PHANTASM doesn’t quite succeed as a horror film, feeling too outlandish to be truly frightening, but it's undeniably original and captivating in many ways. It seems the filmmakers were aiming to construct an entirely new and distorted world where appearances are deceptive and anything is possible—and likely will happen. Conventional logic quickly becomes irrelevant within this twisted landscape. A group of charact…

There are men of considerable height, but then there’s the "Tall Man." I recall seeing the advertisement, or preview as some might say, for Phantasm while waiting for Invasion of the Body Snatchers to begin in December of 1978. And that trailer stuck with me, because it seemed genuinely frightening. The image that really stood out was the scene where the main villain, the Tall Man, played by Angus Scrimm, is position…