- Year
- 1979
- Country
- USA
- Runtime
- 89 min
- Director
- Don Coscarelli
- Updated
- 10 Aug 2026
- Obscurity
- known (17/100)
- Also known as
- The Never Dead · Phantasm 01 Phantasm · Phantasm 1 · Don Coscarelli's Phantasm: Remastered
- Banned in
- UK
Phantasm
On the Section 3 seizure list during the video nasties panic.
A flying silver sphere, a towering undertaker, and dream logic. Nobody has explained it since.
Don Coscarelli's low-budget nightmare, made with friends and family, about a boy who discovers the local mortician, the Tall Man, is harvesting the dead as slave labour for another dimension, aided by a flying silver sphere that drills into skulls. It runs entirely on dream logic and is all the more frightening for it.
Angus Scrimm's Tall Man became an icon, and the film's refusal to make conventional sense is its strength. It spawned a whole series but the original's handmade strangeness has never been matched.
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