The Greatest Horror Sequel Never Made: Phantasm 1999

Lost PHANTASM script written by Roger Avary

Somewhere in a drawer in Los Angeles sits a screenplay in which Reggie Bannister, four-barrel shotgun in hand, leads a government suicide squad into an American wasteland ruled by the Tall Man … written by a man who had just won an Oscar. It's the best Phantasm movie you'll never see, and the story of why it doesn't exist says everything about how Hollywood treats its weirdest franchises.

ENTER ROGER AVARY

The connection goes back further than you'd think. In the late 1980s, while making Survival Quest, Don Coscarelli fell in with a small collective of aspiring South Bay filmmakers .. a group that happened to include a young Roger Avary and his friend Quentin Tarantino, who would come by to borrow the office computer to write their screenplays.

Roger Avary is a giant PHANTASM fan..

Fast forward to 1995. Avary and Tarantino win the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Pulp Fiction. According to Coscarelli, Avary called him roughly a week after the Oscar telecast and asked to meet for lunch. With Hollywood at his feet and big-money offers on the table, what Avary actually wanted was to resurrect a scrap of an idea Coscarelli had once mentioned in that editing room … Reggie alone in a wasteland …and build the definitive Phantasm finale around it. About three months later, he delivered a script titled Phantasm 1999 A.D. later rechristened Phantasm's End once the actual year 1999 came and went.

Roger Avary with PHANTASM super fan Scotty Rascal

THE SCRIPT

Avary's script took the series where it had always been drifting: full post-apocalypse. In his version of the future, only Los Angeles and New York remain; everything in between is a barren "Plague Zone" controlled by the Tall Man, who infects the population with something called the bag plague. And the bag plague is pure Phantasm body horror … a description circulated from the script has victims' heads swelling with infection until they burst, spraying skull fragments with enough force to punch through car doors and infecting anyone nearby.

Concept art for Phantasm: 1999…

The plot: entering the wasteland requires surrendering your U.S. citizenship … you can go in, but you can't come out. Reggie heads in anyway, colliding with a government "S-Squad" carrying a quantum phase device meant to be dropped into the Tall Man's dimension and detonated. After butting heads, they team up. Best of all, when the budget got trimmed, Coscarelli and Avary planned to cast Bruce Campbell as the S-Squad's leader an unofficial Evil Dead/Phantasm crossover, decades before "shared universes" were a studio buzzword.

THE INDUSTRY

So why doesn't this movie exist? Money … but not blockbuster money. Coscarelli has said the film needed maybe fifteen to twenty million dollars and that he never found “that visionary executive"willing to commit it. Financing was actually in place in 1997, but the company changed hands and the deal evaporated. Even slashed to a five-million-dollar version with Campbell attached, nobody would fund it.

Phantasm 4 incorporated elements from Phantasm 1999…

Coscarelli's fallback move was shrewd, if bittersweet: he made 1998's Phantasm IV: Oblivion on a sub-$1 million budget to keep the series alive while the bigger film was developed …essentially the same play New Line later ran with Jason X while waiting on Freddy vs. Jason. Oblivion even smuggled in pieces of Avary's script, including a sphere-related dream sequence and a scene in a deserted future Los Angeles where Jody warns of infection risk, both direct setups for the movie that never came.

RAVAGER

Phantasm: Ravager was released in 2016.. and a beautiful send off to Angus Scrimm.

The franchise finally got its farewell with 2016's Phantasm: Ravager, which retained some elements of Avary's draft while going in a trippier direction. But Coscarelli hasn't fully let go. As recently as 2022 he still expressed interest in filming the script, and he has openly pitched the idea of a graphic novel adaptation as a way to renew interest and maybe crack the door open again.