==Why I love the Phantasm franchise==

Sept. 25, 2025

Sometimes I get really side-tracked when I'm writing.

It's like the daydream gets a little too strong, and you begin to drift with it. And to compound matters, if you're working on a creative project, you're probably already thinking a little strangely.

Anyway. I've had an interesting person relationship with the Phantasm franchise. The first one I saw was Phantasm 3: Lord of the Dead. One of my best friends rang me up and told me to check out cable channel whatever, and I tuned in right in time to see someone get decapitated with a boomerang! I was sold, as any good elementary schooler would be.

Now Phantasm 3 is by no means the best in the series. When I got a little older, I used to scour DVD racks at different stores, and lucky for me, one day I happened to find Phantasm. The first one. So naturally, I bought it, having only a vague but nonetheless fond memory of the 3rd movie from childhood. It was like reuniting with a childhood friend!

I showed that movie to everyone I knew! One of my fondest memories is the time my friends and I, already graduated at this point, went to the student union at the nearby college to play video games. You see. We had a tv at home, but it was a lot smaller than the one at the union. Well, one thing led to another, and pretty soon we had carted my XBOX over to use that gigantic tv instead. Probably to play the beat-em-up game based on The Warriors.

We got bored after a while, and there's a good chance we were at least a little high, so we decided to pop in a movie. Phantasm was in my backpack. We played it in the student union on the big screen in a lounge. Hell, even some guy we'd never met pulled up to watch. Everyone was into it.

See the fun thing about the Phantasm series is it really goes off the rails. And in case you haven't seen it, the main characters discover at one point that the super strong, Jawa-looking creatures with blood like the inside of a glowstick are from another planet! Yeah! They're shrunken because of something about super strong gravity there? Regardless. The Tall Man's making an army of the dead in another dimension or planet or something! And it sorta goes on like this.

The whole franchise is like getting dropped off in a parallel dimension. The rules seem internally consistent, yet also beguiling as they're revealed. Now I have no idea if Don Coscarelli pantsed the whole thing or not. Either way, from film to film it gets wilder and wilder. By Phantasm 3, most of the people in the world--or at least the US--seem to be dead! But that's exactly what makes the franchise so good.

Every Phantasm movie is a unique experience. I couldn't imagine another person accidentally having the same idea. The plot winds through serious, intense beats, but the characters also have their funny moments, even as they face the end of the world, their chosen family being enslaved after death by the Tall Man in the weird super gravity dimension, etc. Somehow it keeps this perfect balance between being funny and serious enough to remain cool. And on top of everything, it's a tremendously weird story.

There's not much of a point here. Mostly thinking about points of inspiration. I don't write horror, but a lot of my favorite movies are horror movies. And I definitely take inspiration from them. Especially weird ones like Phantasm! I think maybe the Child's Play franchise is second to Phantasm's weirdness. That's another example of a series that remained the idiosyncratic bizzaro vision of its creator throughout.

I should finish this by saying weird art is the most fun. My opinion. While I can appreciate "good" art, I have to say that for me, as a trash connoisseur, the best art is the weirdest art. Stuff that makes you laugh when you see it, but you're laughing with the artist instead of at them. Stuff that makes you scratch your head or wonder later just exactly how all that worked out again. I try to write it as best I can in my own books. Inject that spike of weirdness that I think drives a novel or a movie right through to the next truck stop. Ah well.

That's enough for now though