Production History (The Frighteners) The Frighteners (1996)

The project began as a Tales from the Crypt feature

The Frighteners started as a screenplay Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh wrote on spec in the early 1990s, intended as an entry in the Tales from the Crypt Presents feature series that HBO and Universal were developing alongside the popular HBO horror anthology. Robert Zemeckis was one of the executive producers behind the Crypt features. When he read Jackson and Walsh's script he pulled it out of the anthology slate.

"Bob read it and said, 'This is too good for Tales from the Crypt. We should make it as a stand-alone Universal picture.' That was the entire shift. We went from a low-budget anthology entry to a Universal summer release in a single conversation." — Peter Jackson, Empire (2017)

Zemeckis, fresh off Forrest Gump (1994) and the Death Becomes Her (1992) experience with extensive digital effects, saw in Jackson the next director who could execute large-scale ghost effects without the cost overruns that had haunted his own Death Becomes Her. He brokered the move to Universal as a $26 million stand-alone feature.

Heavenly Creatures was the audition

The reason Zemeckis was willing to bet was Jackson and Walsh's previous film, Heavenly Creatures (1994), which had earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay. Heavenly Creatures demonstrated that the director of Bad Taste (1987) and Braindead (1992) could handle psychological subtlety, build a sympathetic protagonist out of a real-world murderer, and integrate digital effects (the Borovnia clay sequences) into character drama. Zemeckis saw the Frighteners script and saw an American-budget version of the same skill set.

"We told Bob we wanted to keep shooting in New Zealand. He said fine. We told him we wanted final cut. He said fine. We told him we needed the visual effects done in-house. He said fine. He was the most enabling executive producer we have ever worked with." — Fran Walsh, The Hollywood Reporter (2021)

Michael J. Fox came on after Tropic Thunder

Michael J. Fox was Jackson's first choice for Frank Bannister. The director had wanted a star whose public image was so wholesome that the cruelty of Frank's early scenes — cold-reading mourners at a funeral, calling Lucy a mark — would land as a register break. Fox accepted the role on a deferred-salary arrangement that Universal structured to keep the budget at $26 million.

"Peter wanted somebody who walked in trailing twenty years of likability. The Frank Bannister he was going to write only worked if the audience already loved the actor before the actor opened his mouth. I was the most likable person he could afford." — Michael J. Fox, Always Looking Up (2009) (memoir, not available online)

Fox's Parkinson's symptoms had begun in 1991 but were not publicly disclosed until 1998. He has subsequently said that the long shoot in New Zealand, away from his routines and managing the early symptoms, contributed to his decision to step back from theatrical leading roles after this film. The Frighteners would be his last.

The 1995 New Zealand shoot

Principal photography ran from August 1995 through November 1995 in Lyttelton and Wellington, New Zealand. Lyttelton — a port town on the South Island just outside Christchurch — stood in for the fictional American small town of Fairwater, with its Victorian houses and steep streets dressed to look like Pacific Northwest United States. The cemetery and church sequences were shot at Lyttelton's actual graveyard. The "Bradley house" exterior was a Wellington Heritage building. The unfinished house where Frank lives was a set built specifically for the film, then partially demolished for the wind-down beat. (wikipedia)

Alun Bollinger shot the film. Bollinger had been Jackson's cinematographer through Heavenly Creatures and would continue with him into The Lord of the Rings second-unit work. His approach on The Frighteners was high-contrast practical lighting, dutch angles in the haunting sequences, and deep shadow blocks for the Reaper scenes.

WETA Digital was built for this film

Before The Frighteners, Jackson's in-house effects shop WETA (named after a New Zealand insect) had been a small physical-effects house attached to his earlier films. The Frighteners required hundreds of digital ghost shots — translucent characters, the Reaper's column-of-life beam, the freezer-scene spirit forms, the demonic worm-mouth at the climax. Jackson and his partners Richard Taylor, Jamie Selkirk, and Tania Rodger reorganized the company around the demand. WETA Digital — the digital arm — was effectively founded for this production.

The effects work was unusually ambitious for 1996. The film contained over 570 effects shots, more than any non-Jurassic Park production of its period.

"The Frighteners was the Trojan horse. Peter built a digital effects house on a $26 million horror comedy that the studio thought was a one-off. Three years later that house was rendering Helm's Deep. Without The Frighteners there is no New Zealand Lord of the Rings." — Joe Letteri, WIRED (2015)

See WETA Digital and Pre-LOTR VFX for the longer technical history.

Danny Elfman's score and the tonal problem

Danny Elfman scored the film. His brief from Jackson was that the music should bridge — not resolve — the comedy and horror registers. The result is a score that quotes Beetlejuice (1988) cheerfully through the first thirty minutes and turns into a near-Sleepy Hollow gothic register for the second half. The tonal pivot of the score tracks the protagonist's pivot from racketeer to participant.

The Independence Day collision

Universal slotted The Frighteners for July 19, 1996. Twelve days earlier, on July 2, 1996, 20th Century Fox had released Independence Day, which would become the highest-grossing film of the year. Phenomenon (the John Travolta vehicle) opened the same day as The Frighteners. The summer's box office was effectively closed by the time Jackson's film reached theatres.

The film opened at #4 with $7.7 million on its opening weekend and finished its US theatrical run at approximately $16.8 million against the $26 million budget. International release was rolled out over the following six months. The film's break-even came on home video. See The Universal Marketing Disaster (The Frighteners) for the longer release-and-reception history.

Post-production and the director's cut

Jamie Selkirk edited the film, continuing his collaboration with Jackson that ran back to Bad Taste. The theatrical cut runs 110 minutes; Jackson's director's cut, released on DVD in 1998, runs 123 minutes and restores several Dammers scenes and an extended freezer sequence. Jackson has said the director's cut is the version he prefers.

"There was no battle over the cuts. Universal trimmed thirteen minutes for pacing and I agreed at the time. By 1998 I had the leverage to put them back and I did." — Peter Jackson, Empire (2017)