Thread by @AlexandraErin

Scream Guy: Who was the killer in Friday the XIII?

me: Too easy. Who killed Tommy in Phantasm?

Scream Guy: The Tall Man.

Other Scream Guy: No! Dude! It was the Lady in Lavender.

First Scream Guy: They're the same person.

me: No one. It was a dream.

Scream Guys: But was it?!

Then they point out that they're obviously still going to kill me anyway and I point out I wasn't even there in the first place because there is no way I would have picked up a landline if I wasn't expecting a call, leaving them to helplessly wonder

THEN WHO WAS PHONE?

I don't think any speculative/genre movie that's overtly about dreams has ever nailed the dream logic experience as much as Phantasm does. Much of the rest of the series leans away from that towards more straight sci-fi horror, to its detriment.

The root of "phantasm", shared with "fantasy", "phantom", and "fantastic" refers to an appearance. In English the f-spelling is strongly associated with imagination vs. reality, where the ph-spelling is largely strongly associated with ghosts and apparitions, cf. phantom.

The somewhat old fashioned word "phantasmagoria", largely out of currency outside of horror circles, hearkens back to a time before that split and possibly helped solidify it, as it was used for a type of theatrical special f/x show that grew out of phony spiritualism techniques.

So a word that had connotations of both fantastical things and of apparitions became strongly associated with spooky and shocking spectacles, an experience somewhere between going to a horror movie and a touring a modern staged haunt.

In truth, the structure of the movie Phantasm may be a happy accident of the circumstances of its birth as a self-funded personal project driven by far more ideas than money. But "Phantasm" really is the perfect name for it, despite the lack of ghosts or immaterial spirits.

...at some point I stopped putting self-deprecating disclaimers like "It's time to make learning fun</blatant lie>" before musing about etymology because my own amusement justifies their existence sufficiently for me to make them.

Tall Man vs. Freddy crossover called Nightmare at Morningside, wherein Freddy kills the Tall Man in his dreams then somehow wakes up and finds out that was *his* dream and while he's trying to wrap his head around that, the Tall Man appears and asks, "You think you're awake now?"

Also, the etymology rambling will probably keep the first tweet from going too far, but just in case: I am aware that the slasher in Scream is called "Ghostface" and not "Scream Guy". I was referring to the two guys playing the role within the story as Scream Guys.