What happens when a franchise that has been relegated to the straight-to-video dumpster gets a lifeline from one of the hottest writers in Hollywood? In 1994, just one week after Quentin Tarantino walked away from the Oscars with an Academy Award for Pulp Fiction, his longtime friend and Pulp Fiction co-writer Roger Avary revealed that his next dream project was the fourth Phantasm movie.
It was an ambitious plan to resurrect Don Coscarelli’s bizarre horror franchise. Avary had a wild script, Coscarelli was on board to direct, and the proposed movie was unlike anything the series had attempted before.
It never happened. Instead, Coscarelli had to start over with a fraction of the proposed budget, a mountain of salvaged props, footage left over from the original Phantasm, and one of the strangest investor pitches imaginable: a model wearing a bra made from the franchise’s signature silver spheres.
The funeral for Phantasm was beginning. Or was it? This is the story of what happened to Phantasm IV: Oblivion.
After Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead arrived in 1994, the future of the franchise was uncertain once again. Universal had relegated the third movie to home video, making it increasingly difficult to imagine Phantasm returning to theaters. Then Roger Avary came calling.
Fresh off the success of Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs, Avary could have pursued virtually any project he wanted. Instead, he contacted Coscarelli about making another Phantasm movie. Avary was a longtime fan of the series and had known Coscarelli since the late 1980s, when the two spent time together during the production of Survival Quest. At some point, Coscarelli mentioned an idea involving Reggie traveling through a horrific wasteland.
Avary never forgot it. When he approached Coscarelli in 1994, even the director tried to convince him that making another Phantasm was a bad idea. The franchise was already struggling to escape the direct-to-video market. Avary didn’t care. He wanted to make the ultimate Phantasm sequel, and Coscarelli intended to direct.
Over the following months, the pair developed a screenplay originally titled Phantasm 1999 A.D.. As the years passed without the project getting made, the title changed to Phantasm 2013 and eventually Phantasm’s End.
The story was considerably larger and stranger than anything the franchise had attempted before. The Tall Man had devastated the United States, leaving destruction and death behind him. Reggie drove through the wasteland in his beloved Cuda, determined to save Mike and finally kill the Tall Man, accompanied at one point by a squirrel monkey named Titi. There was also a military suicide squad called the Commandos, led by Sgt. Heckelman, whose mission was to stop the Tall Man.
And then there was Bruce Campbell. Coscarelli announced at Phantasmania that Campbell would play the lead Commando. It would have been an incredible pairing, although it never came to pass. Campbell and Coscarelli would eventually work together on Bubba Ho-Tep in 2002.
The proposed Phantasm sequel, however, continued to grow increasingly ambitious. And increasingly expensive.
The proposed budget climbed to at least $8 million, a huge figure compared with the movies the franchise had been making. The script also pushed the mythology into some truly bizarre territory. In various drafts, Mike and the Tall Man disappeared for long stretches. One version reportedly brought Mike back only as a corpse, while Jody suffered a similar fate.
The screenplay also attempted to explain the Tall Man’s origins. At one point, the character was controlled by a gigantic entity called the Tall Mankind, essentially a massive Tall Man head that sounded like something from The Wizard of Oz. The idea would have offered an explanation for how the Tall Man could seemingly replace himself every time he was killed. For a franchise built around dream logic, mystery, and unanswered questions, that may have been a step too far.
The bigger problem was money. Studios weren’t interested in spending millions of dollars on such an unconventional sequel, even with Roger Avary’s name attached. Coscarelli and his collaborators tried cutting the proposed budget roughly in half, but it still wasn’t enough. Eventually, Avary moved on to make The Rules of Attraction. Coscarelli went back to the drawing board.
That is where Oblivion began.
Coscarelli didn’t initially write Oblivion as a replacement for Avary’s movie. Quite the opposite. The intention was to create a much cheaper Phantasm that could actually get made while keeping the door open for Avary’s much larger sequel. The budget was approximately $650,000. For comparison, the previous Phantasm sequels had reportedly cost between $2.5 million and $3 million.
With that kind of money, Coscarelli had no choice but to get creative. Frequent franchise collaborator Kirsten Deem encouraged him to scale the story back and return to the spirit of the original movie. The result was one of the most inventive decisions in the entire production: Coscarelli went back to Phantasm. Literally.
The production discovered unused outtakes and deleted footage from the 1979 original and incorporated it into the new movie. Additional dialogue was recorded to make the old footage work with the new story. Because Michael Baldwin, Bill Thornbury, Reggie Bannister, and Angus Scrimm were all returning, Coscarelli could seamlessly connect footage of the younger characters to their adult counterparts. No expensive digital de-aging. No elaborate visual-effects trickery. Just old footage, new performances, and some clever editing. Necessity became the mother of invention.
