Novelization Appreciation: Phantasm, Page 2

NOVELIZATION APPRECIATION

P H A N T A S M

by Kate Coscarelli . page 2

The Hathaway and Glunter backstories seems like they must have come from the mind of Kate Coscarelli rather than Don, if only that - since there's no dialogue directly referring to them - there's no place they could have possibly gone in the movie. But whether Don provided his mother with character/town backgrounds before she wrote the book, it's clear just how fully she understands his movie from the novelization's focus on the film's nuances. Like the film, the novelization focuses on tangible objects that hold the characters to the substantial world. Even something as apparently insignificant a detail as the lighter Mike takes with him when he sneaks into Morningside that he uses to hold open the lid of the coffin in which he's hiding is present in the novelization. That's because the lighter is a subtle symbol for the meager possession that quite literally keeps Mike from being trapped in his final resting place. The heroes' props become their crucial tethers to the living world and feasible reality The Tall Man's forces try so vehemently to pull them from, whether it's their vehicles - the infamous Cuda with its 426 Hemi V8 engine, Mike's Hodaka Road Toad motorbike (which The Tall Man separates him from in their first confrontation; in the novelization, it's moved earlier so it becomes TM's very first appearance), Reggie's ice cream truck - or tiny objects like Mike's lighter or Reggie's tuning fork. In the book and novel, these items are mirrored by otherwordly counterparts - the Cuda/hearse, the tuning fork/planetary gateway - and give the boys a conversant insight into how to defeat them. Most clearly connected is Mrs. Starr's oblong box (or Gom jabbar, as we Dune fans know it), and Coscarelli adds a scene where Mike returns to the fortuneteller's parlor and takes the opportunity to feel around the table and try to figure out if there was some trick to the box's magical appearance/disappearance, at this point desperate to connect the supernatural with the corporeal.

Going back to the book's antique shop scene, Coscarelli explores even further how the grotesque artifacts of The Tall Man's army have corrupted Mike's sense of familiarity. Mike thinks about how often he's come to the store, and the solace he finds in browsing the unsold items on its shelves: "There were things happening that were so far beyond his understanding that he needed some comfort and relief." But he now finds it difficult: "Somehow, all the old familiar things that he used to love so much now seemed gloomy and menacing. The green Chinese lions appeared to be snarling at him." Of course, The Tall Man personally invades these private objects with his presence in the old timey photograph atop a funeral wagon in front of Morningside, his image turning directly to Mike as if mockingly confronting him with the idea that death debases even the consoling intimacy of personal items (the memories of which, as death approaches, tending to fade into oblivion). Whenever I show Phantasm to a new viewer, I'm worried what they'll think of the boys' excitement at arming up against the menace - that they might mislabel the Pearsons and their bald buddy as hick gun nuts rather than understand that weapons in the Phantasm-verse are just as much vigorous indications of reality as they are practical tools against inescapable fate (such as the lovingly-constructed MacGuyver-esque shotgun shell/push pin/hammer combination Mike uses to escape the confinement of his room). Coscarelli sums up that idea, and the whole concept of reliance on incorrupt objects, thusly: "Jody...was frightened, for the concept of another dimension overwhelmed him, and the implications of a power that could not be controlled by the mortal weapons of guns and muscle was staggering." Not a bad line - it just manages to sum up the core of the Phantasm series in one sentence.

While Coscarelli (like any of us) couldn't have guessed where Don intended to take the series after the first movie, her decisions as to which deleted scenes to include in the novelization suggest some remarkable foresight.* Before the dawn of laserdisc/DVD, novelizations were the only place one could go for major story differences and material excised from the finished movie, and Coscarelli had loads to work with based on the crazy amount of Phantasm phootage that ended up in Part IV alone. But none of the OblIVion "flashback" footage shot during production of the first movie is included in Coscarelli's book; could she have sensed that Mike's snaring of The Tall Man by hanging him from a tree only to release him would be best saved for the third sequel? I only mention it because I fully expected her to include, at least, the tiny bit of conversation between Reggie and Mike in the ice cream truck on the way to the antique store that ended up becoming such a poignant final scene in OblIVion - even in the first movie, there's a shot of the two laughing and chatting amiably as they head to the shop in the truck (the only piece of the scene that made it into Part 1). The novelization's version? "Mike and Reggie rode to the antique store in silence." Not only that, Coscarelli goes so far as to have Reggie's dropping off Mike repeated through two perspectives, the first by sisters Suzy and Sally when they call Jody to confirm Mike's arrival ("The usually garrulous Reggie hadn't even said hello"), then through Mike's viewpoint as he enters the store ("Mike...said a muffled hello, and walked past them. He had nothing more to say.")

