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Angus Scrimm

Angus Scrimm took an unusually winding route to becoming one of horror cinema’s most imposing figures. Born in Kansas City, Kansas, in 1926, he studied drama at the University of Southern California but initially built his career with words rather than performances. He worked as a journalist and editor for publications including TV Guide, Cinema Magazine and the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, then wrote liner notes for Capitol Records releases by artists ranging from Frank Sinatra and the Beatles to Arthur Rubinstein and Itzhak Perlman. That work brought him a Grammy for the liner notes to the 1974 album Korngold: The Classic Erich Wolfgang Korngold. The award was credited to Rory Guy, the name Scrimm also used for his early film roles. After several minor supporting parts in the early 1970s, Scrimm found the role that gave his acting career its defining shape: the Tall Man, chief villain of Don Coscarelli’s independent horror film Phantasm (1979). Already approximately six feet four inches tall, Scrimm amplified the character’s severe, looming silhouette by wearing undersized suits and platform shoes. It was a simple but effective piece of visual construction, turning his natural height into something even more unsettling on screen. The Tall Man opened the way to steady work in horror, while Scrimm also continued performing in theater and television. His screen presence was especially suited to characters who could control a scene through stillness, stature and a measured sense of threat rather than constant movement. Yet his career was broader than that signature image suggests: his credits encompassed film, television and voice acting, and he later held a recurring role as an SD-6 agent on Alias. Scrimm died in 2016, leaving behind a career that connected journalism, music writing and performance—and demonstrated how one precisely judged horror role can define a screen persona without fully containing it.