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A Phantasm TV Series Is in Development. Here Is What I Am Trying Very Hard Not to Get My Hopes Up About.

Don Coscarelli's surreal 1979 horror cult classic is reportedly heading to television. A fan tries to balance forty-seven years of patient hope against the specific ways this could go wrong.

Allen Erwin·Hellbound Hearts·June 28, 2026·6 minute read

There is a specific kind of horror movie that lives in your bones because you saw it when you were too young and now it owns real estate up there permanently. The films that worked on you before your critical apparatus had developed. The films you can't actually evaluate as an adult because your eight-year-old self already filed them under "true" and the verdict will not be appealed.

Phantasm is one of those films for me.

So when Dread Central reported this week that a Phantasm TV series is in development, I had two reactions in quick succession. The first was the involuntary smile of a horror fan who has waited a very long time for the world to remember a film he loves. The second was the immediate flinch of that same fan realizing what could go wrong.

This might be the adaptation Phantasm has always deserved. Or it might be the one that finally ruins it.

Let me explain.

What Phantasm Is, For The Unfortunate Souls Who Have Never Encountered It

Don Coscarelli wrote and directed Phantasm in 1979 on a budget that wouldn't cover catering for a modern streaming pilot. The film is about a young boy named Mike who discovers that the mortician at the local funeral home — a towering figure played by Angus Scrimm and referred to only as the Tall Man — is doing something deeply unnatural with the bodies. And no — not the thing you are bracing for. Something much weirder. He is reanimating them as squat hooded dwarf creatures and shipping them to another dimension as slave labor. There are also flying chrome spheres that hunt people through the funeral home corridors and drill into their foreheads.

I am not making any of this up. This is the actual plot of the actual film, which is loved.

What makes Phantasm work is that Coscarelli does not give a single inch on any of it. He plays the entire surreal, dimension-hopping, sphere-drilling premise with absolute commitment, and the film operates on dream logic in a way that almost no other horror film of its era did or has since. Phantasm is what would happen if a Lynch film and a slasher film had a child who grew up in a 1970s funeral home.

Phantasm is what would happen if a Lynch film and a slasher film had a child who grew up in a 1970s funeral home.

Angus Scrimm as the Tall Man is one of the great horror villains. Tall, gaunt, dressed in black, with a face that looks carved out of a tree trunk and a voice that delivers the single most famous line in the franchise — that drawn-out, gravelly "BOOOOY!" — in a way that suggests he has been doing this for a very long time and is not particularly tired yet. Worth noting — Scrimm was born Lawrence Rory Guy in Kansas City, Kansas. One of horror's most iconic villains came from right here, give or take a state line. Kansas side, technically, which I will graciously not hold against him.

The franchise spawned four sequels — Phantasm II in 1988, III: Lord of the Dead in 1994, IV: Oblivion in 1998, and Phantasm: Ravager in 2016. Coscarelli wrote and directed the first four; he handed Ravager to David Hartman while staying on as producer and co-writer. Ravager was a swing that did not quite connect for most critics, but committed fans appreciated the chance to spend one last film with characters they loved. Angus Scrimm died in January 2016, before Ravager was released that October. The franchise has been in suspended animation since.

Allow me one tangent, because the man earned it. Coscarelli has more to his name than Phantasm. The Beastmaster in 1982. Bubba Ho-Tep in 2002, which stars Bruce Campbell as an aging Elvis Presley fighting a soul-sucking mummy in a Texas nursing home, a sentence I would like you to read twice because it gets better each time. John Dies at the End in 2013. The man's batting average for "weird films that absolutely should not work but do" is unreasonably high. If you have not seen Bubba Ho-Tep or John Dies at the End, fix that. He deserves better than the cult status he has settled into. Tangent over.

