The Phantasm series is specifically intended to capture the feel of a nightmare. And it succeeds - with flying colors.
WARNING: Spoilers Off applies to Nightmare Fuel pages.
- Everything about the spheres. The way they move, the sounds they make, how easily and gruesomely they kill and last but not least where they come from. Fittingly, they were based on an actual nightmare that Don Coscarelli had when he was a teenager.
- The spheres in Phantasm II are even worse, especially the golden one. The Funeral Attendant's death
by the golden sphere is a horrific death that rivals the first movie's most brutal death, which is pictured up at the right.
- The spheres in Phantasm II are even worse, especially the golden one. The Funeral Attendant's death
- The scene where Mike flees to the mineshaft and runs into the Lady in Lavender is unsettling. All she does is stand there, still as a statue as she watches Mike's every movement, holding a knife with a terrifying smile. Nothing happens, but its still very tense.
- One of the best is from the climax of the first film. We learn that the kid Mike dreamed everything that happened, that his brother died in a car wreck, and there is no Tall Man — only for Mike to go back to his room and find the Tall Man waiting there for him after discovering the Tall man's reflection in a mirror on his closet door.
- The fate of the dead once the Tall Man digs them up: they're enslaved, either becoming dwarves or spheres, and are unable to find peace in death.The Tall Man: You think when you die, you go to heaven? You come to US!
- The origin of the Tall Man: He's the body of the funeral parlor's first owner, who broke into the other universe only to be killed and then controlled by a gold sphere.
- The slow apocalypse taking place over the course of the series. In the first film, the most we see is a set of strange goings-on around a funeral home. In the second, small towns are left deserted as the Tall Man makes his way across the country. By the fifth and final movie, the entire world has fallen to invasion, with giant spheres making short work of the military, the streets full of undead minions and advanced spheres, and even the sky has turned the same shade of red it is in the Tall Man's home dimension.