The movie was originally going to be called Phantasm 4EVER. Publisher Richard Elkin, however, suggested the title Oblivion, taken from the Phantasm Fanzine. The title stuck. It also allowed Coscarelli to sneak the Roman numeral IV into the subtitle.
As usual, Phantasm IV picks up after the previous movie. Reggie is released by the Tall Man, while Mike takes off in a hearse searching for answers. Reggie follows him at Jody’s request.
Mike’s journey quickly becomes a nightmare. The golden sphere inside his skull has left him unable to trust his own perception of reality. He experiences visions, memories, and flashbacks as the Tall Man manipulates his understanding of time and space. Some of those flashbacks incorporate the unused footage from the original Phantasm.
One particularly memorable sequence reveals that the Tall Man was once trapped and hanging from a tree. Young Mike frees him after the Tall Man telepathically convinces the boy that he will leave him alone. He does not.
Mike’s present-day journey becomes increasingly surreal. The Tall Man appears in the hearse, and the vehicle eventually takes Mike into the desert, where he attempts to escape his torment by hanging himself. The plan doesn’t work. Mike eventually travels through a dimensional gateway and encounters Angus Scrimm in another form: Jebediah Morningside, a mysterious old man living in the nineteenth century.
The encounter seems to offer a glimpse into the origins of the Tall Man. But this is Phantasm. Coscarelli gives the audience just enough information to make the mystery bigger rather than actually solving it.
Meanwhile, Reggie gets his own nightmare. His journey turns into a low-budget Mad Max, complete with demon cops, exploding cars, deadly women, and silver spheres. One woman, Jennifer, even has breasts that transform into silver spheres. If that sentence sounds ridiculous, remember what franchise we’re discussing.
Mike also discovers that he has developed telekinetic abilities. He uses them to crush a scorpion, kill a dwarf, and even construct his own sphere from engine parts.
Eventually, Jody’s role becomes even stranger. He appears to be an unreliable antagonist before the movie reveals that he actually died in the previous story and has been controlled by the Tall Man.
Mike uses his homemade sphere and another exploding vehicle in an attempt to finally destroy the Tall Man. It doesn’t work. Another Tall Man emerges through the gateway. Because, of course, he does.
The Tall Man removes the golden sphere from Mike’s skull, apparently killing him. Then comes one of the strangest endings in the series. Mike’s final words seem to travel backward through time, reaching a younger Mike and Reggie as they drive together. The two hear the sound but dismiss it as nothing more than the wind.
The credits roll.In true Phantasm fashion, the ending works as both a conclusion and a potential continuation. It presents a peaceful image of Mike and Reggie before the Tall Man entered their lives while simultaneously suggesting that there may be no escaping him.
For a movie made for roughly $650,000, that’s an impressively ambitious idea.
The production was no longer dealing with Universal, which meant Coscarelli had more freedom. Unfortunately, it also meant he had very little money. To help secure financing, Coscarelli put together a makeshift trailer featuring the classic Phantasm theme. The production even hired a model to wear a bra constructed from silver spheres outside the hotel suite where Coscarelli was pitching potential investors. That was the kind of guerrilla filmmaking Oblivion required. The production also raided Coscarelli’s storage units, where he had saved props, costumes, and other materials from previous Phantasm movies. Those leftovers became the foundation of the new film.
Michael Baldwin initially wasn’t thrilled about returning. The Phantasm movies had been notoriously difficult productions, and the money wasn’t exactly impressive. What changed his mind was the opportunity to become a hands-on producer.
Bill Thornbury, meanwhile, had largely stepped away from acting but returned after reading Coscarelli’s script and hearing his enthusiasm for the project.
And then there was Angus Scrimm. The Tall Man himself returned, even turning down a role in The X-Files movie to do it.
Effects artist Mark Shostrom ultimately went to The X-Files, but some of his former assistants joined Oblivion instead. Those assistants included Bob Kurtzman, Greg Nicotero, and Howard Berger, the future founders of KNB Effects Group.
Reggie Bannister also returned, giving the movie some of its funniest and most action-heavy moments.
Filming began in October 1997. The production started with location work in places including Death Valley, Lone Pine, and other Southern California locations. The conditions were brutal. Locations were remote, sometimes hours from lodging. Temperatures could swing dramatically between the daytime heat and freezing nights.
On the first day, even craft services and portable bathrooms failed to arrive at the correct location. The cast’s RV dressing room ended up being used to store equipment.
And the budget problems didn’t stop there. For the scene in which Mike attempts to hang himself, the production actually rented and planted a tree in the desert.
For another sequence, Bob Ivy played the demon cop, wearing what was essentially a simple rubber mask that reminded the crew of Freddy Krueger. The makeup team transformed it into something considerably more convincing.
Ivy also performed one of the production’s most dangerous stunts. The demon cop had to explode inside a car, climb out, and walk away while completely engulfed in flames. Ivy later recalled getting badly burned during the stunt because his socks weren’t flame-resistant and his boots caught fire.
