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October horror: PHANTASM (1979) 1st viewing

What's interesting is: this movie has no audience. It'd be perfect gateway horror w/o 1 gory death and 2 nipple shots.

Otherwise, it's like feature-length Goosebumps. That's not so much criticism as just observation.

This is NOT a scary movie But it's "spooky." Does anyone remember the kids' horror series, Are You Afraid of the Dark? This took me back to that.

The acting is so awful that no tension ever has a chance to build. And that's ... fine. If you're watching w/ the right mindset

But there's no way to be scared when your main characters look like this. Big and little brother, tons of "it was all a dream" scenes, and then "DOUBLE FAKE OUT SCARE! WHOA!" Classic Goosebumps tactics. This is summer camp scary and that's okay.

I agree w/ @AmyTheus4 that it's far more funny than scary.

That's okay - I think of it along the same lines as what Friday the 13th was trying to be. But since there are f-words and one GORY death, you can't show it to kids, even though it's made on their level. Kind of a shame.

W/ a little tweaking, Phantasm would belong on lists w/ Gremlins and Poltergeist as gateway horror. If it's supposed to be REAL horror, it's not even close!

But we got a sweet Batman reference out of it. And Phantasm ITSELF makes a reference to DUNE w/ its own pain box.

I like that horror has room to be silly. But the ending still pushes feelings of anticlimax w/ its double fakeout. What ruined Nightmare on Elm Street here is just a little more ... expected?

And hopefully the sequels have more Jodorowsky imagery because THAT I can get into!

I want to elaborate on one more thing: "it was all a dream."

If you want a sense of the surreal, you establish a world where being a dream doesn't make a DIFFERENCE, not one where people wake up from spooky nightmares fine.

That's the core groundedness that holds this back.

Despite being defensible as a small-budget movie, Phantasm had 30 times as much money as Eraserhead. That's a movie that feels maddening - the core of Lovecraft stories - because reality feels CONSISTENTLY UNCERTAIN.

If weird stuff is just bad dreams, we can't get that feeling.

So if the goal is to make us doubt our senses in a mystery that spans space-time, it has to have an unnerving sense of "being there." We have to question "being."

For example: Phantasm dialogue being filmed in A/B camera pattern, the most rote and predictable way to do it.

Even if the acting isn't on point, a clever camera or editor can mess w/ our senses to give the desired effect. It can make something real seem unreal.

It can also make a space mortician seem typical. Unfortuantely, in Phantasm, it's the latter.

Consider God Told Me To.

A constantly moving camera and energetic editor makes even just ... walking through a crowd seem unpredictable. It induces paranoia through motion.

That's the technical side of the unreal. The crypt scenes in Phantasm have some! The dialogue scenes ... do not.

Does this make Phantasm bad? NO. Again, silliness is fine in horror, campy acting is fine, cheesy scares are fine.

But I didn't connect w/ it on a horror level. If that was their intention, their inexperience showed too much in my modern first-time viewing.