[filmmaker2]

Back to what Urge was saying about the sphere thingie being the shit back in the day...............this is a really long comment but I think it is important to put "Phantasm" in its historical context, at least in more detail...

Urge is quite correct about the sphere being the shit... and, probably because he was trying not to seem too audacious (he prefers to be understated), he put it in a very subtle way. Here's a few memories from way back when...or at least, this is how it was in my neck of the woods...

Try to imagine it being 1978; we had seen "Star Wars" but horror had not really had a modern face-lift, so monsters were not very interesting, and things were generally low-budget and kinda crude....and we had not seen any off-the-wall "killing MACHINES" ...or at least not many to speak of. "Dawn of the Dead" and the makeup effects "gore" trend were on the horizon, but those excesses were still more than a year away. Really outrageous scenes of violence in movies were few and far between.....

And the voiceover on the TV spots said, "If this one doesn't scare you...YOU'RE ALREADY DEAD." And the "Phantasm" TV spots featured a moment or so of the sphere scene (but not the gory stuff, just an image of it flying) so you were thinking, "Hmm, wow, wonder what THAT'S all about."

So you're ten or eleven years old and you snuck into the theatre or your older sibling or friend bought you a ticket...and there's about half an hour of build-up...you're eating your popcorn...the film is fairly scary and really weird and you're thinking. "Hmm, I wonder what's gonna happen?" But you figure you can handle it...the mortuary where weird things are happening is creepy, the kid goes to investigate because he thinks something evil is living there..........

And suddenly this scene comes along with a flying metal ball that deploys these evil-looking spikes and plants itself in the forehead of anyone who happens to be in its way...and then a DRILL comes out of it and bores right through the character's skull (WTF??????????!!!!), and starts pumping the blood right out of his head while he stands there struggling and screaming, and then he falls down dead and urinating on himself......while the character that was lucky enough to avoid this horrible death looks on in total shock.

You have to understand, this was the freakiest, most insanely horrifying scene most people had ever come across...it made people drop their popcorn, scream, look away, cover their eyes...a lot of people almost ran out of the theatre because it was THAT scary and THAT bizarre.

As a friend of mine has said, "That scene IS the film. You only have to do something like that ONCE (in a film); once you do that, the audience will jump at any little thing you throw at them." And, indeed, "Phantasm" follows that wisdom...everything that follows the sphere scene is by comparison smaller. After the sphere scene, the really crazy excesses were not needed because the audience is too busy worrying about what the film MIGHT do...

Back when it came out, "Phantasm" was so wild that kids DARED other kids to go and see it...it was a test of how tough you were. Ah, those were the days!