the same streets now boogied upon by Marlon Williams<\/a> being used for supernatural car chases, or Christchurch\u2019s Sign of the Takahe standing in for a banquet hall. Straddling both comedy and horror, the film showcases Jackson\u2019s early penchant for gore and silliness as seen in Braindead and Bad Taste (\u201cI doubt I could ever control myself sufficiently to make a serious horror film,\u201d he once said.)<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"data:image\/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP\/\/\/yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7\")
<\/p>\n
Alas, that comedy-horror blend, as well as a convoluted plot culminating in a giant hell-worm sequence \u2013 could have also been The Frighteners\u2019 downfall. It doesn\u2019t feel quite scary enough, nor funny enough, to work either way. Jackson himself was disappointed with Universal\u2019s marketing campaign, which \u201cdidn\u2019t tell you anything about the movie,\u201d and was not helped by the release competing with 90s box office titans Independence Day and The Nutty Professor.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Frighteners may not have been a commercial success (with a $26 million budget, it only just broke even in the United States) nor a critical darling (Roger Ebert gave it one star and said \u201cI reviewed a nine-hour documentary about the lives of Mongolian yak herdsman, and I would rather see it again than sit through The Frighteners\u201d), and yet it was a huge step forward for Jackson and W\u0113t\u0101 Digital, who created the then-unprecedented 570 CGI ghost shots for the film.<\/p>\n
There was also the extremely important factor that Jackson insisted to the studio that the film, despite being set in the American midwest, had to be entirely shot in New Zealand as a chance to showcase our chops to Hollywood. \u201cThe fact Universal had invested in a movie to be made here revealed a huge vote of confidence in the New Zealand film industry,\u201d Fox told The Post before filming began in 1995, also dropping a rare compliment about our \u201clack of pollution\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Jackson\u2019s work with Universal Studios on The Frighteners also meant they offered him the chance to direct King Kong, which wouldn\u2019t come to fruition for over a decade thanks to the humble billion-dollar, Oscar-winning, national-identity-shaping trilogy that came next in his filmography. Could we have had Lord of the Rings if we hadn\u2019t had The Frighteners? W\u0113t\u0101 certainly held onto their GrimReaper.jpeg for the Ringwraiths, that is for certain.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Although flawed, The Frighteners is a pivotal moment in our film history. It\u2019s a film about the bridge between the living and the dead, but it also represents Jackson making the leap from low-budget indie filmmaking to big budget blockbusters, W\u0113t\u0101 taking the reigns as the most ambitious and inventive digital effects company in the world, and Hollywood well and truly taking notice of little old New Zealand, even with its boring rugby and its boring pollution-free air.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Plus, where else are you ever going to see Marty McFly and Rachel McKenna arguing on a Lyttelton basketball court?\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Frighteners is available to stream on Neon<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Alex Casey returns to Peter Jackson\u2019s genre-bending Lyttelton-shot ghostfest on its 30th anniversary. Here\u2019s a fun fact about…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":556979,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[93,61,60,270,235508,31170,12895,235509],"class_list":["post-556978","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-movies","tag-nz-film","tag-peter-jackson","tag-pop-culture","tag-the-frighteners"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/556978","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=556978"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/556978\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/556979"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=556978"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=556978"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=556978"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}