Don Coscarelli's Long Beach: Where Phantasm Was Born
Long Beach, CA and PHANTASM have a long history dating back to the 1970s!
There is a particular kind of dread that belongs to Southern California alone. Not the Gothic chill of a New England graveyard or the swampy menace of a Louisiana bayou, but something stranger: the feeling of death dressed up in sunshine, of mortuaries framed by palm trees, of gleaming chrome caskets displayed under fluorescent light while traffic hums outside on a six-lane boulevard. This is the dread that animates every frame of Don Coscarelli's Phantasm, and it has an address. Several addresses, in fact. All of them in Long Beach, California.
In addition to PHANTASM, Long Beach, CA is known for the Queen Mary…
And the connections run far deeper than location scouts and permit paperwork. Long Beach provided the director who dreamed the film, the cemeteries that made it possible, the studio where its iconic score was recorded, the actor who became its unlikely hero.
The Kid From Wilson High
Don Coscarelli laid the groundwork for his filmmaking career at Wilson High in Long Beach, CA
Don Coscarelli was born in Tripoli, Libya, in 1954, but his family relocated to Southern California when he was barely a year old. He grew up in Long Beach and the adjacent community of Los Alamitos, recruiting neighborhood friends to populate his short films from an early age. Those experiments won prizes on local television, but the real turning point came at Woodrow Wilson High School in Long Beach.
At nineteen, Coscarelli sold his independently produced feature Jim the World's Greatest and shot across the Long Beach area to Universal Pictures, becoming the youngest director to ever have a film distributed by a major studio. That production also marked his first collaboration with Angus Scrimm and Reggie Bannister. His follow-up, Kenny & Company (1976), was a micro-budgeted portrait of suburban childhood that film historians cite as Phantasm's thematic predecessor: the baseline of Long Beach normalcy that makes the Tall Man's world feel so violating when it arrives.
Kenny & Company which Phantasm Phans jokingly call “the Phantasm sequel”..
After Kenny & Company, Coscarelli retreated to write Phantasm, drawing on a recurring teenage nightmare about fleeing down marble corridors pursued by a chrome sphere, along with the specific textures of the Southern California landscape he knew best.
The Cemeteries: Where Morningside Lives
The first film's core conceit depends on American funerary space, mortuary, chapel, cemetery, caskets so practical access to those environments was the entire production. Two Long Beach sites anchored the franchise, and understanding them requires one key disambiguation: the name "Sunnyside" applies to two distinct places in the city.
Sunnyside Cemetery was a huge inspiration for the original PHANTASM..
Sunnyside Cemetery (1095 E. Willow Street) is a standalone graveyard with no mausoleum, now under City stewardship. Sunnyside Mausoleum / Memorial Park, associated with Forest Lawn–Long Beach (1500 E. San Antonio Drive), is a full complex with Spanish Renaissance architecture, a stained-glass chapel, a mausoleum, and cemetery grounds. When cast and crew refer to filming at "Sunnyside," the structural details they describe, mausoleum, mortuary, chapel point to the Forest Lawn complex for the original film, and the Willow Street cemetery for the sequels.
Forest Lawn Memorial Park: Long Beach
1500 East San Antonio Drive · Est. 1921
Coscarelli identified this site as the foundational inspiration for Phantasm's mortuary aesthetic. The park features a chapel with stained-glass windows depicting early California history…the kind of "beautiful-but-unnerving" sacred space that the film exploits to devastating effect.
A crew member who worked across multiple Phantasm productions identified the casket showroom, Tommy's funeral chapel, and the cemetery ending with Jody's bronze grave marker as having been filmed here. Reggie Bannister confirmed that they "shot some stuff for Phantasm" at Sunnyside in Long Beach, and his description of the site as a cemetery/mortuary/mausoleum matches the Forest Lawn complex.
If Forest Lawn gave Phantasm its interiors, Sunnyside Cemetery gave the sequels their outdoor graveyard iconography and a visual signature no other cemetery in Southern California could match.
In 1921, drillers struck oil adjacent to the property. Today, the cemetery is surrounded by towering oil derricks that create what Discover Los Angeles calls a "striking backdrop." That industrial-necropolis juxtaposition is the most discriminating visual feature for matching film frames to location and it's deeply compatible with Phantasm II's tonal shift toward action-road imagery.
