The screenplay I came home from the mountains with and then later refined could be condensed into this short synopsis: “The residents of a small Oregon town have begun dying under mysterious circumstances. Following the death of his parents and then a friend, thirteen-year-old Mike finds himself compelled to investigate. After discovering that the town’s mortician (a sinister and malevolent character Mike nicknames ‘the Tall Man’) is responsible for murdering and reanimating the dead, Mike seeks help from his older brother, Jody, and best friend and ice cream man Reggie. Working together, these three friends must lure out and confront the Tall Man, all the while avoiding his rabid minions and his flying chrome killing device, the deadly silver sphere.”
When I was fifteen years old I experienced what turned out for me to be a profound dream. This odd nightmare found me trapped inside a maze of immense, never-ending corridors, unable to find my way out. High in the corner of one of the corridors there was a CLUNK and a WHOOSH, and a chrome sphere, about five inches in diameter, appeared and zoomed toward me. I ran. And ran. And as this strange orb hurtled toward me, it suddenly evaporated. I slowed to a walk, then again heard the CLUNK and WHOOSH and spotted another chrome orb jetting toward me. I was terrified. Again I ran. As the ball neared, I could feel it touching the back of my neck, and I suddenly awoke to find myself safe in my bed.
Have you ever had a dream stick with you for months or years after you experienced it? I frequently forget my dreams immediately upon waking, but this one I remembered. A few years later, as I was writing the screenplay that was to become Phantasm, I found myself remembering this odd dream from my past. I immediately decided to use this nightmare to create a signature weapon for the sinister undertaker character I was creating. What if, on his exploration of the Tall Man’s mausoleum, my intrepid young hero Mike was confronted by one of these orbs? As it barreled toward him he would turn and flee, but what if, unlike me, as it neared, Mike dived to the floor and it screamed right over his head, just missing him? Good stuff, yes? But where would it go from there?
For a while I considered having the ball latch on to someone, and then we would see a wicked-sharp hypodermic needle extrude and, spider-like, inject the victim with some poison. Then I decided to make it more dynamic. What if instead of a needle, a drill bit came out instead, drilled into the cranium, and then pumped out the poor sap’s blood! Now that was an idea a young horror filmmaker could sink his teeth into. While still in high school Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch exposed me to blood flow as an art form. Peckinpah worked in pints. I decided to work in gallons. As preproduction progressed on Phantasm, this “ball” idea would become an obsession, an ongoing research-and-development project for the entire crew as we struggled to figure out work-arounds to several major problems. How would the ball fly? How would the ball drill into an actor’s head without killing him? And how would we pump out blood, a lot of blood, and make it look realistic?
I distinctly remember at the time telling Paul and other crew members that this would be the signature effect of the film and we should be prepared to allocate whatever resources we had to this one gag at the exclusion of any other. There would be nothing more important in the film than getting the ball scene right.
One of our capable crew members, Marc Schwartz, was tasked with finding a solution to the flying question. Marc did a lot of work with very thin piano wire. The idea was to stretch it the length of the mausoleum hallway and then use small eyelets to attach the sphere to the wire. We tried to push it along the wire or tug it along with a string, but all these tests looked just terrible. At one point we even attached a model rocket engine to the ball, but it was far too unstable.
We didn’t have much luck with the question of drilling the actor’s head until Janis, our script supervisor from Jim The World’s Greatest, introduced us to an effects wiz named Willard Green. Will was a gentle, grandfatherly mechanic who owned a movie effects shop on Vine Street in Hollywood called Turntable Rentals and Sales. Will was an expert practical effects fabricator, but his bread and butter was building huge rotating turntables used by auto companies for their commercials and trade shows.
