Revisiting Peter Jackson’s The Frighteners, 30 years since its release

Alex Casey returns to Peter Jackson’s genre-bending Lyttelton-shot ghostfest on its 30th anniversary.

Here’s a fun fact about The Frighteners: according to his 2020 autobiography, Michael J Fox became so miserable and homesick while shooting the film down here in Aotearoa that his agent from the United States would periodically post him VHS tapes of Friends and Seinfeld to lift his spirits. “You have rugby this and rugby that,” the Back to the Future star grizzled to The Dominion in 1995. “I’m getting up at 7am to watch the NBA and 5am to watch the NHL.”

Shot in Lyttelton and Wellington and released 30 years ago today, Peter Jackson’s comedy-horror The Frighteners is a reminder that hosting big Hollywood talent was still a rarity for us in the mid-90s. Compared to today, where you simply can’t stop movie stars hitting up our drive-thrus, hooning around in illegal cars and noshing down on battered cod, the 1996 film represents a crucial turning point in both Jackson’s career and New Zealand’s film industry.

Reportedly coming together as a quick three-pager when Jackson and Fran Walsh were writing Heavenly Creatures, The Frighteners is a madcap comedy-horror following Fox as Frank Bannister, a psychic investigator in the fictional town of Fairwater. He can commune with ghosts after the death of his wife Debra (our own Angela Bloomfield, on leave from Ferndale) and works with them to haunt the living, and then take their cash by cracking the case.

But things get complicated when people keep mysteriously dying of heart attacks in Fairwater, and locals find themselves with demonic numbers etched onto their foreheads, indicating that they are next in line. Turns out a dead serial killer is back to wreak havoc from the underworld as a Grim Reaper type figure, and Bannister is the only one that can stop him. With all sorts of decaying spooks helping him along the way, it’s a little bit Ghostbusters and a lot Beetlejuice.

It’s a fascinating rewatch 30 years later, not least for the thrill of seeing the same streets now boogied upon by Marlon Williams being used for supernatural car chases, or Christchurch’s Sign of the Takahe standing in for a banquet hall. Straddling both comedy and horror, the film showcases Jackson’s early penchant for gore and silliness as seen in Braindead and Bad Taste (“I doubt I could ever control myself sufficiently to make a serious horror film,” he once said.)

Alas, that comedy-horror blend, as well as a convoluted plot culminating in a giant hell-worm sequence – could have also been The Frighteners’ downfall. It doesn’t feel quite scary enough, nor funny enough, to work either way. Jackson himself was disappointed with Universal’s marketing campaign, which “didn’t tell you anything about the movie,” and was not helped by the release competing with 90s box office titans Independence Day and The Nutty Professor.

The Frighteners may not have been a commercial success (with a $26 million budget, it only just broke even in the United States) nor a critical darling (Roger Ebert gave it one star and said “I reviewed a nine-hour documentary about the lives of Mongolian yak herdsman, and I would rather see it again than sit through The Frighteners”), and yet it was a huge step forward for Jackson and Wētā Digital, who created the then-unprecedented 570 CGI ghost shots for the film.

There was also the extremely important factor that Jackson insisted to the studio that the film, despite being set in the American midwest, had to be entirely shot in New Zealand as a chance to showcase our chops to Hollywood. “The fact Universal had invested in a movie to be made here revealed a huge vote of confidence in the New Zealand film industry,” Fox told The Post before filming began in 1995, also dropping a rare compliment about our “lack of pollution”.

Jackson’s work with Universal Studios on The Frighteners also meant they offered him the chance to direct King Kong, which wouldn’t come to fruition for over a decade thanks to the humble billion-dollar, Oscar-winning, national-identity-shaping trilogy that came next in his filmography. Could we have had Lord of the Rings if we hadn’t had The Frighteners? Wētā certainly held onto their GrimReaper.jpeg for the Ringwraiths, that is for certain.

Although flawed, The Frighteners is a pivotal moment in our film history. It’s a film about the bridge between the living and the dead, but it also represents Jackson making the leap from low-budget indie filmmaking to big budget blockbusters, Wētā taking the reigns as the most ambitious and inventive digital effects company in the world, and Hollywood well and truly taking notice of little old New Zealand, even with its boring rugby and its boring pollution-free air.

Plus, where else are you ever going to see Marty McFly and Rachel McKenna arguing on a Lyttelton basketball court?

The Frighteners is available to stream on Neon