It almost seems like Coscarelli is making a point of leaving out the ice truck scene: not only are the two friends not comforting each other by joking around, or apprehensively commenting on the strange sounds that accompany them ("It's just the wind...") they're not even speaking, and continue not to speak when Mike exits the truck. Most notable though is Coscarelli's circumvention of the even more famous ice cream truck scene, the slow motion shot of a casually stomping The Tall Man pausing by the back of the truck to glare at Mike from across the street, only to ambiguously wince at the gust of carbon dioxide that emits from the truck's frozen compartment. Mike interprets this reaction as an aversion to cold in a deleted scene where he shoots The Tall Man with a fire extinguisher; ultimately, this moment wouldn't pay off in the final cut of a film until Part 3. Coscarelli doesn't include the fire extinguisher scene, and when describing The Tall Man glaring at Mike, leaves the demon's reaction obscure ("He seemed transfixed by the cold vapor, and slowly rotated his body and lifted his hands as if to touch the cold...or fend it off"), apparently so it could be addressed much, much further down the line.

Because of Coscarelli's humble approach to the adaptation, the narrative doesn't attempt to superfluously explain the film's weirdest moments. One such moment I eagerly anticipated while reading the novelization was Mike lying in the middle of the road after being pitched head-first through the back window of the moving Volkswagen Beetle by bloodthirsty dwarfs. Mike remains facedown on the concrete, seemingly dead, while the film continuously cuts back to Jody sitting at home, staring silently forward, almost knowingly, until Mike stirs and stands up. The popular interpretation of this moment is that the brothers share some unspoken psychic bond: Jody not only senses his brother's in danger, he somehow heals him or brings him back to life. It's one of those great moments from the film that formulates the illogical (miraculous recovery? psychic mending?) into something perceivable by use of the familiar - namely, the unbreakable bond between two brothers. At the same time, it's so abstract as to be almost impossible to explicitly outline, so Coscarelli doesn't even try. There's no mention of Jody at the house or a prolonged period of recuperation for Mike - instead, she makes Mike's recovery as inexplicable a phenomenon for him as it is for the reader: "He had no thoughts for the miracle of his survival." Rather than an oversight however, it feels like another chance for Phantasm viewers to knowingly nod as they take in the obligingly sparse information Coscarelli provides.

Rather than unravel cabalistic moments like this, Coscarelli relies on simple character study to build the strong connection between Mike and Jody. At the beginning of the film, Jody off-handedly mentions how Mike follows him everywhere he goes for fear that Jody is planning to abandon him; the viewer is probably too distracted by trying to make sense of all the hooded midgets and hand-snatching boxes to pay much attention to it, but the novelization puts Mike's concern at the center of everything that happens. Coscarelli sympathetically likens Michael seeking out Jody to "clinging to a lifeline in an angry sea," the frustration of any younger sibling chasing after a rebellious big brother but also a deceptively accurate analogy for what Mike's subconsciously worried about. Coscarelli takes Mike screaming at Jody not to leave him locked in his room before venturing out to Morningside alone - "You're never comin' back you goddamn bastard!" - and links the improvised line's use of "bastard" to an internalization exclusive to the prologue of the novelization: "Jody, you bastard...how...how could you leave me?" as Mike remembers the last time he saw Jody before the narrative's big reality-bending shocker - the older brother's tragic death. Coscarelli understands that Michael's struggle to keep Jody from leaving him is in fact his attempt to keep Jody alive, and she haunts him from the beginning of the novelization with the ambiguous words "I'll be right back," which are ultimately revealed to be the last thing Jody will ever say to his brother as he leaves to set up the trap for The Tall Man at the mine. Viewers who've already been jarred by the sudden spiral of total victory to tragic defeat at the end of the film can now appreciate that, rather than an abrupt twist, Jody's death - the impetus for Jody's bravery can even be cheekily applied to the movie's famous tagline: "If it doesn't scare you, you're already dead" - and Mike's futile attempts to avert it have been what the story is all about.

