In 1979, a 21-year-old filmmaker warped countless young minds with a terrifying bit of surreality called Phantasm. A quarter of a century later, he's entertaining us with a tale of Elvis and JFK, both alive (yet feeling their age), as crime-fighters. Jonathan Marlow finally caught up with the director on the eve of Bubba Ho-tep's release, long after Don Coscarelli appeared with Bruce Campbell at the San Francisco Independent Film Festival in 2003...
Coscarelli: It's always a great time appearing with Bruce. You just sort of get him going and then stay out of the way. He's unbelievable in front of a crowd. He really should have been a stand-up comic. That was a fun time, that festival.
Marlow: You were born in Libya?
Coscarelli: It's true. My father was in the Air Force and was stationed over there. For some reason, he decided to bring my mother over there when she was pregnant. Craziness. It's a third world country now but, back then, it must have been a fifth world country. I was only there until I was two and then we came back over. I really didn't catch much of the culture. I do hope to go back now that the relations are warming. It's something I've been waiting for years to happen...
Marlow: ...and shake hands with Muammar Gaddafi?
Coscarelli: I don't know about that! My father talked about the great beaches. He said the beaches are great on the Mediterranean. It's an interesting city [Tripoli]. That's the African part of my life.
Marlow: I should mention that Angus Scrimm is the Max Schreck of my generation.
Coscarelli: [laughs] I'm going to tell him that! He's a great guy. In real life, he is so unlike the character that he plays. He's distinguished, quite funny and kind.
Marlow: Before Phantasm, he first starred in an earlier film of yours - Jim the World's Greatest. How did you end up meeting Angus?
Coscarelli: He was the first real actor I ever directed, the first professional actor who had appeared in anything. Honestly, the source of his characterization of the Tall Man comes out of that fact. I was really young when we made this film. It was almost a semi-student film. I was really intimidated by him. We were so disorganized. We'd call him down to shoot. He'd drive down, an hour drive to our location, and in a dingy apartment in Long Beach, and we'd stick him in a back bedroom at eight in the morning. We'd be shooting all day and we'd never get to his scenes. At about six in the evening I'd have to go back there and tell him that we weren't going to use him. He'd give me this look, this scowl. I think he even raised his eyebrow like the Tall Man. I'd be, "Ah, excuse me... but we won't... be able to... use you... today." "You're NOT?" Out of that, I thought that he'd make a great villain in something. I think that's where that character came from.
Marlow: He gets to display some of his acting chops in the later Phantasms. In addition to the Tall Man, he plays the polite southerner Jebediah Morningside and what appears to be a Civil War doctor in the fourth film.
Coscarelli: He's got a lot of range.
Marlow: Thanks to you, my brother tried the shotgun shell/hammer trick.
Coscarelli: You know, for twenty years I've been waiting... seriously, for a year or two after that movie came out, I thought, "Some kid's going to kill himself and it's going to be my fault." I never heard ever of that happening. Honestly, you're the first one that I've ever heard. He really did try it?
Marlow: He tried it. It didn't work very well.
Coscarelli: Did it discharge?
Marlow: No, thankfully not.
Coscarelli: Thank God!
Marlow: I don't know why he thought it was a good idea. There seems to be a strong "brother theme" in the Phantasm films, even though Jody dies in the first one. Do you have siblings? Where did this whole thing come from?
Coscarelli: That might be the root of it. I have a sister and it's just not the same. I think that I always wanted to have a brother. Jim the World's Greatest, the first film that I made, while it was successful in some respects - in that we got distribution and that helped me to get money to make a second one - it had some flaws. But one of the better things it had was a relationship between two brothers. It was a very similar type of thing, only the brother was just a little younger. I saw that it worked in that film and I thought that I could make it work in Phantasm. Also, I got to know and work with Reggie Bannister on those films. He had such a warm, engaging personality. The idea that these two brothers didn't have any parents - he just melded into that. It was a nice little threesome that they had going there.
Marlow: With Phantasm IV: Oblivion, there is a sense of "getting the band back together." I was startled by how these actors, portraying identical characters, step into these roles two decades later.
Coscarelli: Part of it is that the characters they play aren't far from themselves. Truthfully, Reggie is that character in real life. He's the coolest guy that you'd ever want to meet. He's a genuinely nice guy and a very loyal person. The guy that played the older brother, he was sort of a non-actor when we started and he didn't really pursue acting, so he drew a lot out of his own persona.
Marlow: That's Bill Thornbury?
Coscarelli: Yeah, another really nice guy.
Marlow: How did you end-up casting A. Michael Baldwin?
Coscarelli: He had been in my second movie. It's light-years better than Jim the World's Greatest. If you ever get a chance to see it... it's very hard to find because it's never been out on video, if you can believe it. I'm really going to try to get it out on DVD. All of these actors are in it. It's about these two boys in suburban life. A slice-of-life in a twelve-year-old's life.
Marlow: This is Kenny & Company?
Coscarelli: Yeah. Michael Baldwin plays the best friend of the lead character. Reggie Bannister was the teacher at the elementary school. That's how I met Michael. I think he's one of the best kid actors that I've ever seen. I was so lucky to get him. He really made Phantasm work. It wasn't until later... one of the interesting things that I realized about why the movie was successful - I always used to think that it was the horror, the ball, the Tall Man - but we have a massive fan base of people who come up to me and they go, "I saw that film when I was thirteen and it had an impact on me." In a weird way, the movie is empowering for young teen boys which I didn't realize until many years later how important that was.
Marlow: I can second that. I was ten at the time. One of the things that I see in your films that's rarely present in the work of other American directors that dabble in horror is your touch of surrealism. Your mixing of dream-like qualities with "reality," which reminds me of the Italian horror work of Lucio Fulci and Umberto Lenzi.
Coscarelli: The only Italian director, other than Bertolucci - who doesn't really do any of that stuff - that I was influenced strongly by at the time of making the first Phantasm was Dario Argento and Suspiria. I love that picture and it really had an impact. There was another film that has elements of the dwarf-thing that I took - a Nicolas Roeg film called Don't Look Now.
Marlow: That's what I was thinking.
Coscarelli: Sometimes I feel weird talking about these films because I feel like I steal from them, but I guess that's how everybody makes their movies. Another movie that really had an impact on me at the time was the Polanski picture with Catherine Deneuve...
Marlow: Repulsion?
Coscarelli: It's a great film and so many elements of that movie knocked me out. I filtered that through my own Southern California lifestyle and came up with Phantasm.
Marlow: There are some non-film influences as well. Dune figures into the film.
Coscarelli: Of course. I took that whole scene from there. At the time I made Phantasm, there was no hope of there ever being a Dune movie, so I thought that I'd... and don't forget Invaders from Mars, the original 1954 version that had the young boy that nobody would believe. These are the kinds of movies that I grew up watching. When I got my opportunity to make a horror film, I wanted to do things like them.
Marlow: I have three primary questions about the series. What's with the yellow blood? I guess that it's a way to distinguish the humans from the non-humans?
Coscarelli: I always felt that the Tall Man was a very different character, even though he was in this very normal type of funeral get-up. I just thought that he came from another place. It's just a function of a primary color that hadn't really been done before. Spock had green blood in Star Trek so I didn't go that direction. With yellow, I thought it would be interesting if, when they cut him, something other than red came out.
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