Paul and I went down to his shop and I explained my idea for this killer sphere sequence. Will was immediately intrigued and came back to us a few days later with a detailed bid and some sketches. Will offered to build us a rig that would contain extruding blades, a spinning drill, and include a blood tube with syringe. He suggested creating vacuum-metalized plastic hemispheres, which could snap onto the front of the rig. Using this plan we could shoot the sphere straight on, or profile, just by swapping out different hemispheres. Even better, Will had figured out the blood-pumping rig. He would provide us with a separate hemisphere that attached to a hose, and he demonstrated how the actor could run the blood hose up through his sleeve. By holding the hemisphere just so, he could hide the blood hose, which would run down his pant leg to a pump and a bucket of stage blood. He even offered to loan us a pump to spout the blood.
We immediately made the deal with Will, thrilled with so much potential for progress on the sphere scene. Will was not much of a horror fan. However, the more he worked with us, the more he found himself getting caught up in our enthusiasm and bloodlust for this weird scene. Will took it even further when he offered to provide us with some shredded foam rubber that we could mix into the stage blood, to give the effect of brain matter pumping out of the sphere.
A couple weeks later we were back at Turntable Rentals and Sales and Will gave us a demo of the finished sphere rig. It mounted handily on a C-stand (the old crew saying “Gaffer tape and C-stands hold up the industry” is so true), with gleaming chrome blades, which would snap out when a lever was thrown. There was a similar setup with a chrome-plated drill bit. As we took delivery, Will handed us an invoice that read:
Design and construct Spherical Space Weapon special effects system as per instructions from Paul Pepperman & Don Coscarelli. Consisting of sphere, activating mechanisms, protective head guards, bleeding effect, guide harness. Loan of drill motor, speed control, pump. Total price $1,163.00
For that sum total of eleven hundred and sixty-three bucks, Will had succeeded in figuring out a big chunk of how our sphere scene would work. Now we just needed to figure out a way to make that damn ball fly!
* * *
We entered into leases on two properties in which to shoot Phantasm. The set for the brothers’ house would be a two-story home set in a run-down suburb near Van Nuys airport. The house was fairly spacious and had a number of bedrooms where our crew, including me, could live during production. Since nobody was being paid up front, including a place to live at no cost was a welcome bonus. This was a smart lease: the house also served as our production office and central headquarters for the production.
We next leased a small new warehouse in an industrial district of Chatsworth. This was where we would build our mausoleum and other necessary sets. Just six years after meeting director Douglas Trumbull in his Canoga Park warehouse, I was following in his footsteps and shooting in my own warehouse just a few miles away.
I enlisted Mark Scott Annerl, my best friend from high school, to design our mausoleum set. Though Mark’s day job was as a top landscape designer at Mark Scott Associates in tony Newport Beach, California, he had some fun laying out the plans for the main location for our horror movie. I explained how I hoped the set would seem much more expansive than the small warehouse we had to work in. Mark came up with a clever design in which we could change statuary so that the hall could show different looks. He also designed a hallway intersection, which he referred to as the “Octunda,” in which characters could exit down one of eight nonexistent halls and then reenter at the other end, thus doubling or tripling the size of the set.
Marc Schwartz volunteered to head the mausoleum construction, as he had some building experience. He, Kurt Tiegs, and Stephen Miller went to work building our mausoleum despite the fact that none of them had any previous set-building experience. Consequently they built that set as solid as a house. Our only complaint was that every few days we would receive a call from them asking us to bring them more wood.
The warehouse we leased in Chatsworth was brand-new construction, and what was so exciting for me was that the slab cement floor was completely flat. This was a godsend: it would allow smooth tracking shots as the characters moved through the mausoleum. I wanted Phantasm to be filmed in a more fluid style than my previous films, and rolling our camera dolly over a smooth, level surface without having to build track would allow me to achieve that easily.
To create the traditional mausoleum look of marble, they tried painting the plywood surface but it never looked realistic. Enter my mother, who had a simple suggestion: to cover the walls with marble contact paper. We ended up purchasing over a hundred rolls of the stuff, but once it was applied correctly, it gave the set an amazingly realistic look.
