R.I.P. Angus Scrimm, Phantasm’s Tall Man

Angus Scrimm, star of the Phantasm films, has died. According to Phantasm director Don Coscarelli’s Facebook page, Scrimm died peacefully Saturday surrounded by his friends. He was 89.
Scrimm was born Lawrence Rory Guy on August 19, 1926 in Kansas City, Kansas, and, according to Hero Complex, decided to become an actor after seeing Gary Cooper in 1929’s The Virginian. (It was a Frankenstein and Dracula double feature that infected the young man with the horror bug.) After graduating from high school early, he and his older sister made their way for Los Angeles, where Scrimm studied theater at USC under Cecil’s brother William C. DeMille.
In between theater gigs, a young Scrimm took on whatever jobs he could, including working as a publicist for KTTV and writing book reviews for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. “I was working at TV Guide, which paid about $50 a week, and looking for a way to supplement my income,” the actor told PDTV in 2014. “ There was an ad in the paper for a music writer. I was a great record fan, so I applied, and it turned out to be Capitol Records.” During his tenure at Capitol, Scrimm penned liner notes for artists like Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, and even the Beatles under the byline “Rory Guy”; he won a Grammy in 1974 for “Best Album Notes, Classical” for Korngold: The Classic Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Even after the success of Phantasm, Scrimm continued to write liner notes.
Scrimm’s portrayal of The Tall Man in 1979’s Phantasm solidified the character as one of the silver screen’s all-time scariest boogeymen. Director Don Coscarelli had previously worked with Scrimm in his 1976 film Jim, The World’s Greatest, where he played an alcoholic father. The shoot was a logistical mess, according to the director, and Scrimm would sometimes sit around the set all day without shooting a single scene. “Don was terrified to tell me [about the delays],” Scrimm recalled to the L.A. Times, a sentiment that Coscarelli echoes: “I was a bit intimidated by him. [So] when I came around to making a horror film, I thought he would be good and have that kind of presence.”