Mike seeing the slave dwarves in that hellscape beyond the metal bar portal in the room with the dwarf containers. Jody doesn’t want to be a slave to capitalism, angering his father, and so his and Mike’s unconscious is showing them the infernal punishment their devilish bad father (the Tall Man) has planned for them.
You see, Jody has a bit of paranoid anxiety of his own, though it’s not as intense as Mike’s is. Jody, too, has a nightmare, one of dwarves grabbing him and pulling him away into hell, just as Mike has a nightmare of the Tall Man standing over his bed with his arms out, ready to grab the boy, and the dwarves all then do.
With the blurring of the line between dream and reality, we don’t know for sure how much of Phantasm is actually in waking life. For all we know, it’s all a great big, unending nightmare, Dante’s tour of the hellish unconscious with Virgil. For this reason, I feel free to interpret any and every character as an extension of Jody’s and Mike’s family.
Thus, Suzy can be an extension of Jody’s unconscious Oedipal feelings for his mother (with Dad dead, he can have her, provided he’s willing to carry on with the family business). If not, though, he’ll be with the Lady in Lavender that night in the cemetery, taking his chances with the bad mother instead of having the good mother transference in his dad’s office in the bank.
Indeed, because things have gone sour between Jody and Suzy (she representing the good mother), he’ll go that night to the local pub and pick up the Lady in Lavender. Mike will be following Jody, as usual. The two lovers going at it in the cemetery represents a fusion of Eros and Thanatos, the life and death drives.
Mike, of course, will be in the cemetery, too. He’ll be scared by the presence of those dwarves, making him scream for help and distract Jody from her…also saving his life without him even realizing it.
The whole point of the Oedipus complex, properly understood in its expanded sense to include the jealous wish to hog the Oedipally-desired object to oneself (be this object the mother, father,…or really anyone), is that it’s a universal narcissistic trauma expressing hate and hostility to anyone who wishes to share that object and not let one hog him or her to oneself. This is what we see when Mike is following Jody everywhere, not wanting his older brother to be free to live his own life (e.g., to be with the Lady in Lavender). Saving Jody from her knife is thus a justification of Mike’s narcissistic wish to hog his brother all to himself, and is thus a wish-fulfillment. Remember how all of Phantasm could just be Mike’s ongoing dream, all an expression of his unconscious.
The next day, Mike is downtown, and across the street he sees the Tall Man walking up to Reggie’s ice cream truck. The cold of the truck seems to affect the Tall Man negatively. Indeed, we come to understand that the antagonist, being a devil of the hottest hell, has a strong aversion to heat’s diametrical opposite.
Later, Mike is in the garage, tinkering with a car. His precocious talent at fixing cars seems to reflect a wish to know how to bring things back to life, as it were. If only he could bring people back to life, like his parents. Dwarves scare him again, and he tells still-disbelieving Jody about them.
That night, Mike will go with a knife to the mausoleum to figure out what’s going on there. As he’s hiding in a coffin, he sees a caretaker looking around. This is another middle-aged man, like the Tall Man, so as far as Mike’s unconscious is concerned, the man is yet again representative of the bad father that the boy has internalized and whom he wishes he could be rid of.
Note how in all of Mike’s fear of the Tall Man and his dwarves, the boy still ventures out to the places that are the sources of his fear. This willingness to go out there demonstrates his self-destructive nature, which in turn demonstrates the self-hate he feels from his having internalized his bad parental objects, the source of his melancholia in the Freudian sense. He hates himself because he hates them, who are now a part of him.
Still, he keeps trying to project them outward, hence he has to confront them in the forms of the caretaker and the Tall Man. The coffin he hides in is a yonic symbol, representing his forbidden Oedipal desire, which as I said above is much more than just the wish to have his mother incestuously; but in the more expanded sense, it means he wants to hog all desired objects (her, the good father, Jody, and other brother-figures–Reggie and Tommy) all to himself.
Lacan‘s Non! du père forbids Mike to hog everyone just to fulfill his personal wishes, though: Mike must enter society and share everyone with everyone else; he cannot be the symbolic phallus for the mother, which represents the wish to be the desire of the Other. This inability to be that phallus is thus a symbolic castration, which is a recurrent motif in Phantasm.
Mike struggles with the caretaker, even biting his hand…and we’ve seen how a hurt or disappearing hand is symbolic castration. Mike wants the frustration of his wishes to be projected onto others. Immediately after the biting of the hand comes the flying ball with the blade, which stabs the caretaker in the head and kills him. This flying testicle and phallic blade are both castrated and (symbolically) castrating in their mutilation of the man’s face.
Right after this struggle, Mike has to confront the Tall Man, who chases him into a room, with Mike bolting the door to keep the mortician out, his hand slipping through the crack. Mike uses his knife to slice off the Tall Man’s fingers, yet another symbolic castration and Mike’s wish-fulfillment to project the frustration of his desires onto his bad father internal object. This wish-fulfillment is a form of revenge against his father’s frustration of his desires, which led to his unconscious wish for his parents’ deaths, which in turn led to his guilt and melancholia over their actual death. Instead of human blood, the severed fingers drip yellow ichor (the blood of the Greek gods), fittingly the colour of piss and therefore it reinforces how the fingers are phallic.
Mike takes a finger, puts it in a little box [!], and takes it home to show Jody the proof that he isn’t going crazy. Later on, the finger turns into a horrible, black flying insect that attacks Mike and then Jody and visiting Reggie soon after. Its ugliness, and the revulsion that the insect causes, are the diametrical (and dialectical) opposite of the beauty of Aphrodite, who emerged nude from the foam of the sea into which the severed genitals of Uranus were thrown. Indeed, the original sky-father god was castrated by his son, Cronus, in a reversal of the fear of the castrating father of Freud’s conception (Freud, on page 469 of his Interpretation of Dreams, wrote of a variation in which it’s Zeus who overthrows and castrates Cronus in revenge for devouring all of his children.).
