Characters / Phantasm

Protagonists

Mike

• Action Survivor: With the Tall man constantly after him, he turned from a Non-Action Guy to this.
• Ambiguously Human: It's implied he's no longer human after the third film, having gained some of the Tall man's powers.
• Badass Adorable: Even when he was 13, he was making cool gadgets and thinking up ways to outwit the Tall man.
• Break the Cutie: He goes through so much in the first three films...
• The Chosen One: Implied in the fourth film, with the Tall Man trying to sway him to his side. Seemingly subverted by the end, as the Tall Man leaves him to die.
• Dying Dream: At the end of the fourth film, Mike flashbacks to when he was a kid, driving in the Ice-cream car with Reggie.
• The Hero Dies: Mike is dying at the end of the fourth film.
• Kill the Cutie: ... and is dying at the end of the fourth film.
• Non-Action Guy: At first, though he becomes an Action Survivor.
• Stalker without a Crush: He used to follow his brother around in the first film, but it was out of fear of abandonment.
• Unexplained Recovery: shows up in Phantasm 5 alive and well, seemingly having survived the events of 4

Reggie

• Action Survivor: He was just an ice-cream man before getting involved with the Tall Man, and then he became a badass who consistently remains the only person to survive each film.
• Badass Normal: After Mike starts developing Tall Man-like powers.
• Bald Head of Toughness: He's balding and tough enough to spend the entire series fighting the Tall Man's army.
• Casanova Wannabe: The only two women he successfully seduces are allies or avatars of the Tall Man, while Rocky and Jennifer both turn down his advances.
• Cool Old Guy: Continues to fight the Tall Man even as he's getting old and grey. best shown in Phantasm: Ravager, where he's nearly pushing 70 and still joins Mike and Jody in the fight.
• Death of a Child: His family, including his young daughter, died in the second film.
• Dirty Old Man: Almost every film has him flirting with younger women he and Mike pick up. They almost always turn out to be working for the Tall Man.
• Dying Dream: Maybe. Phantasm: Ravager seems to be implying that Reggie is dying from dementia and the events that happened are actually the result of his failing memory as he is dying. However, that is only one interpretation of the film's events.
• The Everyman: He's an everyday, average joe who is in way over his head fighting the Tall Man.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome: In the first movie, he helps several other people the Tall Man kidnapped escape from the mortuary before reuniting with Jody and Mike.
• Papa Wolf: He's extremely dedicated to protecting Mike from the Tall Man.
• Parental Substitute: For Mike, since his parents and Jody died.
• Spanner in the Works: To the Tall Man, who calls him "an unwanted pawn".
• Tragic Keepsake: His family's photo.

Jody

• Big Brother Instinct: He's very protective over Mike, even telling to stay home while he and Reggie hunt down the Tall Man. Subverted in the fourth film, when he has a Face–Heel Turn.
• Cain and Abel: In the fourth film, as he works for the Tall man. This eventually leads to Mike dying.
• Cool Big Bro: Mike certainly thinks so, since he doesn't want to be parted from him. Subverted in the fourth film.
• Dead All Along: In the first film.
• Face–Heel Turn: In the fourth film, he now works for the Tall Man.
• Heel–Face Turn: In the fifth film, he fights the Tall Man with Mike and Reggie.
• Soul Jar: His sphere.
• Unexplained Recovery: In the fifth movie, he is either alive and well or he's still a sphere. Either way, Ravager is weird.
• Wham Line: Courtesy of Reggie in the first movie.
  Reggie: "Mike, that Tall Man of yours did not take Jody away. Jody died in a car wreck."

Liz

• Big Sister Instinct: She shows some protectiveness of her sister.
• Damsel in Distress: The first thing Mike and Reggie do once they meet her is rescue her from the Tall Man.
• Desecrating the Dead: As if dying in a hearse crash wasn't enough, Reggie finds a dwarf eating her corpse's face. Another dwarf cuts her head off as a trophy for the Tall Man.
• I Have Your Wife: Well, the Tall Man has her grandmother, and Liz sets out to try and save her. But she's too late.
• Love Interest: To Mike in the second film. This however leads her to being...
• Sudden Sequel Death Syndrome: Killed off in the first five minutes of Phantasm: Lord of the Dead.

