The mid-1990s tend to be glossed over entirely when discussing the career of Peter Jackson, so much so that you’d be forgiven for thinking he segued straight from low budget gorefests straight into The Lord of the Rings trilogy. That most definitely wasn’t the case, and it was 1996’s The Frighteners that gave him his first taste of not just the Hollywood studio system, but effects-heavy escapades.
Despite winning strong reviews from critics, widespread praise from fans, and impressing the bigwigs at Universal so much they moved the film’s release date up by three months to a prime July bow after being blown away by the first rough cut they’d seen, the supernatural horror comedy died a slow and painful death at the box office after earning less than $30 million on a $26 million budget.
Cult favorite status didn’t take long to be secured, though, and The Frighteners still holds up as a rip-roaring and action-packed slab of genre-bending escapist entertainment. Thankfully, even at-home audiences haven’t given up on it yet, with FlixPatrol revealing the overlooked and unfairly ignored bomb has surfaced on the iTunes Top 10 in multiple countries.
Michael J. Fox headlines as a former architect turned “exorcist”, who gets in way too deep when the residents of his small town home begin dying off in alarmingly high numbers. Along the way, he stumbles upon a new love interest, runs afoul of an FBI agent, and gets caught up in a riotous set of circumstances that deliver fun, thrills, humour, and chills in spades.