The Frighteners
1996 · Directed by Peter Jackson
- horror
- comedy
The story
Once an architect, Frank Bannister now passes himself off as an exorcist of evil spirits. To bolster his facade, he claims his "special" gift is the result of a car accident that killed his wife. But what he does not count on is more people dying in the small town where he lives. As he tries to piece together the supernatural mystery of these killings, he falls in love with the wife of one of the victims and deals with a crazy FBI agent.
What it’s like
Bright, saturated and slightly grubby, The Frighteners looks like a 1990s studio horror-comedy that has been dipped in grease and fog: sodium-yellow streetlamps, rain-slick suburban streets, and a deliberately sickly green-and-purple haze for the ghosts. Peter Jackson's camera swoops and cranes with restless energy, whipping through walls and across rooftops, while the practical prosthetics and stop-motion-adjacent visual effects give the spectral world a tactile, slightly cartoonish weight. The score is bombastic and orchestral, with ghostly choral stings and sudden blasts of strings that undercut the jokes. Vibe-wise it is mischievous and noisy, a campy ghost-hunt with a warm, slightly melancholy undertow around grief and a widowed man who cannot quite move on. Good for a Friday night with friends, a playful Halloween watch, or when you want spooky without dread settling in for long. Pacing is brisk and bouncy, with scenes tumbling into one another, and the central arc follows a fraud slowly becoming someone who genuinely cares. Intensity: a fair amount of gory, cartoonish violence and a few genuinely startling jump-scare moments, but the body horror is more slapstick than harrowing, with no sexual content. For people who like horror that laughs at itself and wants a bit of heart beneath the scares.