Another scene required Reggie to get a mouthful of the demon cop’s blood. The production shot the moment three times using a mixture of Karo syrup, sorbitol, and food dye. That’s low-budget horror filmmaking at its most gloriously disgusting.
Ivy also performed the stunt involving Jennifer’s car crash, driving a vehicle without a roll cage off a ramp and flipping it onto the road. He reportedly managed to land it back on its wheels. The production then blew the car up. Of course it did.
When production moved into the warehouse, the crew had only two complete sets and two partial sets. Jebediah’s laboratory, a hotel room, and the recreated mausoleum were largely constructed from old sets and salvaged props. The art department consisted of only two people. Somehow, it worked.
The production even needed to capture the devastation supposedly left across America by the Tall Man. Getting the permits for a conventional shoot would have cost thousands of dollars. So the crew went guerrilla. They filmed in Los Angeles’ Miracle Mile district in the early hours of Thanksgiving morning, when they knew the streets would be largely empty. They didn’t have permission. When a police car appeared, Angus Scrimm reportedly pretended to be picking flowers.
That’s the kind of story that perfectly captures the production of Phantasm IV.
Not everything made it from the screenplay to the finished film. One significant change involved Mike’s final moments. The original script called for Reggie to give Mike a grenade necklace to use when all hope was lost. The idea was that Mike could detonate himself rather than allow the Tall Man to do anything with his body.
His scripted final words were also different: “Goodbye, buddy. I’ll see you in Hell.”
Another memorable change involved Angus Scrimm. The Tall Man originally had a joke immediately before removing the golden sphere from Mike’s head: “This won’t hurt a bit. Well, maybe just a little bit.” Scrimm hated the line. He believed it undercut what should have been a serious moment and argued with Coscarelli about it late into the night. The two eventually walked away from one another while the exhausted crew waited for the disagreement to end.
They ultimately shot the scene both ways. Scrimm thought he had won. He hadn’t. Coscarelli kept the joke in the final movie.
Even though Avary’s massive sequel never got made, pieces of his ideas survived in Oblivion. The infamous sphere-breast sequence originated in Avary’s screenplay. Avary himself also appears in the finished film as one of the dead soldiers in a coffin during a battlefield flashback. He was credited under the name Yrava Regor. That’s Roger Avary spelled backward.
Coscarelli’s movie was essentially built as a bridge: something small enough to make while preserving the possibility that Avary’s much larger Phantasm story might eventually happen. It never did.
Despite the crew’s hopes, Oblivion didn’t return Phantasm to theaters. Orion released the movie directly to video in the United States in October 1998. It did receive festival screenings, some of which featured appearances by the cast and crew. There is no reliable public box-office figure because the movie wasn’t theatrically released, although Coscarelli later said it performed well financially.
Critically, the response was less enthusiastic. The movie currently sits at 29% from critics and 42% from audiences on Rotten Tomatoes.
The reactions are fairly predictable for a Phantasm sequel. Some viewers disliked how little of the story made conventional sense. Others appreciated that the franchise had never really operated according to conventional rules. Some wanted the Tall Man’s origins explained. Others argued that explaining the Tall Man would destroy precisely what made the character frightening. Both sides have a point.
There is no pretending that Phantasm IV: Oblivion is a polished blockbuster. It’s confusing. It’s obviously cheap. Some performances and effects show the limitations of the budget. But that misses what makes the movie interesting.
Coscarelli and his crew didn’t simply try to imitate the original Phantasm. They found a way to return to it. They incorporated unused footage from the 1979 movie. They brought back the original cast. They repurposed old props and costumes. They built sets with almost nothing. They performed dangerous stunts because there wasn’t enough money to do them any other way.
And somehow, beneath all the insanity, Oblivion retains the heart of the franchise. The friendship between Mike and Reggie is still there. The graveyards are still creepy. The gore is still plentiful. The Tall Man is still terrifying. And the movie remains committed to the strange dream logic that made Phantasm unlike virtually any other horror franchise. For a series that had been pushed toward direct-to-video oblivion, that is no small achievement.
It also wasn’t the end. Despite years of speculation that Oblivion might be the final Phantasm, the franchise eventually returned with Phantasm V: Ravager in 2016.
Roger Avary’s giant Phantasm sequel, however, remains one of horror’s great movies-that-never-were. And perhaps that’s fitting. Phantasm has always been a franchise about death, resurrection, alternate realities, and things that refuse to stay dead. Phantasm IV: Oblivion is the perfect example. The franchise was supposed to be finished. Instead, Coscarelli and his crew dragged it back from the grave with $650,000, some old footage, a warehouse full of salvaged props, a handful of dangerously committed filmmakers, and a woman wearing a silver-sphere bra outside a hotel.
And somehow, it worked. That is what happened to Phantasm IV: Oblivion.
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