The Ghoul Next Door

“Pantasm II,” this year’s sequel to the 1979 sleeper, ghoulishly picks up where it last left off.

The Tall Man, an alien mortician played by Angus Scrimm, still is on the graveyard shift, exhuming small-town corpses and transmogrifying them into hideous dwarfs.

So you’d think that the man behind the Tall Man would have grown used to the terror he still strikes in his fans. Not so Scrimm, whose real name is Rory Guy, a guy who fancies himself as a witty William Powell instead of the twisted super for some outer space outfit trafficking in cadavers.

“I probably wouldn’t have ever done a horror (role) had (director) Don Coscarelli not offered me the part,” Scrimm said. “He had the perception to see that I was capable of a role which was such a complete departure from my previous endeavors.”

But, Scrimm confesses slyly: “The incongruity of it just delights me.”

The 62-year-old Scrimm, who won a Grammy in 1974 for his album note-writing talents but has since played only a handful of film roles, worries about being typecast.

“It’s a rather self-limiting role,” he acknowledges. But Scrimm, a name he invented to hide his off-campus acting jobs from his former acting professor at USC, defends his character.

The 1979 version of “Phantasm,” Scrimm says, revived the popularity of the horror movie. “The ‘Friday the 13th’ and ‘Halloween’ movies and their endless sequels,” he added, “were part of this new wave of films which has never stopped.”

The Universal Pictures release can also be seen as a metaphor for the depopulation of rural America, he posed half-jokingly. “Agriculture alone can’t keep the (small towns) going. Meanwhile, the old people keep dying and the young people are leaving.”

And though the sequel has been criticized for replacing its predecessor’s humor with gruesome, machine-inflicted violence, Scrimm insists the Tall Man would never really commit such outrages as plunging an embalming needle into the pale throat of Liz, his teen-age adversary played by Paula Irvine.

“Somehow, I feel that he never really would go through with it,” Scrimm said. The Tall Man “lives a somber existence, and the kids help relieve the tension. He enjoys their spunkiness.”