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People Are Very Strange These Days: A Look at ‘Phantasm”s Tall Man

People Are Very Strange These Days: A Look at ‘Phantasm”s Tall Man

Phantasm II The Tall Man

If Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm series has a single defining trait, it is an incredible, unwavering strangeness. Nothing in the films exists in a way that isn’t somehow off; even before we factor in the dwarf slaves from another planet brought to the earth through a massive tuning fork that is a portal to a different dimension hidden in the basement of a funeral home, the portrait of everyday life we’re shown never quite matches up with one we can clearly relate to. An orphan pair of brothers are best friends with a balding ice cream salesman, neither of them seem to have a job, and the younger brother is friends with a girl his age whose grandmother is some sort of fortune teller or witch. The world is never so far off that we feel its unreality, but it’s also never close enough that we feel comfortable or grounded. The audience exists in the limbo of strangeness, living in a setting that is both very familiar and utterly alien.

It is this sense of eerie dislocation and discomfort that makes the series work, and what has grown its fanbase and cult. Horror films, as a category, tend to ground the audience and then pull the rug out from underneath, creating tension and anxiety through contrast and juxtaposition. Coscarelli never provides the rug to begin with. He plays wonderfully with the fear of strangeness by using cultural knowledge and context as extra-textual information; he doesn’t need to set up the real world, because the audience already knows what the real world looks like and, more importantly, how it feels. The Phantasm films create displacement through gestures both subtle and large that show a world taken over by an outside force, a force that is slowly perverting the world around it. This force, this living fear, is Angus Scrimm’s legendary character, the Tall Man.

The Tall Man is the embodiment of Phantasm‘s conception of strangeness, fear, and danger. In a different film, Angus Scrimm might play a doting grandfather (even in the first film, over 30 years old now, he looks older than his middle age); his eyes, when they soften, are light and playful, and his stature is large, but not traditionally powerful. His voice, relaxed, is weathered but joyful, and filled with small notes of comfort. In Coscarelli’s hands, however, Scrimm’s features are exaggerated just enough that they become unsettling; his height (he’s only 6’4″ in real life), his long limbs, his wrinkled face, his intense eyes all get pushed just a bit, to the point where they pervert his human qualities. His features become expressionless, except when they move to express anger. Through this, the Tall Man moves from ordinary man to extraordinary figure; nothing in him is perverted beyond reality, but it’s pushed just enough to the extreme that he becomes striking and foreboding in a setting that should be easily related to and understood.

Phantasm The Tall ManIn many ways, this almost imperceptible oddity and inhuman distance ties the Tall Man to the body snatchers in many of the Invasion of the Body Snatchers films. The horror comes not just from personal endangerment, but from an implacable oddness, a weirdness, an idea that everything has been tweaked and changed in a way that can’t even be explained logically, and as such can barely be fought. It’s not so much a fetishization of the status quo as it is a fear of unexplainable and unrelatable distance; the unknown can only become known when it can be connected with, related to, and understood. The impulse to impart humanity on the non-human stems from this desire to understand, and in the body snatchers and the Tall Man we find the reverse, a human-looking figure that blatantly resists humanity.

Of course, it’s not just the Tall Man’s physical features that make him strange, and his connection with the body snatchers is more than skin deep. He’s an alien in the extraterrestrial sense, come to take human corpses for slaves to use on his home planet. His otherness masks a different displacement, leading the forces of his own planet through a human shell. His inhumanness, his strangeness, implies evil, implies a corruption of order and of life. He perverts the role of a mortician and the setting of the funeral home by removing sanctity and reverence from their place in the cultural approach to death. He controls the dead, warping corpses into twisted slaves to do his bidding. The Tall Man’s strangeness is a foreign entity, an invasive species warping the environment around him, destroying it. The series’ use of unexplainable one-off paranormal happenings and instances represents a deeper unease sitting beneath normalcy, constantly threatening the rational world with a sickness the Tall Man brought with him. He is a threat not just to individual lives, but to the concept of life itself.

As Don Coscarelli prepares Phantasm V: Ravager for release (the last film in the series, and the first he hasn’t directed; check out the trailer here), audiences everywhere (well, genre nerds everywhere) are preparing to meet Angus Scrimm’s iconic character for the final time. But, like all great monsters, he exists beyond his own appearances; he is a concept made literal, and the concept never goes away. Even as cultural changes speed up to an almost uncontrollable place, the unfamiliar never stops being eerie. It’s telling that over 30 years after the character’s beginnings, one of internet culture’s most pervasive myths, Slender Man, had his first image created through a photo-edited picture of the Tall Man. He strikes a chord with audiences because he, and the movie series he is the star of, are entirely about a universal fear of distance and of lost connection, impossible connection; the familiar and comfortable imperceptibly twisted until it becomes implacable, monstrous, and, above all, strange.

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