Any of us who’ve been around zombie movies long enough have seen the Tall Man’s plot before, stripped of its more surreal elements, in the form of really awful Bela Lugosi zombie movies like “King of the Zombies” that often involved a band of square-jawed every-man heroes stuck in a creepy old haunted plantation where Lugosi’s character creates zombie slave labor for Nazi spies in a poor-man’s Frankenstein Laboratory (doomed to explode by the end of the movie), while a Mantan Morleand or Steppin Fetchit character steals the show as the “odious” comic relief (and probably the best and most entertaining actor in the voodoo zombie film.)

Angus Scrimm does a better, more menacing Lugosi-style zombie ringleader than poor Bela Lugosi ever did, and, although they don’t get much screen time, the zombie dwarfs have certainly been brought back from the dead to serve as slave labor for some sinister conspiracy acting through the Tall Man, as the centerpiece of explicit sci-fi plot. Simply remove the odious comic relief from the old Voodoo Zombie movies, trade in the Nazis for eldritch abominations from another dimension, and filter the whole thing through a feverish, dream-like lens borrowed from the original “Invaders From Mars”, and you have “Phantasm”.

Sure, the voodoo elements are barely visible in “Phantasm”, but then they were barely present as little more than set dressing in films like “King of the Zombies”, too.

Possibly the only real Voodoo Zombie element missing from “Phantasm” is that we were spared having the zombie dwarfs turn on the Tall Man at the end of the film before the creepy funeral home and its alien laboratory exploded; had that been present, it would have been a more obvious spiritual successor of the Voodoo Zombie film, but really, that’s just the small stuff, isn’t it?

no.

not a zombie movie.

I am going to say Zombie movie, but only marginally so. There’s no denying that the dead are coming back to life and are little bastards who do attack people.