Tim

• Action Survivor: Probably the most competent survivor aside from the main characters.
• Badass Adorable: He knows how to shoot a gun and sets traps.
• Badass Bandolier: Wears his zombified father's duty belt as one.
• Death of a Child: He apparently died at the end of the third film.
• Kill the Cutie: At the end of the third film, he's killed off-screen.
• Trauma Conga Line: He loses his family to the Tall Man, then gets sucked into some pretty crazy stuff, although he adapts well to it.
• Wise Beyond Their Years: He's likely the youngest character in the franchise, but he's probably the most survival savvy.

Rocky

• Action Girl: She fights with nunchucks.
• Ambiguously Gay: Has a bit of a butch appearance and attitude, Tanesha refers to her as "girlfriend", and she turns down Reggie's advances. The most Reggie ever gets out of her is a hug, though in Ravager she implies that she may be into men after all.
• The Bus Came Back: Appears at the end of Ravager and starts traveling with Mike, Reggie and Jody again.
• Final Girl: Of the third film. And remarkably, she's the only main female in the franchise to survive.
• He's Not My Boyfriend: With Reggie in the third film.
• Sassy Black Woman: She has plenty of attitude and isn't afraid to be snappy.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Left at the end of the third film.
• Token Minority: The only prominent non-white person in the whole franchise.

Antagonists

The Tall Man (spoilers)

Tall Man

"The funeral is about to begin!"

Played By: Angus Scrimm

The mysterious Tall Man is a sinister, interdimensional conqueror of worlds with an army of the undead. Though he may appear to be human, the Tall Man is a supernatural being of unknown origin, a grim harbinger of death.

Once, he was Jebediah Morningside, a mortician during the Civil War who developed a fascination with death. He created a device that would allow him to travel through dimensions in the hopes that he could use it to conquer death, but when he walked through the gate he came back only a few moments later, forever changed, if he was even himself anymore.

