Filming Location: The Phantasm Hanging Tree in Agoura Hills
The Phantasm Hanging Tree from the lost footage of the original PHANTASM shoot.
Some filming locations get bulldozed. Some get turned into a strip mall. And a few, against all odds, just keep standing there on a hillside, looking exactly the way they did when Don Coscarelli pointed a camera at them in the late 1970s.
The scene you almost didn't see
Angus Scrimm hanging from the PHANTASM hanging tree…
If the Hanging Tree doesn't immediately ring a bell, there's a good reason. The sequence shot there …the Tall Man pursuing Mike up the hillside, only to end up strung up from the branches himself ..was trimmed down to almost nothing in the theatrical cut of Phantasm. It's one of the great "what if" pieces of the original film.
But Coscarelli never really let it go. Nearly twenty years later, he mined the original 1979 footage for Phantasm IV: Oblivion, and the Hanging Tree finally got its moment. Mike standing below. The Tall Man above him, hanging, bargaining. Asking to be cut down. Promising to leave and never return. Mike says no. It's one of the most quietly unsettling exchanges in the entire series, and it plays even stranger knowing the actors filmed it two decades before anyone saw it.
How to find it
The address to plug into your GPS is: Kanan Rd & Agoura Rd, Agoura Hills, CA 91301, then when you get there head roughly 400 feet southeast of the intersection. The tree is just off the 101, about 400 feet southeast of where Kanan and Agoura roads meet. Google Map here.
The tree sits at the intersection of Kanan Road in Agoura Hills, California …and here's the part that always surprises people making the pilgrimage: it isn't remote at all. Highway 101 runs almost directly past it. What reads on film as an isolated, otherworldly hillside is a short walk from one of the busiest freeways in Southern California. That's the genius of Don Coscarelli (the ultimate “true indie” auteur) who found a patch of landscape that looks like it belongs to another dimension.
Horror movie fans have made it part of their Southern California horror movie film location visits! Phantastic horror content creator @CodyLovesHorror went several years back! Make sure to follow her here.
Phantastic horror influencer CodyLovesHorror made the pilgrimage several years back!
Go while it's there
Our friends the Grimm Life Collective made an excellent video visiting the tree and lining up the original shots, and it's worth your ten minutes:
The tree has been out there for over forty years since the cameras rolled. Nobody knows how many more it's got. Trees come down, hillsides get developed, and film history has a way of disappearing while everyone assumes somebody else is protecting it.
So if you're anywhere near Agoura Hills, take the exit. Stand where Mike stood. Look up at the branch.