Phantasm Ravager kept nagging at me. For several years I had been sitting on twenty minutes of amazing Phantasm scenes already in the can that I knew fans would love to see. But we never told a soul about it. However, Phantasm fans continued to badger me about making another Phantasm film. It slowly dawned on me that this footage could possibly be the basis of it. Once the distribution of John Dies at the End was finished up, I finally made a decision that we needed to take the Ravager material and finish it as a feature film. It was simply too good to ignore.
I started meeting with director Dave Hartman every Saturday morning for a coffee shop breakfast and we would brainstorm ideas about how we might take the disparate sequences we already had in the can and assimilate them into some kind of coherent Phantasm story. It was a huge challenge and as we worked, it reminded me a lot of the story challenges I faced when I made the original film.
Over the years, as our Phantasm characters aged and their battle against the Tall Man continued, I jokingly would tell friends that one day our heroic Reggie might end the series in a wheelchair, maybe with tricked-out weaponry, still fighting the Tall Man to the very end. Reggie’s dogged loyalty and relentless pursuit of the Tall Man was one of the themes I cherished in the series. I may have mentioned this to Dave, and in one of our brainstorming sessions, the concept of dementia came up. We started asking each other rapid-fire questions about how this devastating illness might affect the mind of our intrepid hero. It immediately became apparent that this concept could form a logical conclusion to the series. In the first film we meet young Michael, at the beginning of his life, trying to comprehend the reality of death, and in the fifth and final film we could have Reggie as an older man facing these same implications as well. In the first film, Mike’s dreams are penetrated by the Tall Man, and in the last, Reggie’s delusions. And best of all, we could link all the scenes we had previously shot together by filming new sequences of now adult Michael’s conversations with Reggie, who would be stuck in an old folks’ home … trapped in a wheelchair. Perfect!
With newfound vigor we started making plans to make the final push to shoot the new connective tissue. Instead of some short films or webisodes, David Hartman would now be directing the final, full-fledged Phantasm conclusion.
The budget on Phantasm Ravager, by necessity, was almost half of the original. We were making a targeted film, by fans, for fans. By nature, it had to be the lowest-budget Phantasm on record. How could we possibly do it? The short answer—the same way we shot the earlier short segments, with that microcrew of five or fewer people. We called in favors everywhere, including from the wonderful actor Derek Mears (who played Jason in the Friday the 13th reboot), who spent an entire day masked in a brown cloak shooting a crazy sequence as a seven-foot-tall “giant dwarf-creature,” which was unfortunately cut from the film in the final edit.
Our wives made huge contributions. Kathleen built many of the sets and the critical hand props. Shelley handled all of the wardrobe and much of the other logistics. I’ll never forget the day she pulled up to the house driving a five-ton truck loaded with set dressing, her wide grin barely visible over the dash. Gigi Bannister, Reggie’s wife, handled makeup effects. There was more grunt labor involved for everybody than I care to remember. But the process was genuinely fun, both exhilarating and exhausting. We had no one lording over us, we just set out to shoot interesting sequences every shoot day. We also imposed on a lot of our friends to come out on a rotating basis and help us for free. Since we had no release date, there were no time demands. Sometimes we would spend an entire month just prepping for one weekend shoot.
The final sequence of the screenplay called for Mike’s long-lost brother Jody to make a dramatic appearance as a battle-hardened survivor of the war versus the Tall Man. As scripted, Bill Thornbury would come roaring into the story driving an armor-plated “Battlecuda,” a weaponized version of the Plymouth muscle car the brothers drove in the first film. For the past thirty years I had held on to the Phantasm II car and eagerly volunteered it to make a reprise appearance in the new film. I drove the car out to Dave’s house and we pulled it into his garage. Over the next two months Kathleen went to work on her “art project.” Using a variety of tools and textures, including chain-link fencing and even peanut oil and cocoa powder, she transformed my car into the thundering beast of a battlewagon our heroes would drive.