Even though she received the following credits in pseudonym form—wardrobe by Shirl Quinlain, production designer S. Tyer, and makeup by Shirley Mae—my mother, Kate Coscarelli, never really got the credit under her own name that she deserved on Phantasm. She did everything: designed and sewed the dwarf-creature robes, costumed all the actors, and designed and applied their makeup, including creating the look of Angus as the Tall Man. She borrowed one of my father’s black suits and took it to a local tailor and had it fitted and narrowed to enhance his tall, thin appearance. My mom requisitioned a pair of my father’s black boots and had them outfitted with elevator lifts to make the man tall. She also constructed and fabricated the alien insect creature that torments the characters of our two brothers, Mike and Jody, and, to top it off, she even cooked for the cast and crew. My mother was the true unsung hero of Phantasm.
Other loyal Phantasm crew members enlisted for the duration and made significant creative contributions to Phantasm, including: Dena Roth, Jacalyn Welan, Adele Lustig (who was also responsible for fixing me up on a first date with my future wife!), Michael Gross, Wendy Kaplan, Steve Chandler, John Zumpano, Colin Spencer, Doug Cragoe, Mori Biener, James Becker, and Bruce Chudacoff. I could not have made Phantasm without them.
* * *
To save money our resourceful production manager, Bob Del Valle, cold-called various vendors trying to get equipment and props donated to our production. His first success was with Fender Guitars when they donated the Stratocaster and Twin Reverb amplifier that Bill Thornbury ultimately would play on-screen. Next, Bob convinced Hodaka Motorcycles to contribute a brand-new Road Toad dirt bike for young Mike to ride in the film. But best of all, since the screenplay made casual reference to the beer several times, Bob was able to talk Moctezuma Brewery into delivering fifty cases of Dos Equis amber beer to our production house. We featured this great beer throughout the film, but most of all, our entire crew drank a lot of it. Many mornings it was beer for breakfast!
On my previous films we shot mostly on weekends. With Phantasm, I really made an effort to shoot it conventionally. However, when shooting began we managed to go only six days before we were so logistically out-of-control that our low-budget production ground to a stop. To get the production value I wanted, and to solve the various puzzles of all the special effects, we needed time. So again, we only shot on weekends, and then Monday through Thursday Paul, Bob, and I could regroup to scout locations, develop special effects, and solve the myriad other problems for upcoming shoot days.
* * *
With two films under my belt and now another in progress, I was developing my own growing company of repertory actors, which contributed a slew of great acting talent to Phantasm. We had Michael Baldwin back from Kenny & Company, Angus Scrimm from Jim The World’s Greatest, and Reggie Bannister from both.
There were two new, major cast additions. For the role of Jody, Bill Thornbury was submitted to us by an agent, and I was immediately charmed by his friendly and affable nature. Bill was an accomplished musician and had just recently taken up acting. My favorite casting technique was to include already-cast actors, so I paired Bill with Michael Baldwin for an audition and the two bonded immediately. It was obvious to all of us that they could effectively portray the brothers that anchor the film.
Kathy (Kat) Lester was nineteen years old. In her first interview, she immediately dazzled Paul and me with her seductive charm. She came to the interview clad in a slinky lavender dress, and little did I know what a significant piece of wardrobe that would become. Again I brought in a previously cast actor, Bill Thornbury, to read their introductory scene, and sparks immediately flew. In the original screenplay her character was simply an underling of the Tall Man, and for her first few scenes there was no intention of anything else. But Kat had a compelling way of grabbing the camera’s attention, so rather than let her upstage the Tall Man, I crafted a weirdly novel way to merge them. This small decision really made Phantasm unique and challenged the audience. Neither Kat nor Angus learned about this character change until principal photography was complete. To say they were both later surprised would be a huge understatement.
