One of the Best 1970s Horror Movies Is Hiding on Peacock (And All the Sequels Are There Too)

Peacock may be the best streaming service around for horror movies this Halloween season. The streamer not only has many of Universal’s library of classic monster movies from the 1930s and 1940s, like The Wolf Man, but also plenty of fan-favorites from the 1980s, like The Thing. There are even titans of the genre like Psycho, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and Night of the Living Dead, plus newer releases that genre fans love like The Invisible Man (2020) and M3GAN. They even boast multiple franchises for anyone eager to dive into a lot of sequels.

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Though it may be tempting to venture into the Chucky movies on Peacock (they have almost all the movies, plus every episode of the TV show) or even a more recent horror series like Terrifier, Peacock is hiding another complete franchise for horror fans. Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm from 1979 remains one of the most underappreciated movies in the genre, a movie that operates purely on nightmare logic and is filled with scares that don’t feel derivative of anything else you’ve ever seen. Even better? The entire series can be watched on Peacock.

Phantasm Remains an Underrated Horror Masterpiece

Phantasm follows Mike (A. Michael Baldwin), a young boy lost in the world after his parents’ death, along with his older brother Jody (Bill Thornbury), and Jody’s best friend, Reggie (Reggie Bannister). Mike loves his older brother but feels the distance growing between them, as Jody feels the responsibility of raising Mike is the only thing keeping him in town. The strain on their relationship only mounts as the big mystery of their town becomes Mike’s obsession, who is The Tall Man, and what is he doing at the cemetery?

The mysterious Tall Man at the center of Phantasm, played expertly by Angus Scrim, appears normal on the surface, but the evidence that he’s off mounts. The Tall Man is spotted carrying a full coffin on his own, green goo shoots from his severed finger rather than blood, and a flying chrome sphere with spikes on the end drills its way into a man’s head. After witnessing all this firsthand, Mike’s obsession with finding out the truth takes hold of him and his brother. Filled with surprises and twists throughout, Phantasm‘s story is elevated by Coscarelli’s imaginative visuals, which harken to dreams and nightmares in a way that even beats out that other famous nightmare-based horror franchise.

Produced on a budget of $300k, Phantasm was released in 1979 and would go on to gross over $22 million. In short, Phantasm was a certified hit at the time of its release, so why has it become underseen? Some of this stems from the fact that the series is largely an independent venture, so unlike Halloween or even Friday the 13th, the series wasn’t something a studio could quickly lean on to earn a buck at the box office. As a result, it’s not as immediately recognizable to younger fans because it doesn’t have an omnipresent place in culture. There are no chrome Phantasm spheres at Spirit Halloween, but there should be.

Phantasm’s Storytelling Isn’t For Everyone

A complaint that new viewers may have, or read about if they’re curious, is that Phantasm‘s storytelling logic doesn’t make sense. There may be some truth to this if the film is approached from the point of view of a purely surface-level reading, attempting to track everything that occurs using logical reasoning. If Phantasm does one thing, it is to defy logic.

The movie sets the stage for this in its opening minutes when The Tall Man assumes the form of a beautiful woman and seduces his first on-screen victim. How can The Tall Man do this? Why did he turn back into his regular form in the middle of a graveyard rendezvous? Don’t ask questions of Phantasm expecting firm answers; you must meet the movie on its own terms, experiencing its horrors through the eyes of its lead characters that are just as confused as you might be.

Even as The Tall Man’s sinister plan and intentions become clearer as the movie continues, almost none of the actual answers are given to the audience. This can no doubt cause some audience members to lose interest, but when you know the movie is operating on a different wavelength and is more concerned with making you feel for these characters and giving you a new experience, it’s okay that it doesn’t fully explain the why and how of every choice it makes. You may feel differently, or you may find Phantasm as wild as it really is.

The Entire Phantasm Franchise Is Worth Watching

After the success of the original Phantasm in 1979, a sequel quickly followed. Like Halloween before it, this independent movie found its way into the studio system for its follow-up, with 1988’s Phantasm II arriving from Universal Pictures. The sequel didn’t fare that well at the box office, but that didn’t stop the franchise from finally giving us three more movies across the decades. In the end, the first four movies in the series were written and directed by Coscarelli, who co-wrote and produced the fifth.

The good news for anyone who watches the original Phantasm and vibes with its unique philosophies and storytelling, the entire franchise can also be found on Peacock. It’s quite rare for all five of the Phantasm movies to be streaming at all, but the fact that the entire series can be found in one place is something horror fans should celebrate. This is one of the weirdest and most consistent horror franchies of all-time, featuring largely the same creative voice across its entries and even bringing back the same actors despite the many years in-between films.

There’s nothing out there quite like Phantasm. From a one-of-a-kind mythology that gets deeper across each sequel, to a unique villain that cannot be put into a box like so many other boogeymen, it’s a series that defies expectations and logic. Phantasm and its sequels aren’t built around how it can creatively kill people to entertain the audience; they’re born from the imagination of one mind, and it’s a trip worth taking.