Peter Jackson and the Splatstick Tradition The Frighteners (1996)

Splatstick — the portmanteau of "splatter" and "slapstick" — is the genre Peter Jackson effectively invented in New Zealand between 1987 and 1992 across three feature films: Bad Taste (1987), Meet the Feebles (1989), and Braindead (1992; Dead Alive in the US). The Frighteners is the Hollywood-budget continuation of that tradition, and the film at which the splatstick register collides with the prestige character drama Jackson had developed on Heavenly Creatures (1994).

What splatstick is

Splatstick combines two registers that normally repel each other: the physical comedy of Buster Keaton and the Three Stooges (timing-based, exaggerated, played for laughs) and the explicit gore of 1970s and 1980s horror (latex prosthetics, blood squibs, body-horror practical effects). The combination requires both registers to be played at full volume simultaneously. The comic timing must hold under the gore; the gore must register as physically real under the comedy.

The precursors are Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead (1981) and especially Evil Dead II (1987), Stuart Gordon's Re-Animator (1985, starring Jeffrey Combs), and Bob Clark's Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things (1972). Jackson's Bad Taste drew on all three and pushed the register further.

"Splatstick is the genre that makes you laugh and gag in the same second. The audience cannot tell whether it is a comedy or a horror film, and the genre's argument is that the distinction does not matter. Real life is also both." — Kim Newman, Nightmare Movies (1988, revised 2011) (book, not available online)

Bad Taste (1987)

Bad Taste was Jackson's self-funded debut. He shot it on a 16mm Bolex camera on weekends with friends over four years, sculpted the latex prosthetics himself in his parents' kitchen, and completed it with a NZ$30,000 New Zealand Film Commission grant. The film follows a small unit of New Zealand soldiers fighting alien fast-food restaurateurs who have come to Earth to harvest humans as meat.

The signature scene is a brain-eating sequence in which the lead alien's head is split open and the contents consumed with a spoon. The scene is played for both gore and comedy: the actor's grin holds throughout.

Meet the Feebles (1989)

Meet the Feebles, written with Fran Walsh, Stephen Sinclair, and Daniel Mulheron, is a depraved Muppet pastiche. Heroin-addicted puppets, sex-tape blackmail, a Vietnam-flashback bullfrog, a syphilitic singing rabbit. The film is one of the most genuinely transgressive products of 1980s cinema and has accrued cult status.

"Meet the Feebles is what Jim Henson's nightmares look like. The film takes the children's-television register and runs it through a meat grinder. The fact that it works as comedy, not as shock cinema, is what makes Peter Jackson Peter Jackson." — Maitland McDonagh, The Village Voice (2010)

Braindead / Dead Alive (1992)

Braindead is the splatstick apotheosis. A New Zealand-set zombie outbreak that culminates in a lawnmower sequence in which the protagonist clears a houseful of zombies with a push-mower at full revolutions. The sequence used over 300 liters of fake blood — more than any other single sequence in narrative cinema before or since.

The film's structural argument is that the splatstick register can carry actual emotional weight. The protagonist's grief over his mother's transformation into a zombie is played sincerely under the gore. The combination is what makes the lawnmower sequence land as both cathartic and disturbing.

"Braindead is the most blood-soaked film ever made and one of the most genuinely affecting horror comedies. The two facts are connected. Peter understood that the gore had to mean something, or it was just gore." — Stephen King, Entertainment Weekly (2010)

The Frighteners as the splatstick-prestige hybrid

The Frighteners is the film where Jackson tries to keep the splatstick register while adding the character-drama discipline of Heavenly Creatures. The opening sanatorium massacre, the ghost-crew haunting sequences, the freezer scene, the chapel climax — all are staged with splatstick energy. But Frank Bannister's grief over Debra, the Lucy partnership, the Heaven sequence with Debra's blessing — these are staged with Heavenly Creatures care.

The combination is what makes the film difficult to market and easy to love. The 1996 audience was not yet prepared for a film that played both registers at once; the critical re-evaluation in the 2010s has largely been about recognizing the hybrid as deliberate rather than as tonal incoherence.

"The Frighteners is what happens when a splatstick filmmaker decides he wants to make characters who matter. The gore registers because the characters matter. The characters matter because the gore is taken seriously. This is the lesson Peter Jackson would carry into Lord of the Rings, where every orc-killing in Helm's Deep matters because Aragorn matters." — Bilge Ebiri, Vulture (2018)

After splatstick

Jackson left the splatstick register behind after The Frighteners. The Lord of the Rings trilogy, King Kong, The Lovely Bones, and The Hobbit trilogy are all in the prestige-epic register. They Shall Not Grow Old (2018) and The Beatles: Get Back (2021) are documentary work. The splatstick tradition has continued in other hands — Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, 2004), James Gunn (Slither, 2006), Eli Roth, the Soska sisters — but Jackson himself has not returned.

The Frighteners is, in this sense, his farewell to the form.