‘Phantasm V’ The Next Kickstarter Movie? Don Coscarelli Isn’t Saying ‘No’


Could Phantasm V be the next project to get the Kickstarter movie treatment? Don Coscarelli, series creator and director of the four previous entries, would not rule it out in a recent interview with Fangoria.

When asked if he’d considered the crowd-funding platform for a possible return of the Tall Man (Angus Scrimm), Coscarelli said, “Yeah, I have. A lot. It seems there might be passion for that kind of thing.”

Coscarelli continued: “When you’ve got something that has a committed fanbase and you can get pretty creative with the perks … for a $50,000 dollar donation the Tall Man will strangle you on film!”

The interview, published on Thursday, focused on Coscarelli’s latest film, the adaptation of David Wong’s cult novel John Dies at the End. But the director admitted that Phantasm V has come up quite a bit while on the promo trail.

“All the interviews I’ve done in the past few months have asked about this so I think I’m really missing something here. The actors are in great shape. Angus [Scrimm] had a role in John Dies at the End. He’s in his 80s now, but he still looks good.”

Coscarelli added that Reggie Bannister, now age 68 and who starred in the previous films, was in “excellent shape.”

“We’ve had a number of discussions about how we would do something in the current climate. It’s not easy. Over the years, I must have five or six versions of ideas of films that were never made, so there is a lot of source material,” Coscarelli said.

Included in that source material was a now famous un-produced script from Pulp Fiction co-writer Roger Avary, who is “a fan” of the series, who “wrote this really cool, epic Phantasm kick-ass end-all sequel.”

“We went out to try and get funding for it, didn’t happen. Very disappointing, and so I made Phantasm IV on a micro-budget and used a lot of footage from Phantasm that I still had to kind of wrap up the series because people had gotten their hopes up when the Avary script was talked about,” Coscarelli said.

Here’s what we ended up with instead:

Phantasm V may not end up happening, but at least Don Coscarelli is talking about it again, and he seemed very receptive to the Kickstarter movie idea.

At this point, it stands a better chance than a sequel to another of his cult classics, Bubba Ho-Tep. Since scoring a hit with the Elvis-JFK-Mummy mashup, based on the Joe Lansdale story, Coscarelli had been eager to do Bubba Nosferatu.

Unfortunately, he lost lead Bruce Campbell due to creative differences, and the last mention anyone’s made was Paul Giamatti in a 2008 interview with Ain’t It Cool News.

Giamatti, who also stars in John Dies at the End, would have played real-life Elvis Presley manager Colonel Tom Parker opposite Ron Perlman’s King of Rock and Roll in the film, but the project has sat dormant for five years with nothing else to go on.

What are your thoughts on Don Coscarelli taking Phantasm V to the masses? Would you donate to a Kickstarter movie project?

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