... and imagine people standing near it wearing really long scarves around their necks. If you have ever seen a slapstick comedy or cartoon, you can guess where this is going. "I turned to David Brown, he was the art director. I signaled him to go turn the fan off, and he ran over to it, and the freaking wind machine grabbed his muffler and yanked him. Luckily it was a cheap muffler, and it snapped and threw him back. If it had been, like, a Burberry muffler, he would have just been killed. I probably shouldn't talk about it, but it's decades later and Dave's still alive, healthy, and thriving, so I can tell the story, but man, that was horrible."

But they all learned their lesson from such a close call ... right?

Nothing safer than filming a chainsaw fight.

"We almost killed our actor, Bill Thornbury, who played Jody, because we thought that if you shot a movie blank, there was no danger whatsoever. What we found out a few months after is that an actor on a television series had taken a gun with a blank and was goofing around, and for some reason pulled the trigger like he was pretending to commit suicide. And there is a wad of some material [in blanks], and it came out and cracked his skull and killed him [the actor was Jon-Erik Hexum]. So that's the subtext when we handed Bill a gun, and then we put this rubber dwarf on his back and said, 'Okay, hold the gun backwards and shoot [wildly] behind your head while you're fighting him.' So he's fighting with the dwarf, and he's got the gun, and God knows what it was aimed on, and it goes off and blows the dwarf off, and we literally dodged a bullet."

Embassy Pictures
"Die young and leave a beautiful corpse, I always say."

Okay, but then, after two close calls, they knew they had to start playing it saf -- oh, shit.

"I had this idea that as part of the [car] chase, Jody would pop up through the sunroof and shoot at the driverless hearse that's chasing him. I want to get that close up, so the plan is I'll take the camera and sit in the trunk, and he'll shoot the blanks by me."

Embassy Pictures

Embassy Pictures
"What possible risk could there be in that white-hot muzzle flare?"

"And one of the smart guys on set goes, 'There might be some stuff coming out of that blank, you need to cover yourself up.' So they took this cushion and duct-taped it to my head. So I get up there and he's shooting [by me], and then we get out and I'm going, 'Wow, that was really cool, really great!' What I don't know is that my head is on fire and I can't see it. It lit the cushion on fire, so there's this mad scramble where everyone's trying to yank this thing off my head before it got through and burned me."

See, all you aspiring filmmakers? You thought it was all glamorous fun, and in reality, it's ... okay, it still sounds fun.

If you watch the clip, you see that the sphere zooms around a bit first. And that effect was accomplished much the same way you accomplished "special effects" when you were six and playing with your action figures -- by throwing shit around.

"Getting the thing to fly, we tried all kinds of stuff with wires, and it just wasn't working. Then we hit on this idea of getting a kid who was a college baseball pitcher to just throw the ball from behind camera and reverse the film."

Embassy Pictures
Splatter up.

These days, of course, you don't need a big budget to create even fairly decent CG effects. A talented artist can use software like After Effects to show people's cranial blood getting sucked out in any number of imaginative ways. That means it's easier than ever for aspiring filmmakers can get their stuff made, so this has to be the golden era for indie horror, right? Well ...

And if you don't get noticed, you're not going to pay the bills. The current landscape is great if you're making something for fun; unlike when Coscarelli was starting out, you don't have to get your hands on expensive rolls of film, you can find collaborators by hopping online, and there are countless websites willing to walk you through the basics. But it's harder than ever to make a living at it, as indie filmmakers themselves will tell you.

"Fourteen years ago, I made Bubba Ho-Tep, and the DVD market was really strong ... a distributor could make a profit of like 10 bucks off of a single DVD. But now, if you put it on streaming, it's less than a quarter a view. Money's just been sucked out of the business. But at the same time, movies are a lot cheaper to make now. There was a great picture out last year called Tangerine that was shot on an iPhone 5, and it looked pretty darn good."

Magnolia Pictures
Right now, everyone with an iPhone in their pocket is reexamining how they spend their free time.

Still, that movie got lots of press attention and raves from mainstream critics -- good luck getting the same treatment for that zombie flick you and your buddies shot around town hoping it'd be your big break. If you aspire to do it the old-fashioned way and get your opus made (and promoted) by a studio, you'd better be ready to make something pretty close to whatever is in style at the moment. That's why your theater has been hit with identical movies that arrive in waves (like "Young people getting tortured in filthy warehouses" and "Besieged family filming their haunting with a GoPro").

"It's strictly a financial decision. It has nothing to do with people wanting to make found footage movies. In the late '90s, early 2000s there was Japanese horror, all of those movies with the girl with the black hair hanging in front of her face, and it got to the point where if you saw another one, you'd scream, and it wasn't because you were scared. Now that stuff's gone away, but someone could probably come out with a J-horror ghost story now and bring it right back."

Making movies may be easier, but it's not easy. That's because movies by their nature will always involve the work of lots and lots of human beings. So the world is full of artists who have a vision, but who find themselves working in a medium that demands they also be great at networking. Even if you're making fun stuff about Elvis fighting a mummy, you find yourself needing the shrewd heart of a salesperson to get it done.

Vitagraph Films
And that's with the most beloved cult-horror actor ever already in your corner.

"When I started making movies, no one ever said to me that to succeed, you need to have an ability with marketing and sales, and be able to sell yourself and your projects. Filmmaking requires a market. Any movie takes an upfront investment of tens of thousands [to] hundreds of millions of dollars. So it requires salesmanship to get into a position to practice your art. I'm sure there are some brilliant filmmakers out there who just have no ability with that, and disappeared.

"Terrence Malick, his first couple movies came out, and then he disappeared for decades. Stars rallied around him and were able to bring him back. It's not discussed much -- it would be interesting to have more film journalists' first question be 'Tell us about your frustration trying to work and raise money.' You'd get an earful."

Roadshow Entertainment
Turns out that in the days before Kickstarter, funding an indie film could get, well, a little weird.

You also need a cast and a crew, and even if one's resume only has a stint as a tree in an off-elementary-school play, it's not easy to secure their time. "Usually, there's a lot of begging, trying to get people to do things for cheap or nothing. That's an ability that's necessary. And trying to make connections with people who can do things that no one else can do ... you have to learn how to network, and stay in contact with people you meet, all kinds of things that I didn't know anything about when I was first starting out."

So exactly how much hustling does it take in between projects? Let's put it this way: Phantasm II came out nine years after the original. Coscarelli was in talks to make the newest movie, Ravager, in 2005 ... and it came out in 2016. There's been talk of a Bubba Ho-Tep sequel since 2002, and it's still unclear if it will ever happen. So you can dream up a genius idea for a movie overnight, then spend over a decade scraping together the money, the stars, and the marketing. Then maybe you'll get a big hit, or maybe you'll watch your life's dream be buried beneath a pile of Paranormal Activity knockoffs.

Miramax Family Films
Or have 30 years' work get labelled a cheap knockoff thanks to an unfortunate release date.

That doesn't mean you shouldn't try -- do it right, and kids will be dressing like your characters for Halloween half a century later. "Horror's eternal. From The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari through Karloff and Frankenstein, through the '50s monster invasions and Godzilla, then through Texas Chainsaw ... people keep reinventing and coming up with cool stuff. And I'm firmly confident that there's some 19-year-old kid out there reading Cracked who's a horror fan and has some germ of an idea, and in the next few years they're going to put it on film and we'll all be blown away."