One of Dave’s superb choices was to bring his family friend Stephen Jutras into the Phantasm world to portray the badass warrior character of “Chunk.” Dave’s inspired idea was that Chunk would be a hard-core tough guy who could pull Reggie’s ass out of the fire time and again, yet the actor portraying him would be diminutive in stature. This made for a unique on-screen buddy pairing that was rooted firmly in Phantasm’s offbeat sensibility. I was thrilled to include this new character and actor because for years our series had been pushing the edge of political correctness in our depiction of little people as scary monsters. Now we had a great actor, who also happened to be a little person, who could rival Reg’s heroics and could battle the dwarf-creatures side-by-side with him. A personal favorite scene of mine is when Chunk blasts a dwarf-creature just as it’s about to chow down on the hapless Reggie. Stephen’s line as his character kicks the creature’s corpse: “I hate those little motherfuckers.” It’s priceless.
Since no one was getting any younger and it was becoming apparent that this was probably Angus’s last Phantasm film, Dave suggested that we shoot a coda sequence in which we offered up a ray of hope to Phantasm fans that some of our younger cast might one day carry the franchise. The scene involved the irrepressible Chunk battling his way back from certain death and meeting up with a long-lost Phantasm favorite, Gloria Lynne Henry reprising her signature role as Rocky from Phantasm III.
We returned to the desert where we began the project several years before. In the intervening years, the collapsing house where we filmed the opening scenes of the film had been burned to the ground by vandals; now it made for the perfect postapocalyptic setting for the final scene with Rocky and Chunk. It was pretty cool that we stayed true to our roots and shot that entire scene with just our traditional five-person crew.
The final day of shooting with our original actors called for two memorable scenes. First up was the melancholy death scene of our never-say-die hero Reggie. The scene called for him to take his last breaths confined to a hospital bed with his two best friends Mike and Jody at his side. To watch Dave brilliantly direct this tender moment, one we will all face one day, was simply heartbreaking. Actors Michael Baldwin, Bill Thornbury, and Reggie Bannister were at their finest and brought such subtlety and empathy to the scene. A bit of Phantasm serendipity occurred during the last take of Reggie’s death scene: on the street outside the set a random ice cream truck drove by, and the tinkling bells of “Three Blind Mice” added a poignant live musical score to the scene. I had worked together with these fine actors for almost four decades, and their performances that day had me weeping and beaming with pride at the same time.
We then went on to shoot what would be Angus Scrimm’s final scene in a Phantasm movie. The scene found Reggie coming awake, years in the past, in a strange vintage hospital with Angus portraying the alter-ego character of Jebediah from Phantasm Oblivion in the bed beside him. Actress Kat Lester appeared dramatically at the end of the scene and was delightful. Watching Angus play this scene while confined to a bed was astonishing. Even though he was battling advanced age and serious illness, I watched this still-powerful actor conjure magic right in front of us.
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The music of Phantasm has always been a key component of its success. We were so lucky to be able to enlist veteran Phantasm composer Christopher L. Stone to score Ravager. Chris was there at the very beginning on the original Phantasm as a young sound designer, in an uncredited role, personally creating the guttural dwarf-creature voices using his analog Roland SVC-350 vocoder. Fred Myrow began collaborating with Chris musically on subsequent films including Phantasm II and Phantasm III. Chris then single-handedly scored Phantasm Oblivion. For Ravager Chris created the ultimate Phantasm score while staying true to Myrow and Malcolm Seagrave’s original musical themes. It is a soaring, moving, and majestic score that carries the viewer through the triumph and heartbreak at the Phantasm saga’s core.
We premiered Phantasm Ravager at Fantastic Fest in Austin. The Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar was packed with Phantasm fans eager to witness the unveiling of the final chapter in the series. From the opening images the screening was a great success; the fans loved the movie. I was so relieved for Dave. He had stuck through the long years of our unconventional production and labored for thousands of hours, alone, working on the film’s expansive visual effects. After the screening, there was a hosted Q&A with Dave, myself, and the cast. It immediately became apparent that we had done well with Ravager when the first audience question was asked. “What are your plans for Phantasm 6?”