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• Achilles' Heel: He doesn't like the cold and is stunned by the sound of tuning fork. Downplayed since his quantum immortality renders these weaknesses mostly moot.
• Alien Blood: He gets his hand caught in a door at one point, and the boy cuts off his fingers with a blade. They bleed yellow; the director noted on the commentary that most test audiences were shocked at the unusual color, his minions are also shown to have yellow blood in the sequels.
• Attractive Bent-Gender: In his Lady in Lavender and Alchemy forms.
• Badass Boast: "You think when you die, you go to Heaven. You come to US!"
• Badass in a Nice Suit: He's never seen in anything but a suit.
• The Bad Guy Wins: By the end of the series, he claims dominion over one universe and there doesn't seem to be any way of beating him with seemingly endless amount of clones out there, waiting to replace whichever one is destroyed next. All that's really left for the heroes to do is go somewhere cold that he can't reach.
• Big Bad: He's the antagonist of the entire series.
• Bizarre Alien Biology: Whatever he is, Tall Man's biology is baffling; he bleeds yellow, has a Sentinel instead of a brain, and any severed body parts become weird insectoid monsters.
• Body Backup Drive: How the Tall Man is still around after 'dying' multiple times: one body dies and another simply takes his place with no inconvenience to him. In the fifth movie, he reveals that there are tens of thousands of him.
• Card-Carrying Villain: When confronting and killing a priest, he inverts his rosary before giving him his Badass Boast about people coming to him when they die instead of Heaven, as if to imply he is The Devil himself. In the final film, he admits that he hates positive concepts like loyalty and looks down on humanity for believing in such a thing.
• Catchphrase: "BOOOOOYYYY!"
• Cold Ham: Most of the time, the Tall Man is quiet and stoic, saying little, but when he does speak, he often really cranks it up, particularly for his catch phrase.
• Cool Old Guy: As Jebediah Morningside, he seems like a friendly, endearing old man, which makes it that much more heartbreaking when he becomes the Tall Man through an unknown process.
• Creepy Mortician: He poses as a Mortician to get close to bodies and make more minions.
• Decapitation Presentation:With Liz at the beginning of the third movie.
• Dystopia Justifies the Means: In Ravager, after his conquest, the Earth has become uninhabitable in many places thanks to an alien contagion he released onto the planet, leaving many areas submerged in a thick, red atmosphere that only he and his minions can survive within.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: In Ravager, the Tall Man cannot understand why Reggie would risk his life for Mike and his friends at all.
  Tall Man: Why are you so obsessed with these friends!?
  Reggie: You could never understand. It's called loyalty.
  Tall Man: Those frail human emotions again. Do you not understand? Your kind is simply skinsacks of water and meat, and when a few random electrons fire off in that puny brain of yours, you're ready to annihilate yourself for this... this futile sensation you call loyalty.
• Evil Genius: As a human, he created the Dimensional Forks that allow him to travel between time and space and the rest of the advanced technology he uses, such as the Sentinels.
• Evil Is Bigger: Deliberately invoked, he was made to tower over the other characters. Hench his title.
• Evil Old Folks: The Tall Man generally appears as an elderly white man, and acts more civilized than the monster he really is.
• Evil Plan: In the first movie, the Tall Man is collecting bodies from the Morningside Cemetery to make into his extradimensional slaves.
• Evil Sounds Deep: Speaks in a gravelly voice, contrasting with the grandfatherly voice of his host body, Jebediah Morningside.
• Fascinating Eyebrow: It's such an iconic look for him that he's shown doing that on several posters.
• Faux Affably Evil: Throughout the series, the Tall Man often acts and speaks politely, particularly towards Mike in the fourth film, assuring him that his lobotomy won't hurt a bit. However, the mask ultimately slides completely away in Ravager, when he ridicules Reggie and Mike's friendship.
• For the Evulz: Angus Scrimm has said himself that the reason the Tall Man messes around with Mike and Reggie so much is because he is bored, which the Tall Man confirms in Ravager.

  Reggie: If you're so strong and powerful, why haven't you killed us yet?

  Tall Man: (Mike was) my subject, and you... well, every poor man deserves an amusement.

