I believe it was inevitable. As a child I was drawn to horror films. There were three very obvious and concrete reasons that helped rewire my eleven-year-old brain into an obsession with horror.
• A Saturday night horror movie show on my local television station entitled Chiller, which I would watch religiously.
• Less than ten miles from my childhood home stood the cheesy and infamous Hollywood Wax Museum with “living” statues of every classic monster from Frankenstein to the Mummy.
• Somehow, pre-Internet I managed to find and secure a subscription to Forrest J. Ackerman’s seminal monthly horror magazine, Famous Monsters of Filmland.
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On Saturday nights my babysitters were given explicit instructions by my parents that under no circumstances was I to be allowed to watch “that horror show” on TV. I learned quickly that my teenage babysitters had much more important things on their minds than policing my TV habits. They loved the telephone and talking to their girlfriends and boyfriends, so we reached an easy détente. They were under no requirement to entertain or even supervise me and could talk on the phone to their heart’s delight. In exchange, I was at liberty to watch Chiller as much as I wanted. Chiller played some extremely freaky movies that terrified and fascinated me at the same time. Films like The Hypnotic Eye, in which a deranged hypnotist used mind control to force a series of women to disfigure themselves in scalding hot water, or Caltiki: The Immortal Monster, where the spirit of a vengeful Mayan goddess is awakened and mayhem ensues, or the terrific Enemy from Space (aka Quatermass II), in which Brian Donlevy discovers that diminutive aliens have infested an industrial facility with the goal of infiltration of the British government and total domination of world society. Films like these played every Saturday night along with genre staples such as Godzilla and the entire catalog of the Universal Classics including Frankenstein, Dracula, and The Mummy, and they all had a profound impact on me.
My first visit to the Hollywood Wax Museum in Buena Park, California, was a real eye-opener. This musty old museum of wax figures was filled with large dioramas re-creating scenes from classic Hollywood movies. There was Judy Garland and Shirley Temple and Laurel and Hardy. But around the corner, down a dark corridor, I nervously stumbled upon the horror section and found life-size wax re-creations of Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s monster, Bela Lugosi as Dracula, and Lon Chaney Jr. as the Wolf Man. These horror icons, who thrilled and terrified me on the screen, now loomed right there before my very eyes. Better still, the museum gift shop sold color postcards of each diorama and I was able to collect images of my favorite monsters to pin to my wall and gaze at every night before bed. Once I started collecting them, my elementary school friends did too, and they became a coveted currency of trade on the playground. Sheer horror heaven!
Famous Monsters of Filmland was delivered every month to my door. Each issue featured a graphic and glorious depiction of a movie monster, from classics like Frankenstein and The Phantom of the Opera to movies from the fifties such as The Creature from the Black Lagoon and then-current horror stars like Vincent Price. The magazine contained display features with all the classic and current horror movies, many of which never played in my hometown. I have no memory now of how I came to find Famous Monsters of Filmland, let alone order a subscription, as this was not a widely circulated publication. But somehow I did, and then many years later was surprised to learn that every contemporary horror filmmaker I admired also tracked down and subscribed to Famous Monsters of Filmland in their youth. It was like an infection, preying on young minds susceptible to horror!
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Neither of my first two films set the box office on fire. Making my two indie movies, which turned out pretty darn well under the circumstances, was extremely hard work. For them not to be seen by anyone was absolutely and utterly soul-crushing. When casting about for a new project I firmly resolved to make a movie that would be commercial and could not be denied. I remembered that someone once told me it was common knowledge that horror films always made money. For me it was a moment of crystal clarity. I loved horror films + horror films make money = I will make a horror film. Simple arithmetic.
In the first public screening of Kenny & Company something astonishing happened. In my film, on Halloween night, our three young heroes enter a haunted house located in a suburban garage and a neighbor in a very freaky monster mask leaps out. While attending this screening, I witnessed the entire audience gasp and jump. For a young filmmaker this was one powerful response. I determined then and there that I needed to make a horror film that was truly scary and one that would make audiences jump. The more times the better.
Though neither Universal nor Fox had made much money on my previous films, my investors on both films had done very well from the studio advances. On top of that, my father and I had both made some money too and could reinvest that back into a new project. No studio was beating down my door to finance my films, but there seemed like there might be a financial path to funding an indie horror film on a lean budget of just under three hundred thousand dollars. But, what kind of horror film would I make?
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The fear of death and dying came early to me. I was just seven years old, lying in my bed one night, unable to sleep. Like a sledgehammer out of the dark, it suddenly hit me. I would not live forever, no matter what. One day this body of mine—this head, these hands, these feet—would be dead. It’s pretty sad to remember, but I think this may have been the first actual panic attack I ever experienced. From that point on I had a pretty healthy fear of death. Humans are the only sentient species on this planet who know they will die and yet have developed an extremely powerful defense mechanism against this knowledge: Denial. Total denial. And like the rest of my species I had developed an extreme version of this. It won’t happen to me. I’ll never step in front of that bus. Every plane I fly on will be mechanically sound. I will not die … for now. Later, maybe, but I won’t worry about it now.
