The Tall Man, a monster from an alien world posing as a gaunt undertaker, leaves a trail of destruction hidden in plain sight. Destroying one small town after another, he converts the bodies of his victims into an army of dwarflike undead slaves and uses their brains to power a legion of floating metal spheres - relentless high-tech killing machines. Everyday heroes Mike, Jody, and Reggie battle the Tall Man but their reality is never as it seems.
Drawing inspiration from the Ray Bradbury novel Something Wicked This Way Comes, American filmmaker Don Coscarelli's 1979 horror film Phantasm is an seminal work of independent cinema - low on budget but high on ingenuity, entertainment, and emotional content. Shot on weekends working off a loose and constantly evolving script, the film operates on dreamlike logic, trading in plot coherence for creative freedom of the macabre.
With fleeting major film studio involvement and fluctuating production budgets, four sequels were released on a highly irregular schedule over nearly four decades, retaining the surreal quality of the 1979 original in varying degrees. The Phantasm series is imbued with Coscarelli's earnest spirit, adventurous sensibilities, and appreciation for the weird, exemplifying the challenges and often overlooked benefits of indie filmmaking.