• Healing Factor: He regenerates his fingers after Mike cuts them off. In the third movie, he regenerates his hands after they are sliced off.
• Hero Killer: He's most likely the one behind Jody's death in the first film, gets Liz killed at the end of the second, and seemingly kills Mike in the fourth film.
• Hey, You!: He never addresses any of the characters by their names. He calls Mike "Boy" and refers to Reggie by titles such as "Small man" and "Ice cream man".
• Humanoid Abomination: He's clearly only human on the outside, though whatever he is exactly is left unexplained. In Ravager, he refers to his body as a "skinsack", implying that it may not be his body at all.
• Implacable Man: No matter how many times he's seemingly killed, he always comes back. In Ravager, a rocket launcher only burns his skin.
• Invincible Villain: Played with. The Tall Man has superhuman durability and regeneration, but the protagonists are able to trap or kill him in every installment. The problem is that the Tall Man has quantum immortality, and multiple versions of him exist throughout the multiverse. Thus, every time the Tall Man dies, another version of him pops out of nowhere and replaces the dead Tall Man.
• Just Toying with Them: He refers to his many encounters with Mike and Reggie as "games", and lets Reggie go in the fourth film when he could've easily killed him to play "one last game".
• Kick the Dog: A flashback in Phantasm IV shows him running over a dog for no real reason.
• Kill It with Ice: The cold seems to be one of the few things that can at the very least slow him down. Not that it's much of a comfort to our protagonists.
• Known Only by Their Nickname: The true name and identity of the entity that has taken over Morningside is never revealed. It is known only as the Tall Man.
• Mind over Matter: Has a limited form of telekinesis.
• Necromancer: The Tall Man uses his advanced technology to resurrect the dead as his minions.
• Organ Autonomy: Exaggerated. The Tall Man's dismembered body parts transform into hostile creatures after some time.
• The Problem with Fighting Death: Kind of the point. As has been stated on numerous occasions, the Tall Man represents death itself and thus can never truly die or be escaped. Ultimately, death claims even Reggie at the end of Ravager.
• The Quiet One: He never really says a whole lot in the first movie, only a few short phrases, though he ends up having full conversations with the heroes by the last movie.
• Rape by Fraud: He takes the form of women to seduce men on occasion, only to end up killing them.
• Reality Warper: It's implied in the early films that he can alter the universe to his liking, thanks to quantum mechanics. In the first movie, Michael and Jody survive while Reggie dies, yet a Cosmic Retcon makes it so that Jody died in a car crash while Reggie lives and doesn't remember the events of the first movie. The fifth movie confirms that the characters live in a multiverse and occasionally shift into other realities.
• Satanic Archetype: An evil being who rules over an unnaturally hot place and vies for world domination. Also, when he is confronted by a priest, he telekinetically inverts his rosary before giving his Badass Boast mentioned above. Though Reggie takes it up a notch by saying his world is "worse than Hell".
• Shapeshifting: He can shapeshift into attractive women to seduce and kill his opponents.
• Stealth Mentor: The end of the third and rest of the fourth film seemed to be suggesting that the Tall Man was trying to make Mike become just like him... but then it's subverted at the end, when the Tall Man takes the sphere from Mike and leaves him to die.
• Super-Strength: One of the first undeniably unnatural things Mike sees when spying on the Tall Man is him effortlessly lifting up a coffin by himself.
• Take Over the World: He desires to conquer Earth and various other dimensions.
• Time Master: As Jebediah Morningside, he created the Dimensional Forks that allowed the user to travel to any destination and any time period.
• True Sight: The Tall Man spots Mike when he's astral projecting to spy on him and is supposedly invisible, and even sees him when he's traveled back in time to the moment he became the Tall Man, even though Mike was in another dimension layered over that one.
• Unwanted Revival: Revives Mike after he's tried to kill himself, stating that death is no escape from him.
• Was Once a Man: Maybe. The form he's in used to be called Jebediah Morningside. However, it's unclear if it's really him, or if something had taken his skin. The latter interpretation is supported by his statement that his body is just a "skinsack".
  Jody: Jebediah Morningside never did come back.
• Would Hurt a Child: Has no issue throwing around a young Mike and gets Tim killed by his Lurkers off-screen.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: At the end of Phantasm IV, the Tall Man removes the Golden Sentinel from Mike's head and then... leaves him to die. He confirms this in Ravager, stating, "My need for you is now finished."

Tall Man's minions.

From the dead bodies he resurrects to willing human servants, the Tall Man has an army of henchmen.

• Alien Blood: All the undead henchmen have yellow blood like the Tall Man. This may in fact be embalming fluid used as part of the resurrection process.
• Depraved Dwarf: The Lurkers are made from bodies shrunken down to better adjust to the higher gravity of the Tall Man's world.
• Gas Mask Mooks: The Gravers wear gas masks for some reason.
• Humans Are Bastards: The Tall Man has managed to gather a number of human followers who serve him willingly. They pose as morticians and help him wipe out towns so he can use the bodies of the deceased to create more henchmen.
• Killer Cop: The Demon Troopers are zombie police that patrol the towns the Tall Man has wiped out, searching for humans who wander into them to kill.
• Meaningful Name: The Gravers plunder graves for bodies the Tall Man can use to create more minions.
• Night of the Living Mooks: The Tall Man steals bodies and resurrects them as his undead henchmen. They come in different varieties depending on how he resurrects them. The Lurkers are made to act as slaves back in the Tall Man's world, and are shrunken down. The Gravers retain their size and are tasked with plundering graves on Earth for more corpses the Tall Man can repurpose into minions. The Demon Troopers are more powerful variants of the Gravers that act as the Tall Man's police force.

