Why Is Phantoms So Good? Ben Affleck Was the Bomb in Phantoms, Yo!

Some movies get better with age.

Some movies become cult classics.

And some movies have Ben Affleck fighting an ancient shape-shifting subterranean monster while Liev Schreiber acts like Norman Bates somehow got hired as a sheriff's deputy.

Welcome back to 1998's Phantoms—one of Johnny Spoiler's longtime favorites.

And yes:

Affleck was the bomb in Phantoms, yo.

“Affleck Was the Bomb in Phantoms, Yo!”

Of course, we can't talk about Phantoms without talking about the line that may have done more for the movie's cult reputation than its entire theatrical release.

Three years later, Kevin Smith turned Affleck's Phantoms appearance into a running joke in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001).

While talking with Holden McNeil—also played by Affleck—Holden declares:

“Affleck was the bomb in Phantoms.”

Later, when Jay actually encounters Ben Affleck, he enthusiastically tells him:

“Affleck, you the bomb in Phantoms, yo!”

And suddenly a movie that had bombed at the box office had one of the most quotable endorsements of Affleck's career.

The joke apparently came from Affleck himself. Years later, Affleck told Backstage that someone had approached him and told him that Phantoms rocked. Affleck repeated the story to Kevin Smith, who turned it into the now-famous Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back gag.

Which makes the whole thing even better.

Kevin Smith was making fun of his friend.

Affleck was willing to make fun of himself.

And somehow the joke helped turn Phantoms into the kind of movie people were still talking about decades later.

For Johnny Spoiler, though, there's one problem with the joke:

Affleck actually WAS the bomb in Phantoms, yo.

Peak Late-'90s Horror

There is something immediately creepy about Phantoms that still works.

Sisters Jenny and Lisa Pailey—Joanna Going and Rose McGowan—arrive in the Colorado mountain town of Snowfield and discover that almost everybody has disappeared.

Not evacuated.

Not hiding.

Gone.

The movie gives us abandoned streets, half-finished meals, severed body parts and that wonderful horror-movie feeling that something terrible happened about five minutes before we arrived.

Then Ben Affleck shows up as Sheriff Bryce Hammond.

This isn't Batman Affleck.

This isn't The Town Affleck.

This is basically small-town John McClane Affleck.

He's a local sheriff who suddenly finds himself responsible for fighting something closer to a biological apocalypse than anything covered at the police academy.

Affleck plays Bryce pretty straight, which actually helps. The crazier Phantoms becomes, the more useful it is having somebody in the middle of it behaving like an ordinary cop trying to keep everyone alive.

And Then There's Liev Schreiber

Liev Schreiber plays Deputy Stuart "Stu" Wargle, and this guy seems creepy before the monster even gets involved.

Schreiber gives me serious Norman Bates with a badge vibes.

There's something slightly wrong with Wargle from the moment we meet him. He's smug, unsettling and unpredictable—and once the Ancient Enemy gets its hands on him, Schreiber gets permission to turn the weirdness all the way up.

It's one of those supporting performances that sticks in your memory years after watching the movie.

And Phantoms has a surprisingly loaded cast.

Rose McGowan was right in that late-'90s Scream era of her career. Joanna Going makes a strong lead. Peter O'Toole somehow wandered into this monster movie as Dr. Timothy Flyte and gives the whole production instant gravitas.

Then you've got Affleck, Schreiber, Nicky Katt and Clifton Powell.

That's a lot of acting talent trapped in one empty Colorado town.

So What Exactly Is the Monster?

Here's where Phantoms gets more interesting than the average creature feature.

The monster isn't really a ghost.

It isn't exactly an alien.

And despite what people throughout history might have believed, it isn't literally Satan.

Dean Koontz called it the Ancient Enemy.

It's an enormously old organism capable of absorbing other living creatures—and their knowledge—and then reproducing their forms.

That's why humanity's stories about monsters and demons may actually have been encounters with this thing.

Koontz later explained that when writing Phantoms, he deliberately tried to roll many of horror's classic monsters into one creature, then give that creature something resembling a scientific explanation.

