Orphaned brothers Jody and Mike live in a small town whose residents are being mysteriously murdered. With the aid of ice-cream man Reggie, the brothers discover that Mike's bizarre nightmares about the local mortician — known simply as The Tall Man (Angus Scrimm) — are all too true, and that the funeral parlour houses a gateway to another planet. One of the most consistently weird horror series ever conceived, Phantasm was the brainchild of writer-director Don Coscarelli, who applies a sort of hallucinatory logic to the progressively strange goings-on as the brothers and the ever faithful Reggie face off against The Tall Man, his horde of dwarf minions, and his terrifying weapon: a flying, spike-studded silver sphere with a predilection for impaling people's heads.