Supporting Cast/First Movie

Myrtle

• Cat Scare: Nearly gives Reggie (and the audience) a coronary.

The Fortune Teller

Tommy

• Was Once a Man: He gets turned into a Lurker.
• We Hardly Knew Ye: Is the first person to die, just a few minutes into the first film.

Christa

Sally & Sue

• All There in the Manual: Deleted scenes show that Susan is Jody's girlfriend, Sally works for Reggie, and the two girls are sisters.
• The Dividual: In the final cut, Sue and Sally share all of their brief screen time, look similar and don't have much characterization. This is averted in the deleted scenes, where they do appear separately and are fleshed out a little.
• Hair of Gold, Heart of Gold: Both are blonde and fairly nice to the brothers.
• Sacred Hospitality: They're willing to hide Mike at their store in the middle of a crisis they have a limited understanding of.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Sue and Sally flee the mortuary immediately after being rescued by Reggie (who describes them as being scared as rabbits) and never reappear.

Supporting Cast/Second & Third Movies

Tanesha

• Action Girl: Fights back against The Tall Man,

• We Hardly Knew Ye

Father Meyers

• The Alcoholic: Drinks heavily to cope with being forced to help the Tall Man.
• Ear Ache: One of the Tall Man's spheres slices his ear off before it kills him.
• Good Shepherd: Normally, mutilating a corpse wouldn't make him one (rather the opposite, in fact) but since it's a corpse that The Tall Man wanted to reanimate....
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Tries to run from the Tall Man as things get worse.

Jeri

Supporting Cast/Fourth Movie

Jennifer

• Dumb Blonde: She apparently only thought cars blow up in movies. That is, until, hers blows up in front of her.
• Ms. Fanservice: There's an extended sequence of her topless, though she covers her own breasts. She was also a stripper once.
• We Hardly Knew Ye: Isn't given a lot of backstory before the spheres carve into her and she becomes a zombie.

Jebediah Morningside

• Came Back Wrong: As a result of walking through the dimensional gate he opened, he became the vessel for the Tall Man.
• Cool Old Guy: He isn't onscreen for long, but he's immediately hospitable to Mike when they meet.
• Creepy Mortician: Subverted. He did appear to be obsessed with death, but was a kind man who wanted to use his research to help mankind.
• Nice Guy: He's a kind, gentle old man who offers Mike a glass of lemonade. His demeanor just makes it so much more heartbreaking knowing what he'll become.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: In building the dimensional fork, he not only became the host body for the Tall Man, but condemned countless lives in the process. A particularly tragic twist is that Mike could have stopped him if he'd just told him what horrors await him beyond.
• We Hardly Knew Ye: Only onscreen for a short period of time before he enters the dimensional fork and comes back... not as himself.

Supporting Cast/Fifth Movie

Demeter

• Reality Has No Subtitles: Only speaks Bulgarian, which Reggie can't understand.

The Thief

• Asshole Victim: Even before he tried to pull Reggie's own gun on him when he was caught red-handed, he was honking at him when he was in the middle of the road, clearly beaten down and worn out.
• We Hardly Knew Ye: He's onscreen for only a few moments before he gets killed by a sphere.

Dawn/Jane

• Action Girl: Jane helps Mike and Chunk fight the Tall Man and his minions.
• Ms. Fanservice: Reggie was certainly attracted to Dawn, and attempted to make a pass at her.
• We Hardly Knew Ye: Dawn/Jane are killed off just shortly after their introduction.

Chunk

• An Arm and a Leg: Loses his right hand in an attempt to blow up the Tall Man.
• Dressing as the Enemy: As a midget, he can easily pass as a Lurker.
• Unexplained Recovery: He pulls a Taking You with Me on the Tall Man, blowing him up with the grenades strapped to his chest. But then, in the middle of the end credits, he leaps through one of the portals, still alive but missing a couple limbs.