Renowned horror novelist Dean Kootnz, adapting his own 1983 novel by the same name, produces Phantoms, a film by Joe Chappelle, a man accustomed to being issued second-tier works having come off of Hellraiser: Bloodline and Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers. This isn’t to imply that, by association, Kootnz is a minor writer within the genre, he is merely second in sales to Stephen King and, as we all know–and as Chappelle’s film attests–the notion that majority favor is a reliable indicator of quality is a naïve one at best.
Jennifer Pailey (Joanna Going) retrieves was she deems to be her misguided sister, Lisa (Rose McGowan), and takes her to the former’s hometown, Snowfield, Colorado. Upon arriving, Jennifer discovers that things aren’t quite as she’d left them in that the entire town’s populace is either missing or dead. After locating the sheriff, Bryce Hammond (Ben Affleck), along with his deputies, the small conglomeration attempts to unveil the mystery surrounding them.
Phantoms is a very sedate work which plays in much the same manner that a novel reads, that is, until the bloated climax which, natch, has Hollywood written all over it. Yet, the film has a lot more going for it, especially when, all things considered, the translation from page to screen for Koontz’s horror scribe peer hasn’t faired well at all. (Exempting, of course, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, its success–as evidenced by Mick Garris’s more faithful adaptation of the work seventeen years later–is partially due to the famed director’s liberties with the source material.)
Granted, the work skates the thin line between plagiarism when placed alongside John Carpenter’s The Thing. However, much like Bentley Little’s satirical sensibilities, it is Kootnz’s black humor and wry social commentary which permits the work to stand on its own two legs, which is saying quite a bit for a plot whose basis is founded upon the facticity of World Wide News. Thus, what we have is a very Lovecraftian tale which the director and writer not only aptly represent, but nail the requisite atmosphere, something which many filmmakers treading in the American Gothic master’s domain fail to do and their products are the lesser for it, which is analogous to making a Mel Brooks’s feature, sans comedy.
Chappelle’s deviation from Carpenter’s anomalous thing is due to the fact that his antagonist’s power is derived from the absorbed knowledge of all whom it has killed. In this regard, the horror author becomes, in retrospect, fascinatingly prophetic for he predicts what would come to be labeled Cell Memory. What results is not a live-action, ravenous Encyclopedia Britannica but rather–via an ingenious injection of social criticism cloaked as sarcasm–the world’s most hubris-driven, egotistical undifferentiated mass ever to set, um, tentacled screen. You heard me right, after synthesizing millennia upon millennia of human knowledge, the organism’s primary trait winds up being megalomania. How’s that for a constructive poke in the eye?
Yet we are forced to apply the breaks before we begin to consider implementing the term “masterpiece” to Phantoms for Chappelle’s work, first and foremost, sets out to entertain in a manner sorely missed in much of today’s popcorn terror. Great care was taken in the film’s pacing and establishment of the town of Snowfield as the revelation that we are indeed alone sends shivers down the viewer’s spine, especially when we come upon a pot boiling on the stove, thereby insinuating that the responsible party might well be right around the corner. Replete with the necessary false alarm (made intriguingly obligatory), only to be followed by the trite and arbitrary “boo” moment, before being followed by a drove of the latter, Koontz’s film is chilling fun par excellence.
Is this to imply that Phantoms is an unfortunate case of a “Could-Have-Been” that became distractingly concerned with mainstream audiences somewhere along the way? Doubtful, for the manner in which the film enjoys itself at its own expense makes for a very comfortable outing, a quality which is rarely seen in today’s films, horror or otherwise. However, surprisingly, as Chappelle builds up for a punch line which he can by no means manage to satisfactorily provide, yet somehow almost succeeds in doing, he leaves his audience satiated by the closing frame.
Barring a few plots holes and a continuity faux pas or twelve along the way, Joe Chappelle’s Phantoms is a run-of-the-mill, fun-for-fun’s sake piece of popcorn horror as it, once again, supports my thesis that H. P. Lovecraft exerts more influence on the genre than Edgar Allan Poe. Literary quibbles aside, the work also proves that atmosphere can almost always provide for, if not a substantial, at least an entertaining journey most any day of the week. We also learn in due course that the impact of H.R. Giger’s biomechanical design as expressed in Ridley Scott’s Alien cannot be overstated. But, more importantly, Phantoms goes to sustain the often-uttered, but rarely explored, notion that–regardless of how hideous or otherwise useless a work may be–it must house at least one moment of inspired flight as the film gives us the timeless quip, “I used to believe that any theory, once published with supporting evidence, then became open to discussion and debate, but I’ve learned how envious, vindictive, and vicious the academic community can be. They’ve swine, polite swine, but swine nonetheless.”
’nuf said.
-Egregious Gurnow
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- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
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- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
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