Phantasm

A boy, grieving his parents, becomes convinced the mortician at the local funeral home, the Tall Man, is stealing the dead, crushing them into dwarf slaves, and shipping them to another dimension through a gate between two silver posts.

Coscarelli made it independently, and the film's structure is a dream's: it does not obey continuity, the plot mutates, and the imagery, the chrome sphere that drills into a forehead, the severed fingers that turn yellow and become insects, arrives with the wrong-footing logic of a nightmare.

Angus Scrimm's Tall Man, gaunt and enormous, delivering a single word, is one of the great horror figures, and the sphere is one of the great original weapons.

It was reworked in the edit for years and the seams show, which only adds to the dream texture.

Four sequels followed across four decades, all with the same cast. This is where the strangeness began.