Phantoms is a 1998 American science fiction horror film directed by Joe Chappelle and starring Peter O'Toole, Rose McGowan, Joanna Going, Liev Schreiber, Ben Affleck, Nicky Katt, and Clifton Powell.

[4] Dr. Jennifer Pailey brings her sister Lisa to Snowfield, Colorado, a small ski resort village nestled in the Rocky Mountains where Jenny works.

They then stumble upon the severed heads of the town baker and his wife in an oven before being found by Sheriff Bryce Hammond, a former FBI agent, and his deputies Stu Wargle and Steve Shanning.

The group gets a phone call but are interrupted by an attack by a moth-like creature that rips Wargle's face off before Hammond kills it.

Hammond's FBI associates find Flyte, a British academic who theorizes that the town has fallen victim to the Ancient Enemy, an entity he generalizes as "chaos in the flesh".

The creature's body is physiologically almost identical to crude oil, and could be killed by bacteria bio-engineered to ingest fossil fuels.

Though Hammond reassures Lisa and Jenny that it is gone, with the former stating the townsfolk are at peace, Flyte admits that the Enemy did achieve its victory as he has decided to tell the world what happened with a book based on what occurred in Snowfield.

[5] Producer Joel Soisson, after reading the book, spent the next ten years pursuing the rights and was instrumental in getting the film set up at Miramax.

[12] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 26 out of 100, based on 19 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable" reviews.

[14] Godfrey Cheshire of Variety gave the film a favorable review, writing that it is "perhaps most enthralling in its early sections, when the enemy is still unspecified and the horror thus remains purely psychological.

After the Army arrives and the visual maelstrom is unleashed, there are moments when it’s hard to keep track of the characters or to tell exactly what the sound and fury are meant to signify.