Like most everyone else I had developed a sincere trepidation of the symbols of death—graveyards, mausoleums, funerals. And it struck me that setting a film in this world would be the perfect place to create fear.
In my hometown of Long Beach there also happened to exist an immense three-story marble mausoleum now known as Forest Lawn–Long Beach. Back then its name was Sunnyside and this place was immense and creepy. The sound of your own footsteps would echo down the marble halls to great effect. I started thinking about Sunnyside as a location for a horror story. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that a movie that was set in mausoleums, cemeteries, mortuaries, and embalming rooms could be creepy, strange, and scary.
Coincidentally, Reggie Bannister came over one day and told me he had just read a Ray Bradbury novel entitled Something Wicked This Way Comes and suggested it as the basis for a new movie. What excited Reg was that the Bradbury book featured a story about two boys investigating a strange dark carnival which arrives in their small town. Reg believed that Kenny & Company actors Michael Baldwin and Dan McCann would be perfect to play the leading roles of Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade. I quickly read the book, and loved it. Reg was right. Something Wicked This Way Comes was an elegant and melancholy fantasy of youth with themes of belief, fear, and aging.
My producing partner Paul and I decided we would attempt to track down Ray Bradbury and secure the movie rights from him, for no upfront money of course. Somehow Paul tracked down Ray Bradbury’s office phone number and address. This was back in the day when very few people had answering machines so when we would dial his number, the phone would just ring and ring with no answer. We decided we would visit Ray Bradbury in person—just drop in and talk to him.
As we exited the elevator in the Los Angeles office building, Bradbury’s door was immediately apparent. It was the one with a doormat out front with the words GO AWAY emblazoned on it. Taped to the door was an impassioned letter from Mr. Bradbury stating he was a working writer and did not have time for interruptions. Both stern and pleading at the same time, it begged the reader to leave him alone and posted the name and address of his agent for business inquiries. After reading the blunt warnings neither Paul nor I had the nerve to knock on that door. We copied down the agent information and left.
Ray Bradbury’s agent was all too excited to share the good news with us. “You guys called a week too late. I just closed a deal with Disney for them to make a movie of Something Wicked This Way Comes.” After this wild-goose chase I determined it was time to get serious and write my own horror film.
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One of the movies I loved and would eagerly watch on Chiller again and again was director William Cameron Menzies’s terrifying 1954 film Invaders from Mars. An element from this film was a great inspiration to me, and a theme I thought I might be able to incorporate into my new film. In Invaders from Mars, one night a young boy witnesses a Martian spaceship land in the field behind his house. Strange things start to happen in his town and to his neighbors but no one will believe him when he tells them about the spaceship. Yet this kid knows. Why could I not have a young boy as the protagonist in my new film and have him see strange things up at the local graveyard—and no one would believe him, not even his beloved and trusted older brother? It would be up to this courageous and smart young kid to investigate and discover the source of the mystery. And who to play this boy? Michael Baldwin, of course.
With this concept in mind I journeyed up to Big Bear Lake in the nearby San Bernardino Mountains to be able to write without distraction. Paul came up to the cabin to brainstorm for the first couple of days, but then he left and I was alone. I pretty quickly cobbled together a simple scenario of a boy living under the care of his older brother, both of them orphaned since their parents had died. I spent time developing their personas because I was convinced that if I expected audiences to respond to the thrills and chills, they would first need to be fully invested in realistic and believable characters. A mortuary, mausoleum, and graveyard would be the key settings of this tale. With no telephone and no TV, just pen and paper, I had no choice but to write.
Isolation plays strange tricks with the mind, especially when one is writing a horror film. I would purposely force myself to wander around the woods surrounding the cabin after dark. I had a flashlight in my pocket but I would keep it there, off. When the moon was down, it was pitch dark and the devil himself could be standing beside me and I would not know it. It was scary to stand blind and vulnerable in the dark, and I would force myself to think about my young protagonist, Mike, and what he would be feeling as he moved through the graveyard and explored the forbidding mausoleum.
I now needed to develop the overlord, a villain for the story who would inhabit and rule this domain of death. This bad guy would need to be one tough customer. As I continued to develop this character, I decided it would be smart to try to figure out who might play this potent bad guy, just like I had done with Michael Baldwin. And then I remembered the actor who had intimidated me on my first film, that very tall man who could shut me up with just a glare. Our villain would be played by Angus Scrimm.
In every film, the heroes need a sidekick, an unassuming loyal friend who will be there in the third act to support them with badly needed strength and courage at a critical moment. I decided to play against this typically macho trope, with our character instead being a free-spirited, guitar-slinging ice cream vendor. And my choice for this postmodern sidekick would be the inimitable veteran of my previous two films, Reggie Bannister. This turned out to be one of the best creative decisions I ever made in the making of Phantasm.
While I was up in the mountains Paul bumped into Angus in Hollywood at a screening. Paul decided to let him know what I was working on. As Angus tells it, Paul mentioned that I was working on a new film, a horror film, and that I was writing a pivotal role for him as an alien. “An alien…” Angus repeated as his mind raced with the possibilities of playing an immigrant from another country, working his way up by his bootstraps to success in America. Paul stopped Angus in his tracks. “Not from another country, Angus. From another world.”