Sound And Vision: Don Coscarelli
In the article series Sound and Vision we take a look at music videos from notable directors. This week we look at two strikingly different music videos by Don Coscarelli.
Phantasm looms as a shadow over Don Coscarelli's work. His weird and wonderful horror series, full of feverish dreamlike scenery and phantasmagorical bad guys has stood the test of time. The Tall Man is a villain for the ages.
Still, you can't help but feel that Coscarelli is much more than just his mainstay series. Take for instance Bubba Ho-Tep, part crazy horror comedy, part reminiscence on getting older. Or John Dies At the End, that blends his signature sense of surrealism with something more apocalyptic. And lest we forget that Coscarelli did more than just horror, he also did epic fantasy with the likes of The Beastmaster and family friendly comedy with Kenny and Company and Jim, The World's Greatest. In his best works, Coscarelli aligns his views with the viewpoint of children and teens, and shows us that the world is off-kilter. This teenage frenzied point of view is on display in one of two music videos Coscarelli directed.
Dio's Last in Line (see below) shows us a rad eighties style BMX biker boy riding an elevator, when he is suddenly attacked by tentacles. The elevator is a portal to another world, where several different alien races and humans are enslaved by a race of monsters, who are beholden to a giant eldritch God. The enslaved people are tortured with electric shocks while they play videogames on a loop. This is an apocalyptic horror fantasy scenario, filtered through the lens of videogame slacker culture.
It's all very eighties, but also feels like Coscarelli is filtering the world view and hobbies of a teen through his usual surrealistic horror scope. That prevents this video from being Reefer Madness: The Video Game Edition, or a PSA about too much screen time. It is also quintessentially Coscarelli, where there are hints of Epic Fantasy in the backdrops and designs, that feel very Boris Vallejo of Frank Fazetta inspired. The teen protagonist feels like it came out of one of Coscarelli's family movies, while the horror elements and heavy make-up feel very Phantasm.
Still, Coscarelli grew up, and his more mature outlook on life aged with his protagonists. If the first Phantasm is a horror movie about teenhood, the later installments eventually catch up with Coscarelli' and his protagonists age in style and feel. The later installments are as much about getting older as Bubba Ho-Tep is. The second video Coscarelli directed is therefore a much more subdued affair. Made for a band called Remington Ridge for a tune called Cheyenne. It is a easy-listening country-song, with a fairly standard fare music video, where the singer reminisces about driving back to family, while we see the long trips on the road play out in footage.
The singer in question might be of interest to Coscarelli-fans tho. Bill Thornbury is, next to being a country singer, also an actor, who starred in the Phantasm franchise. In the original film there is a moment where he, still much younger, sings a song called Sittin' Here At Midnight, one of his own compositions. Coscarelli providing the visuals for a song at a later age and stage, in a song about wanting to return, is a full circle moment.
Coscarelli might have been trying to escape the shadow of Phantasm, in some ways, by letting the last installment be directed by David Hartman. But because Hartman co-directs the music video for Cheyenne, and the star is Bill Thornbury, it also feels like Coscarelli is staying loyal to his cinematic family. In both Cheyenne and Last in Line we see a scope that Coscarelli brings to his direction that goes way beyond The Tall Man, his henchman and his tools he has range. But phantasmagorical fingerprints are present in both as well. Phantasm might be a blessing and a curse, and Coscarelli is so much more than just that franchise. But what a legacy that franchise is.
