One movie. Five people, living or dead, at the screening. Who and why?

Today’s screening: “Phantasm”

Wonderfully creative, unapologetically strange and beautifully low budget, Don Coscarelli’s 1978 horror film “Phantasm” contemplates mortality and the odd pageantry of Western funereal practices through a consummate horror film villain: The Tall Man – a corpse-enslaving inter-dimensional being masquerading as an undertaker.

August Wilhelm von Hofmann (1818-1892), Chemist

One of the most influential organic chemists of all time, Hofmann created formaldehyde by passing methyl alcohol vapors over hot platinum. Perhaps the film doesn’t cast the embalming business in a strictly positive light, but I think Hofmann we’ll be able to enjoy it anyway. It helps that the last (film-related) time he was resurrected was to fact check “Flubber.”

Mary Roach, Author

“Stiff,” the first of Roach’s three works of humorous and informative scientific journalism, examines the varied fates of the human body after death, ranging from crash test dummies to objects of putrefaction experimentation. The book, however, does not cover transformation into undead alien chain gang dwarves. A purposeful, fear-inspired omission? My best guess is probably. I heard she left a famous art museum incident out of her ghost-themed book “Spook” after getting threatening calls from a certain Carpathian.

Will Green, Effects Artist

Green masterminded the construction of “Phantasm”’s famous flying sentinel sphere (in real life, a series of modeled spheres and partial spheres designed for different shots and angles), a head-seeking orb that latches onto a victim’s skulls, drills into his brains and pumps out his blood. In this case, the screening is just a pretense to get Green to help with my T-Bat© – a dual-purpose t-ball accessory that can be used as the tee or the bat. Legally, if I add a skull drill, I can advertise it as “multi-purpose.”

Albert Einstein (1879-1955), Genius

Einstein puzzled over some of the greatest scientific conundrums of the 20th century, including the plausibility of space travel and the nature of time. You know how the corpses in “Phantasm” are converted into dwarves in order to condense their mass, such that they can withstand the powerful gravity of the Tall Man’s dimension? I think it’d be fun to have an actual formula for calculating how much any given individual’s height would need to be condensed relative to their respective mass. Also, if he has time, I still don’t understand “Primer.”

Harry Burt (1875-1926), Confectioner

In 1921, when Ohio dessert maven Harry Burt began coating ice cream in fudge and impaling the result on a wooden stick, the Good Humor Bar was invented. Burt also outfitted manned distribution vehicles with small freezers to create the first ice cream trucks. Reggie in “Phantasm” drives an ice cream truck. Burt would be happy to see the enduring cultural impact blah blah whatever. I just want some free ice cream, okay?

Twitter this