* * *
Due to our budget limitations, I had no choice but to be the cinematographer again on Phantasm. Both shooting a film and directing it at the same time requires a lot more physical labor and concentration than simply directing alone. It requires designing the lighting setups, checking exposure, and physically figuring out the camera placement and movement. For my most recent films I have left the cinematography to others, and I certainly do miss it. Yet for someone who grew up around cameras, lenses, and film, holding a camera and watching a scene unfold through the viewfinder is what filmmaking is all about. It is so easy to change the angle or to change a lens. You just do it—you don’t need to ask anybody. You are front and center in the closest proximity to the actors possible, so you can talk to them intimately or whisper instructions from right behind camera even during the shot.
We were lucky to meet Roberto A. Quezada, who joined up and became a key member of the Phantasm team. Roberto had a terrific visual sense and an innate ability to divine photogenic locations. He took over the lighting and made a major impact in the visual style of the film.
* * *
When older brother Jody is lured to the graveyard for a sexy midnight tryst with the Lady in Lavender, I wanted their encounter to be both shocking and seductive. The problem was that I had no actors! In their defense Kat Lester and Bill Thornbury were both engaged to be married. Neither was eager to remove any clothing on-screen prior to their weddings. Try as I might I could not convince Kat to bare her breasts and Bill refused to lower his pants under any circumstances. What’s an indie filmmaker to do? The only answer was to treat it like a special effects sequence. I needed to break the sequence up into its component parts and just figure out a way to achieve each shot. I was able to get them to film the approach to the wide, flat tombstone where the soiree would take place. They even agreed to lie on top of one another as long as the clothing stayed on. Paul managed to track down a “nude model” in Hollywood who volunteered to film the scene topless for a fee. We then convinced a crew member to stand in for Bill and shot the model, while wearing Kat’s lavender dress, tugging his pants down. The continuity of the scene was tricky to edit, but I was able to use cutaways to young Mike, who was watching the encounter from a distance. At the first public screening, when the close-up of the photodouble’s breasts pops on the gigantic screen Kat’s mom blurted out to her, “You should have used your own breasts. Yours are much better.” Kat agreed and to this day wishes she had shot the scene herself. Oh well.
* * *
We still had no idea how to levitate that sphere. We had figured out a way to get it to fly around a corner. That was easy. We simply hung the sphere by a piece of fishing line from the top of the mausoleum set and pushed it; like a pendulum, it rounded the corner nicely. As we were working on the scene and discussing the flying sphere conundrum, somebody on the crew asked, “Why don’t you just chuck the damn thing?” Could we throw the ball from behind the camera and then reverse the film?
Enter David G. Brown, our art director and a key collaborator in the making of Phantasm. Dave was an extremely hardworking and resourceful crew member with a sunny disposition whom we had recruited out of UCLA. Dave had also done some baseball pitching in high school. Bingo! We set up a test and lined Dave up behind camera with just enough room for a pitcher’s windup.
Reverse motion is easy to achieve today using software, but back then we used an old-school technique from the dawn of filmmaking. We mounted our 35 mm Arri IIC camera upside down and filmed in normal forward motion. We then flipped the piece of film from end to end, which created the reverse motion effect. We also shot at a slightly accelerated camera speed to slow the ball down and add some otherworldliness to its motion. When we viewed the tests it was stunning. Everything worked in our favor. Using reverse motion made the ball move slowly at first and then accelerate as it passed by camera. Plus, we found the sweet spot on camera speed at sixty frames per second. We had made the ball fly!
Since Dave Brown’s baseball skills worked so well, we put him to good use in the next shot of the sequence, in which Mike dives by camera and the flying sphere whizzes over his head. In this setup, Michael Baldwin would get a running start and leap through frame onto some foam pads on the mausoleum set floor. On cue, Dave would hurl a fastball right above him. This gag went down like clockwork, and when we reviewed the footage in the editing room, it worked like a dream.
