Tall Man

The Tall Man (Jebediah Morningside) is a fictional character and the main antagonist of the Phantasm series of horror films. The Tall Man first appeared in the first Phantasm in 1979, and his most recent appearance in the film Phantasm: Ravager in 2016. In all of his film appearances, the Tall Man has been portrayed by Angus Scrimm, while he is voiced by Jeff Bergman in Mike Tyson Mysteries. Creation and conception According to Don Coscarelli (director of the first four Phantasm films), the idea was to create a horror film about a boy inside a funeral home because he thought the way Americans handled dead bodies was mysterious. Angus Scrimm was chosen to portray the main villain because when Coscarelli and Scrimm worked together in a previous film, Scrimm was able to frighten a child by just staring at him while raising one eyebrow (this action later becomes one of the Tall Man's most iconic behaviors). Coscarelli also got the idea to feature flying spheres as Tall Man's minions. According to him, the idea came from his dream as a teen where he was being chased down corridors by a flying chrome ball. Later, when he wrote the Phantasm screenplay, he modified the spheres so they were able to drill and drain the blood from its victims. Fictional character biography Originally, the Tall Man was a mild-mannered 19th-century mortician by the name of Jebediah Morningside. After years of performing funerals and burying the bodies of those who had died, he began to develop a fascination with any possible connection between our world and the world of the dead. Jebediah's research eventually led him to construct a machine that enabled him to travel through time and space. After going through the portal for the first time, travelling to a destination unknown, he promptly returned, irrevocably changed and henceforth known as the Tall Man.