Madness Heart Press

In my previous post on Phantasm, Don Coscarelli’s surreal 1979 journey into the cosmic horror of Morningside Cemetery and its sinister keeper, the Tall Man, I wrote that “one of the reasons Phantasm is so beloved of horror goons is that its improvisational, less-than-slick qualities lend it a tremendous feeling of authenticity.” That was true of the first film, which was made largely by amateurs and on a bare-bones budget. The authenticity question becomes more complicated when one looks at the four other films in the Phantasm franchise. There is still much to be learned from the films’ longevity and some of the unique elements that have given the franchise staying power and kept it, for all its warts and failings, fresh. As fresh, one might say, as a newly dead corpse given over to the tender mercies of Jedediah Morningside and his pan-galactic empire of shrunken zombie slaves.

My earliest exposure to the magic and mystery of horror films came at Top Hat Video, a now-defunct VHS rental joint in the town where I grew up. The town in question was a sleepy little suburb of Salt Lake City, and the vast majority of its residents were Mormon, which led to more strictures than one might think. One such stricture was the community’s approach to R-rated movies, which they viewed as not only morally questionable, but downright sinful (Utah is the state that gave us the Clean Flicks and Angel Vids controversies, after all). The upshot of all of this is that Top Hat had a special room in which they kept their spicier fare. In a normal town, such a room might be where the video store kept their softcore porno tapes; where I grew up, it was where R-rated content was kept, including the vast majority of horror movies.