Coscarelli described finding a Long Beach cemetery owner willing to allow filming and stated directly: "We shot Phantasm II and III there." He added that the same location became unavailable for Phantasm IV. The City of Long Beach acquired Sunnyside in 2019. It is now maintained under City stewardship, essentially full, and open.
Phantasm creator Don Coscarelli returns to Long Beach in 2018 at Forest Lawn Long Beach
In 2018 PHANTASM creator Don Coscarelli returned to Forest Lawn Long Beach and Tweeted: “Ground zero of the inspiration for Phantasm- Forest Lawn Long Beach- one gorgeous mausoleum! Was on my way for pancakes then hit the brakes when I saw where I was,”
The Sound: Born in Long Beach
From left, composers Malcolm Seagrave, Fred Myrow and score producer Paul Ratajczak celebrate Malcolm's birthday during the recording of the Phantasm score 1978. Photo by Paul Pepperman. Copright 2024 Starway International
The Phantasm score one of the most recognized themes in horror was recorded in a small Long Beach studio owned by music producer Paul Ratajczak. Composers Fred Myrow and Malcolm Seagrave worked with primitive analog synthesizers that lacked any preset storage. Every dial had to be manually set, and once altered, the exact tone was virtually impossible to recreate. Coscarelli described "long nights" over a two-week session.
The three men took turns performing directly onto Ampex 456 analog tape, cycling through synthesizers, Mellotron, Clavinet, electric piano, an antique upright piano, and a percussion arsenal that included gongs, chimes, bells, and scraper sticks nearly the full range of a symphony orchestra's rhythm section. The isolation of that small Long Beach studio let them experiment without the financial pressure of a Hollywood soundstage. The result was a soundscape that perfectly mirrored the film's collision of suburban normalcy with mechanized horror and a theme that hip-hop producers from Doug E. Fresh to Master P to Mobb Deep to The Alchemist would sample for the next four decades.
Long Beach's own Snoop Dogg has publicly declared Phantasm his favorite horror film of all time!
Reggie's Long Beach
Reggie Bannister defined what being from Long Beach means!
Reggie Bannister was born in Long Beach on September 29, 1945, and the city shaped every dimension of his creative life before Phantasm existed. He came up through the Long Beach music scene: folk groups, coffeehouse circuits, a trio called the Port Town Three named after Long Beach itself and during the 1970s managed the West Coast Bodega, a music club in the Belmont Shore neighborhood that hosted everyone from Vince Gill to Gene Taylor.
Coscarelli found Bannister at a series of one-act plays in Long Beach, cast him in Kenny & Company, and built from there. The character of Reggie.. the balding, guitar-playing, ice-cream-vending everyman who becomes the franchise's unlikely action hero.
Reggie Bannister hailing from Long Beach bought so much to the everyman character!
After filming the original Phantasm, Bannister's day job for two years was delivering flowers for the Sunnyside Mortuary & Cemetery in Long Beach placing arrangements inside the same mausoleum where scenes had been shot. The line between the film and his actual geography was nonexistent.
Full Circle: The 'Cuda Comes Home
That moment the Phantasm ‘Cuda came back to Long Beach…
In September 2025, the Phantasm II 'Cuda… the iconic black 1971 Plymouth Barracuda 340 that Coscarelli chose because he remembered being captivated by the model at Wilson High made a rare public appearance at the 34th Annual Belmont Shore Car Show in Long Beach. Belmont Shore is the same neighborhood where Bannister once ran the West Coast Bodega. One of the Tall Man's minions was spotted behind the wheel.
Long Beach keeps sneaking into pop culture in unexpected ways. Lana Del Rey's 2023 album Did You Know That There's a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd turned a hidden piece of Long Beach infrastructure into a global talking point Long Beach has always had a way of turning its own geography into mythology.
She was clearly pulling from the same instinct that drove Coscarelli decades earlier the feeling that something strange and hidden lives just beneath the surface of this city. Del Rey found her tunnel. Coscarelli found his mausoleum. Both turned real Long Beach landmarks into something haunted, proving that this city keeps handing its artists the same gift: the raw material for beautiful, unsettling worlds that feel too real to be fiction.
Long Beach gave Don Coscarelli everything he needed to build a horror universe .. the cemeteries, the sound, the people, and the nerve to do it all on his own terms. Nearly five decades later, the locations still stand, the theme still gets sampled, and the Tall Man's shadow still falls across the same streets where it all started.