The insect is shoved into the kitchen sinkhole, just as the Tall Man will be trapped in a hole going down into an abandoned mine shaft. Apart from being more yonic symbols, these traps also represent attempts at repressing traumatic memories…and of course, neither of them will last long or be effective. Reggie’s seeing of the insect means he too will be involved in doing something about the Tall Man.
Jody is the next to go to the mausoleum alone, and he’s attacked by the dwarves, one of which then chases him in a hearse, it being too short for Jody to see it through the car windows. It turns out that, once Mike has arrived in Jody’s car to help and that the dwarf has been stopped, that it was a crushed, shrunken version of Tommy.
Jody and Mike come to realize that the Tall Man has been killing people in the town (including their parents), and he has been crushing the bodies down to dwarf height, reanimating them, too, in order to do his bidding. As Mike later learns through the twin metal bar portal in that room with the dwarf containers, the dwarves will be the Tall Man’s toiling slaves.
On a symbolic level, this all means that the bad father wants to infantilize Jody and Mike (i.e., to shrink them down to size), and thus make them obey their dad’s every command (e.g., continue to run their father’s banking business, and so abandon their dreams of a music career, etc., and be good slaves to capitalism) without question. Another thing to consider is how the dwarves, as symbolic children, are projections of Mike’s self-loathing. He screams in terror at them because they are him; they’re what Wilfred Bion called ‘bizarre objects,’ hallucinated projections of Mike.
As Jody tries to confront what’s going on in the mausoleum, he tries to keep Mike out of it, in a misguided attempt to protect him. The Tall Man will go after Mike in the house, anyway. Jody trying to lock Mike up in his bedroom just makes Jody into yet another bad object, frustrating Mike in his wishes to be involved with confronting the Tall Man. Mike, in his frustration as Jody is carrying him upstairs to his bedroom, struggles and screams, calling Jody a “goddamn bastard!” and fearing that Jody will abandon him forever.
Mike manages to break out of his bedroom, and the Tall Man, all fingers intact again, abducts him and puts him in a hearse to take him to the mausoleum. Mike has a pistol, though, and he shoots his way out, making the hearse crash and go up in flames. He goes in the mausoleum and finds his father’s coffin, as Jody has already done.
Just before opening the coffin, Mike says, “I’m sorry, Dad, but we had to”…do what? Wish for his and Jody’s parents’ deaths? He’s horrified to see his father’s corpse gone. A bladed ball flies at his head, but Jody intervenes and shoots it with a shotgun. Instead of being mad at Mike for disobeying and escaping his bedroom, though, Jody hugs him. Jody is thus a good object again.
They’re pleased to run into Reggie again, knowing he isn’t dead (after having assumed that he and a couple of young women were killed earlier by the dwarves). Mike is especially pleased, of course, since Reggie’s another brother-figure. They go in that room with the dwarf-containers and the portal. Mike calls the other world, the one he’s almost fallen into, another planet, but I think it’s supposed to be hell, where the Tall Man and his dwarves are all evil spirits.
Finally, with everyone outside the mausoleum again, Reggie, thinking he’s helping the Lady in Lavender, is stabbed by her, just as Tommy–another brother-figure to Mike–was. Then Jody devises his plan to lure the Tall Man into the mine shaft and trap him there.
Mike has to confront the Tall Man yet again at home, the mortician calling him “Boy!”, like a harsh, disciplinarian father. He chases Mike out to the mine shaft, where he falls in the hole, one which Jody then drops boulders from on high to trap the Tall Man in. Jody seems like a triumphant hero.
Mike wakes up in bed. It was all just a dream…wasn’t it?
As it turns out, it was Jody who died…in a car wreck, and not Reggie from a stabbing. Mike knows those rocks won’t hold the Tall Man for long (if he could survive the fire from the crashing of the hearse into the pole, surely he can get out of that trap): of course not–Jody’s trap is merely symbolic of repression in the unconscious. We know Mike has been having nightmare after nightmare ever since his parents’ deaths, and now he’s having even more of them after Jody’s death.
Has the whole film been a dream, on and off?
We see Mike and Reggie in the living room of the house, with a fireplace burning behind them. It looks almost like a romantic setting. I don’t mean to say that Reggie is being a pederastic predator, or that Mike is welcoming such predation in his unconscious; but rather that these overtones are symbolic of Mike’s deep need to have the (platonic) love of a brother-figure, a need that would be particularly intense now that he’s just lost Jody. His feelings of abandonment are overwhelming.
Since Mike has been frustrated as well as loved by his now-all-dead objects, the bad versions of them, including that of Jody now, will all be internalized by the boy. He’ll need Reggie as a good object and brother-figure. Fittingly, Reggie picks up his acoustic guitar and begins humming and strumming that song he played earlier with Jody, the one about his woman leaving him. The film is all about loss, mourning, and a feeling of abandonment.
When Mike is in his room to begin packing for the road trip he and Reggie have planned, he sees the Tall Man again, in the mirror. Seeing the bad father, instead of himself, in the specular image is a reminder to us that the boy’s demons are all inside himself, internalized, not out there somewhere and so he’d be safe from them.
Like a stern father about to spank his son, the Tall Man calls out “Boy!” again, and the dwarves’ arms crash through the mirror glass, grab Mike, and take him screaming away. The childlike dwarves, about Mike’s height, get him because, like the Tall Man, they are him.
Infinite Ocean 