By the Fall of 1989, the slasher was on borrowed time. Jason Takes Manhattan had limped into theatres that summer to the franchise’s worst box office yet. A Nightmare on Elm Street 5 would follow in August, pulling respectable numbers but signaling creative exhaustion. Halloween 5 landed later that year to middling results. And Wes Craven’s Shocker, positioned as the next big franchise starter – died on arrival in late October.
The genre that had ruled the early-to-mid 80s was hemorrhaging. Leatherface and Chucky had a stab at it in 1990, and both were met with apathy. Audiences were tired and the formula had calcified. The MPAA had spent years neutering the kills and the Reagan-era moral panic around slashers had given way to something else. Between Fatal Attraction in 1987, Misery in 1990, and Silence of the Lambs in 1991, Hollywood was done cashing in on “embarassing” low-budget splatterfests and began an era of “elevated” a-list psychological thrillers that made stabby masked killers feel quaint.
Phantom of the Mall never had a chance.
Not because it’s worse than the half-dozen other slashers released that year – it’s not. But because it arrived at the exact moment the genre stopped mattering. It’s a perfectly serviceable late-80s slasher with a gimmick: the Phantom of the Opera, relocated to a Southern California shopping mall. Eric, a disfigured arsonist’s victim, haunts the bowels of the mall, picking off the corrupt developers who destroyed his life and his girl. There’s a half-decent revenge plot buried in there. The kills are decent. The mall setting offers opportunities for creativity.
And yet.
When it arrived on Home Video in September of 1989, the shelves were already crowded with franchise titles. Phantom of the Mall barely got a theatrical run before being dumped to video. The audience had moved on. The straight-to-video market would keep the genre on life support through the early 90s, but theatrical slashers were functionally dead.
One of the bigger deals about the movie was Pauly Shore, already test-driving his “Weasel” persona in a supporting role, a couple of years before MTV and Encino Man would make him a thing. Buuuudy.
But none of that mattered. By the time the 90s rolled around, Jason was going to hell, Freddy was getting ‘retired’, Michael Myers was MIA, and Hollywood’d B-merchants had pivoted to serial killer procedurals and skinemax-y erotic thrillers. The slasher wouldn’t meaningfully return until Scream revived it with self-aware irony in 1996.
Phantom of the Mall deserves a second window shop, not because it’s some sort of lost masterpiece, but because it’s a solid example of what the genre was capable of when it wasn’t phoning it in. It’s competent, occasionally clever, and more narratively coherent than most of its contemporaries. It just had the misfortune of arriving at the exact moment the coffin lid was closing.
Alas poor Eric, we hardly knew ye. -Pop