Don Coscarelli may not be the world's most prolific writer/director – nine films in nearly 30 years – but he can claim to have made three bona fide cult classics in his varied career. Born in Libya and raised in Southern California, at the age of 19 Don became the youngest director to have a film distributed by a major studio when Universal Pictures picked up his first independent film. He moved into genre film-making with Phantasm in 1979, turning in one of the most off-beat horror movies of the decade, one that eventually built a cult following and spawned three (so far) sequels.