In the next major sequence, the mausoleum Caretaker character, played by the very game actor Ken Jones, pops up and grabs Mike, who then bites into the flesh of his arm. As Mike wriggles free, the sphere smashes directly into the Caretaker’s forehead. We struggled to figure out a way to have the ball hit Ken without hurting him. We tried a ball on a string and, pendulum-style again, swinging it into his forehead. It smacked him pretty hard and bounced right off, looking fairly ridiculous. Finally we settled on going back to our previous success and shooting the shot in reverse motion.
The idea was to attach the ball to Ken’s forehead with tape, then yank it off with fishing line and film it in reverse. We affixed the ball to his head with tape and started filming. The tape was not working and the sphere kept drooping prior to the shot. The tape was also tearing Ken’s skin raw, forcing my mom, who was doing makeup, to keep adding more and more powder to cover the welt. Finally we jettisoned the tape and went with a small loop of fishing line, tied around Ken’s head. We did a take this way and it worked perfectly.
After finishing up the impact scene we had some fun torturing young Michael Baldwin with the bloody bite scene. To free himself from the Caretaker’s grasp, I had envisioned Mike biting down hard on Ken’s arm, causing blood to flow. The way we decided to do this was to fill Mike’s mouth with stage blood and have him struggle with Ken and then chomp down and release the blood. The problem for Michael was that he would have to hold several ounces of the foul-tasting stage blood in his mouth for a good minute as we rolled camera and then ran through the beginning of the scene. The kid was a trooper and made it look extremely realistic. If you watch the sequence today, you can see which shot it is as Mike’s lips are tightly sealed shut until he bites. He got it in just two takes and I don’t think he ever enjoyed a tooth-brushing like he did after that scene.
The major scene left to complete in the sequence was the drilling, draining, and killing scenes. For the drilling, we sat Ken in a tall director’s chair and placed Will Green’s sphere rig directly in front of him. We then placed a small marble wall panel in front of the camera to hide it in the sphere reflection. A small hole was cut in the panel for the camera lens to shoot through. The fun part about this scene, if you pause and still-frame the movie at this point, is that if you look closely into the reflection in the sphere you can see exactly how we did it.
My mom wanted to protect Ken’s forehead from the spinning drill bit so she worked her makeup magic and glued a small piece of plastic to Ken’s forehead right at the point of impact for the drill. She then covered it with a thick skin-replacement makeup. She also covered the sphere blades with the same material, along with some stage blood, to create the effect of them impaled in his forehead. We were now ready to shoot.
Paul would operate the drill. His orders were to push it out to reveal the blade, start it spinning, and then push it forward into Ken’s head. Dave Brown was selected to work the blood syringe, and I watched the scene behind camera through the viewfinder. We did several rehearsals so Ken knew when the drill would come out, when it would start spinning, and when it would cut into his “skin.” This was the money shot of the film and a hush came over the crew as the camera rolled.
I called for action. Ken gasped as the drill came out of the sphere and grabbed the ball. I gave a hand signal to Paul, who started the bit spinning and moved it into contact with Ken’s “skin.” Ken screamed and I signaled for Dave to squeeze out the blood, which would shoot down the drill bit. Dave pushed on the blood syringe and … nothing! The blood tube had clogged! Meanwhile the drill bit was cutting into the makeup and the artificial skin was tearing away from Ken’s forehead. I frantically gestured to Dave, then yelled, “Blood!!!” Dave rammed the syringe with all his strength and finally, SPLAT, the clog broke free and blood spattered all over Ken’s forehead.
Watching the scene in the editing room the next day, we were all stunned. This so-called mistake ended up making the scene great. As the drill cut into the makeup it genuinely looked like a drill tearing into real flesh, and the sudden, explosive splat of blood, and Ken’s surprised reaction, made it look like the drill had realistically punched through the hapless Caretaker’s skull and directly into his brainpan.
Ah, the serendipitous delights of horror filmmaking!!!