Phantasm II: Don Coscarelli’s mom wrote a script for the sequel years before he did

One of the horror genre’s many low budget indie classics is the 1979 film Phantasm (watch it HERE), which was made on a budget of around $300,000 by writer/director Don Coscarelli when he was in his early twenties. Shot on weekends with rented equipment, Phantasm took almost two years to complete… and the result was a box office success that is now widely regarded as one of the greatest horror films ever made. 2024 marks the 45th anniversary of Phantasm – and it also happens to mark the 10th anniversary of author Dustin McNeill’s book Phantasm Exhumed: The Unauthorized Companion… so this seemed like the perfect time to dig up an interesting story from McNeill’s book, where he reveals that Don Coscarelli’s mom wrote a script for Phantasm II years before her son got around to working on the sequel!

Released in March of 1979, Phantasm had the following synopsis: The residents of a small town have begun dying under strange circumstances, leading young Mike to investigate. After discovering that the Tall Man, the town’s mortician, is killing and reanimating the dead as misshapen zombies, Mike seeks help from his older brother, Jody, and local ice cream man Reggie. Working together, they try to lure out and kill the Tall Man, all the while avoiding his minions and a deadly silver sphere.

Don Coscarelli would eventually go on to write and direct Phantasm II (1988), Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead (1994), and Phantasm: Oblivion (1998), and also co-wrote and produced Phantasm: Ravager (2016), which was directed by David Hartman. But when Phantasm distributor AVCO Embassy expressed interest in moving ahead with a sequel in 1979, Coscarelli was hesitant. He thought following one horror movie with another would be a bad idea, as it would get him labeled as a director of horror and nothing else. So he turned his attention to The Beastmaster – and left Phantasm II to his parents. His mother, Shirley Coscarelli, wrote the script for a sequel that would be produced by his father, D.A. Coscarelli (who had also produced the first movie).

This Phantasm II would have reportedly “offered audiences a female-friendly adventure in contrast to her son’s more masculine original. Child star Kristy McNichol was rumored to star as Mike and Jody’s cousin, newly arrived in town to investigate the incident at Morningside.“

The sequel was announced with a full-page ad in Variety in the fall of 1979, with production expected to start in January of 1980 for a 1980 release. But that didn’t happen. If the movie had been made, Angus Scrimm was on board to reprise the role of the Tall Man (which he ended up playing in all of the films), and he told McNeill, “I remember liking Shirley’s script, which had the wit and inventiveness of the bestselling novels she soon started writing. … I seem to recall it was partly set in an abandoned old movie theater. Unhappily, the financing never fell into place, but if it had, who knows what changes it would have wrought in the Phantasm story arc as we know it today?“

That’s just one of the many interesting behind-the-scenes stories McNeill dropped into Phantasm Exhumed, which contains pretty much all the information you could ever hope to learn about the making of the first four Phantasm movies. (He later covered Phantasm: Ravager with a second book, Further Exhumed.) You can pick up a copy of the book at THIS LINK.

The Phantasm II that was made and released in 1988 has the following set-up: Released after seven years in a mental hospital, Mike convinces his old pal Reggie to join forces with him to hunt down and destroy the Tall Man once and for all. Mike’s visions lead the two to a quiet little town where a horde of flying killer balls aim to slice and dice their gruesome way through everyone.

Are you a fan of the Phantasm franchise? What do you think of this information about Shirley Coscarelli’s script for Phantasm II? Let us know by leaving a comment below.