What The TV News Actually Is

Here is what we know. According to Dread Central, a Phantasm TV series is in development. That is the entire content of the news. We do not know the platform. We do not know the showrunner. We do not know whether it is a reboot, a continuation, a prequel, or something stranger. We do not know if Coscarelli is involved. We do not know if any of the original cast is involved. We do not know when it would air.

"In development" is a phrase that does a lot of heavy lifting in entertainment journalism. Friday the 13th was tangled in legal disputes for nearly a decade before Crystal Lake actually got a release date. Plenty of horror properties get announced at this stage and quietly disappear. So the appropriate response to this news is not "I cannot wait." It is "I am cautiously paying attention."

Which is exactly what I am doing. I saw the first Phantasm when I was too young and got sucked into the sequels probably for the same reason. The Tall Man has been living rent-free in my head since I was a kid. So this news matters to me in the specific way news only matters when it involves something you have carried around in your chest for thirty-plus years.

Why It Could Actually Work

Phantasm would work as a TV series. I think that is true and I want to make the case for it.

The original films struggle precisely because they are trying to compress dream-logic mythology into ninety-minute movie runtimes. The Tall Man, the spheres, the dwarf zombies, the dimensional rifts, the time loops, Mike's psychic connection to all of it — there is too much for any one film to hold cleanly. Television gives you time. Multiple seasons, room to build the mythology slowly without trying to resolve it in act three.

The visual style — the gleaming corridors, the chrome spheres, the parallel dimension that looks like a Martian quarry — would benefit enormously from a real budget. And the Tall Man, properly served by a serialized format, could become one of the great long-form horror antagonists. A figure you encounter in episode one and slowly come to understand across seasons. The kind of villain that Twin Peaks did with BOB. Phantasm has the source material to do it well, because Angus Scrimm spent five films establishing exactly who this character was.

The Tall Man could become one of the great long-form horror antagonists. He has the source material. He has the mystery. He has forty-seven years of patient fan investment waiting to be activated.

What Would Kill It

The ways to ruin this are specific and I would like to name them now so that when they happen I can point back at this article.

Cast the Tall Man wrong and the whole thing is over before the first commercial break. Angus Scrimm was not an actor playing a role. He was the role. The voice, the height, the way he occupied a frame like he was slightly too large for the dimension he was standing in — these are not transferable qualities. Replacing him is one of the hardest casting jobs in horror, and the temptation will be to hand it to someone famous instead of someone right. Resist it.

Explain too much and you kill the magic. The reason Phantasm works is that nobody, including possibly Coscarelli, can fully explain what is going on. The Tall Man is from somewhere. We are not sure where. The dwarf zombies are doing something. We are not sure what. This is a feature. The modern streaming instinct is to give every mystery an origin episode and map the lore out on a whiteboard until it is as comforting and explicable as a tax return. Do that to Phantasm and you are left with a show about a tall mortician and his commute to another dimension.

And do not, under any circumstances, try to make it normal. Phantasm is weird. It was weird on purpose in 1979 and the weirdness is the entire reason anyone still cares. The dream logic is not a flaw to be smoothed out for a broader audience. A grounded, accessible, four-quadrant Phantasm is not Phantasm. It is a generic horror show that happens to have chrome spheres in it, and we already have enough of those.

The right showrunner could make something legitimately special here. The wrong one could turn forty-seven years of goodwill into a cancellation notice in a single season.

The Honest Position

I am not making a prediction. I am announcing that I will be watching for the next round of news with extremely active interest. The moment a showrunner is announced I will have an opinion. The moment a platform is announced I will have a stronger one. The moment casting starts I will probably have an article about it.

Until then, Phantasm fans get to do what Phantasm fans have been doing for the last ten years since Ravager wrapped the franchise. We get to wait. We get to hope. We get to know that whatever happens next, the original film is still on a shelf somewhere, still in print, still playing on Tubi for free, still capable of working on a new generation of horror fans the same way it worked on us.

The Tall Man is patient. We can be too. Get this right.

BOOOOY.

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