I can't help but point out that the novelization's focus on that natural protective instinct, as well as the tragedy of being inevitably powerless to save a loved one, feels inherently maternal. In the movie only the father, whose pilfered casket is withdrawn from the walls of the mortuary, is mentioned in any significant way; in the book, we learn that Mike's memorable blanket (presumably pee-stained from the nightmare of being dragged into the grave by The Tall Man's minions) was crocheted for him by his mother. Mike didn't start using it until after her death and finds it comforting, making it yet another powerful earthbound object. (Speaking of which, the silver crucifix that seems to hold special significance for Mike turns out to have been a gift, not from his mother but his flighty aunt - you know, Patso's mom? - who isn't even mentioned in the movie.) The spiritual presence of the mother is imbued throughout the text - it's even applied to the deadly sphere: "(Mike) was looking at death, and it was in the shape of a silver ball, much like the ones his mother used to hang on the Christmas tree."** It stands to reason that Coscarelli's mom would equate Jody's parental-brotherly guardianship of Mike with motherhood, the parents' death already informing Mike's struggle not to lose Jody (the author raised two kids herself). Coscarelli uses the song written and performed in the movie by Bill "Jody" Thornbury as the book's epigraph and mentions a song Jody wrote for Mike on his seventh birthday called "Little and Big," perhaps in lieu of a lullaby from mom. If a cheap roll in the cemetery grass is the empty act that leads to a messy death, genuine connection to family is part of the earthly bond that keeps the heroes alive and at their natural height.

This focus on the brothers is a bit at the expense of Reggie as a character, although it says a lot for Reggie Bannister's presence in the movie that the novelization's most notable flaw is failing to make the reader care that much about Reggie. You can practically picture Coscarelli throwing up her arms in resignation, not bothering to provide the iconic ice cream vendor with a backstory or fill in the holes of Reggie's experience from the film, such as his off-screen adventures at Morningside before meeting up with Mike and Jody (also untouched is the deleted scene where Mike mistakes something nasty in a coffin for a trapped Reggie). These are things I would have enjoyed learning from the novelization, although they would have detracted from that great moment when darkness falls in the "transport room," the lights come up and Reggie is alone, like a background player's nightmare of being left on an empty stage without knowing any lines. Reggie looks like he's wondering what he should be doing, suddenly being thrust into spotlight; of course, the full implications of him coming into the foreground won't be apparent until the next three movies.

And as much as I'd love for fan interest to generate novelizations of the Phantasm sequels, I think the only person for that job would have been Kate Coscarelli. The conflicting realities and unrealities of the films is a near-impossible juggling act - the logic of the Phantasm world is that a character gets stuck praying that a severed finger in a box will still be wiggling around; otherwise how can he explain why he's tooling around town with a severed finger in a box? The only way to grasp the irrational is to prove its impossibility to someone else. And Coscarelli, like her son, finds a way to make that baffling illogic somehow logical. How do you explain that?

Supplemental:

I like to point out books that actually appear in the movie in these novelization reviews, just in case The Deadly Percheron has anything to do with the novelized Mona Lisa. I couldn't find a good place to mention the Ballatine paperback of My Name is Legion by Roger Zelazny left open teepee-style on Mike's desk in the movie, which Coscarelli goes out of her way to mention Mike reading in the novelization. On the director's commentary, Don Coscarelli states there's no deep meaning to having the book on Mike's desk, but I actually think the final third of the collection, the Hugo-winning novella "Home is the Hangman," would make a pretty good Don Coscarelli movie. Zelazny himself is fairly unrepresented on screen other than Damnation Alley (unless you're including Argo), and his Frankenstein-as-artificial intelligence scenario fits into the kind of absurd adventure the heroes of a Coscarelli film are forced into.

* Although I guess some necessary editing to the book could have been done by Don Coscarelli and the PULP XMACHINA editors in 2002, after the three sequels had been released. Or, the director had enough of an idea what he planned to do for the sequels that he made the conscious decision to sit on the footage until 1998, although that seems unbelievable (I haven't had a chance to watch the OBLIVION commentary, which I'm sure would shed more light on this inquiry - sorry).

** From what we learn in later Phantasms, that could very well be Mike's mom in that sphere.

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