That's a fantastic horror concept.

It also explains why Phantoms can feel like five different horror movies smashed together.

The Book Is Even Bigger

Phantoms started as Koontz's 1983 novel, and here's an important distinction from a lot of questionable Hollywood adaptations:

Dean Koontz wrote the screenplay himself.

The movie therefore keeps the novel's central mystery, the abandoned Snowfield setting, Timothy Flyte, the Ancient Enemy and the idea that historical mass disappearances could be connected to the creature.

But the book has considerably more room to develop those ideas.

Koontz acknowledged one huge practical problem: completely translating the novel to the screen would have required an enormous effects budget. He instead wanted the movie to emphasize suspense and imagination over nonstop effects.

Characters and story elements were consequently streamlined. One major change is Lisa: she's only 14 in the novel but was aged up considerably for the movie and played by Rose McGowan. The ending changes too. The novel provides considerably more closure, while the movie throws in that classic horror-movie suggestion that maybe the Ancient Enemy isn't completely gone.

And that's probably the biggest difference.

The novel gets to explore the Ancient Enemy. The movie has to survive it.

Yeah, It Rips Off The Thing a Little

We should address the giant shape-shifting elephant in the room.

Once Phantoms reaches its final act, there is definitely some:

"Hey, remember John Carpenter's The Thing*?"*

energy happening.

Shape-shifting biological creature?

Check.

Absorbing other organisms?

Check.

Grotesque transformations?

Absolutely.

Humans trying to determine how to biologically destroy the organism?

Yeah, we're getting pretty Thing-y now.

Even Roger Ebert joked in his original review that Phantoms seemed assembled from pieces of other movies.

But here's why I'm willing to forgive it.

The first half of Phantoms is genuinely creepy.

The empty town is scarier than the monster.

Not knowing what happened is scarier than seeing what happened.

And the Ancient Enemy concept gives the story a Lovecraftian scale that separates it from being merely The Thing Goes to Colorado.

The final monster battle hasn't aged nearly as well as the setup.

The setup still works.

Some Phantoms Trivia

Here's a weird one.

The movie's original theatrical poster was apparently assembled using promotional photography connected to other Miramax movies. Images of Rose McGowan and Joanna Going were composited onto bodies from a Scream promotional shoot, Liev Schreiber's image came from Scream 2 material, and Affleck's came from a Chasing Amy shoot.

That's about as aggressively 1990s Miramax/Dimension as movie trivia gets.

The film was shot in Georgetown, Colorado, which helps explain why Snowfield feels like an actual isolated mountain community instead of a bunch of Hollywood sets.

And despite having Koontz's name, a recognizable young cast and Peter freaking O'Toole, Phantoms was a theatrical bomb. It grossed only about $5.6 million domestically.

Its reputation survived partly because of one ridiculous joke.

Three years later, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back gave us:

"Affleck, you da bomb in Phantoms, yo!"

And somehow that line has probably kept more people talking about Phantoms than the movie's entire original marketing campaign.

Johnny Spoiler Says Give Phantoms Another Watch

Is Phantoms perfect?

Absolutely not.

Does the final act borrow a little too much from The Thing?

Oh yeah.

But I don't care.

I've always loved this movie.

There's something about that opening—the empty streets, unanswered phones, abandoned buildings and horrible little discoveries—that still gets under my skin.

Rose McGowan is peak late-'90s horror. Liev Schreiber is doing his wonderfully unhinged Norman-Bates-with-a-badge routine. Peter O'Toole brings class to absolute insanity.

And Ben Affleck?

He's not Batman yet.

He's John McClane with a sheriff's badge fighting a prehistoric bio-terror monster in Colorado.

Sometimes that's exactly the movie I want.

Johnny Spoiler verdict: BINGE NOW.

Phantoms remains creepy, weird, ambitious, occasionally ridiculous—and way better than its reputation suggests.

And yes.

Affleck was the bomb in Phantoms, yo.

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