“When a man’s jawbone drops off it’s time to reassess the situation.” Gear up with us for the Halloween season with Peter Jackson’s 1996 Hollywood studio debut The Frighteners.
When unhappy architect Frank Bannister blacks out drunk at the wheel, only to awake after his wife has died in violent, suspicious circumstances, he wastes away his time in the unfinished shell of the house he was building for her, making ends meet by utilising his trauma-induced ability to see into the spirit world by using a squad of ghostly acquaintances to perform sham exorcisms for money. But when victims of inexplicable deaths start piling up bearing a number carved into their foreheads – just like his late wife – Frank finds himself investigating a supernatural mystery in which he is increasingly considered the prime suspect.
Marking the last movie leading man performance from Michael J. Fox, alongside a stacked cast of quirky genre legends (Dee Wallace, Jeffrey Combs, and the original TV Gomez Addams, John Astin), Jackson brought his Kiwi Splatter sensibilities to the attention of Robert Zemeckis, who saw potential beyond the Tales from the Crypt episode it began life as. Join Gali and Patrick as they talk Busey Jr., museum mummy interference, and numerical murder mysteries.
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