"Phantasm" '71 Plymouth Hemi Cuda
"Phantasm" movie series

“When I was in high school, there was a kid who was a year younger than me who somehow bought one of those cars and would drive it through the parking lot,” the director recalls. “I would stand there with my friends, and we would salivate over this car. It was a beautiful 1970 Plymouth AAR ‘Cuda in Sassy Grass Green with a white interior. It was really hot with the blacked-out fiberglass hood and pistol-grip shifter. He’d roar out of that parking lot.”

Years later, while penning the screenplay for Phantasm in a cabin up in the mountains, Coscarelli remembered that ‘Cuda.

“I was cobbling together this horror movie, and for some reason, I thought, ‘oh, the brothers will drive one of those ‘Cudas! It will give me a chance to get my hands on one!'”

And so it was the older brother in the movie, Jody (played by Bill Thornbury), who would drive one of Mopar’s finest fish!

“Back in the day, the price of those cars dropped because the price of gas started to go up and the insurance costs were too high,” Coscarelli says. “We bought it off a kid in Los Angeles who wanted to get rid of it. We cleaned it up, fixed it up, and then it became this icon in the movie.”

-Rob Finkelman "Rob’s Movie Muscle: The 1971 Plymouth ‘Cuda From Phantasm"