Peter Jackson and his partner/co-writer, Fran Walsh, conceived the idea for this movie during the script-writing phase of Heavenly Creatures. Robert Zemeckis nearly directed it as a spin-off of the Tales from the Crypt TV series, but he was so impressed by Jackson and Walsh’s first script that he decided that Jackson should direct. Universal granted Jackson and Zemeckis total artistic control and final-cut privilege.
When this movie was shot, it had the most complex visual effects ever attempted. Jackson’s Weta Digital and Weta Workshop created computer-generated imagery, scale models, prosthetic makeup and practical effects. The studio was inexperienced with computers, which led to an arduous eighteen-month production process.
The long shoot was also because several scenes involved ghosts and humans interacting, which needed to be filmed twice: once with the live actors on set and again with the ghosts on blue screen. This called for precise timing from the actors. To make sure the film could make it to the screen in time, $6 million more was given to add more animators to the team.
Sadly, The Frighteners wasn’t a success. It’s a hard movie to classify. It’s humorous and full of wonder in one scene, then completely terrifying in others.
It’s all about Frank Banister (Michael J. Fox in his last big movie role before he went back to TV for Spin City), an architect who loses his wife in a car accident and gains the power to see ghosts. He becomes friends with three of them: Cyrus (Chi McBride), a 1970’s gangster; Stuart, a geek from the 1950s; and The Judge (John Astin, with 5 hours per day of makeup making him look like a zombie gunslinger).
The ghosts haunt houses until Frank ” exorcizes” them for a fee, fleecing people out of their money. After Frank cleanses the home of Ray Lynskey and his wife Lucy, an entity called the Grim Reaper (which looks like something out of Michele Soavi’s Cemetery Man) marks Ray as his next victim. Only Frank can see it, and he can’t save the man. He then realizes that his wife had a similar mark, a number, when she was found dead. Now, the police and FBI agent Milton Dammers (Jeffrey Combs, who completely and utterly owns this role, a man driven insane by all his work with the occult) are after him, thinking he is a serial killer.
After the newspaper’s editor attacks Frank in an editorial, she’s killed despite Frank trying to save her. The Grim Reaper strikes again, but the police arrest our hero. Now he targets Lucy, who has fallen for Frank. Dammer then kidnaps Lucy, revealing that he was a victim of the Manson Family, and we learn that the Grim Reaper is the ghost of Johnny Bartlett (Jake Busey), a hospital orderly who killed twelve people in 1964 before he was caught and killed. He always wanted to be the best serial killer ever — better than Charles Starkweather — and his girl Patricia (Dee Wallace Stone!) is still in love with him and helping him up his number from beyond the grave.
Can Frank save Lucy? Can anyone stop the Grim Reaper? The story will go beyond life and death to give you the answers. I really love this movie and watch it at least once every few months, then get sad that so few people dig it as much as I do. Come on, people!
The Arrow Video 4K UHD and Blu-ray release includes a 4K restoration from the original camera negative, a reversible sleeve with two original artwork options and a collectors’ booklet featuring Peter Jackson’s 1998 introduction to the LaserDisc release, original production notes and two 1996 articles from American Cinematographer. You get the theatrical cut, the director’s cut (with commentary by Jackson), an open matte version and an entire disc of extras, such as an image gallery; No Way to Make a Living: A Look Back at The Frighteners, a feature-length documentary produced in 2022, featuring new interviews with actors Dee Wallace Stone and Jake Busey, cinematographer John Blick, production designer Grant Major and more; The Making of The Frighteners, an exhaustive 225-minute documentary exploring every aspect of the film’s production, from script development and casting to post-production and release, produced in 1998 for the LaserDisc release, with a 2005 retrospective; “A Conversation with Richard Taylor and Alexandre Poncet”, a 2022 interview with the man behind the film’s creature and miniature effects and more. You can get the 4K UHD or Blu-ray from MVD.
