Trailer
Plot summary
Frank Bannister trained as an architect, and the crash that killed his wife Debra left him able to see and hear ghosts. Three of them keep him company: Cyrus, Stuart, and The Judge, a gunslinger from the Old West. He has turned that into a trade, sending his dead friends to haunt houses so that the owners pay him to clear the spirits away. A call at the home of the physician Lucy Lynskey and her husband Ray goes as usual until Frank notices a number glowing on Ray's forehead. Ray dies of a heart attack soon afterward, and Frank helps Lucy reach his ghost. Then a Grim Reaper-like figure kills another man marked 38, and Frank sets out to learn what is causing the deaths.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Frighteners (1996)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- With so many ghosts among its main cast, The Frighteners required more digital effects shots than almost any movie made up till that time, and the eighteen-month period for completing the work was largely stressful for an effects company that had been in existence less than three years.
- With effects work falling behind schedule, producer Robert Zemeckis brought in ILM animation supervisor Wes Takahashi, who recalled that around 400 shots still needed to be done and that 'everyone was kind of worried.'
- Jackson and Walsh envisioned The Frighteners as a low-budget film with unknown actors, but Zemeckis suggested casting his Back to the Future star Fox in the lead role. Fox became enthusiastic about working with Jackson when he saw Heavenly Creatures at the Toronto International Film Festival.
- Robert Zemeckis viewed the treatment for The Frighteners with the intention of directing it himself, as a spin-off film of the television series Tales from the Crypt, which he helped produce.
- Jake Busey's character Johnny Bartlett is a mass murderer inspired by Charles Starkweather, and he shares the last name of Starkweather's second and third victims, the mother and step-father of the killer's girlfriend and accomplice.
- Director Peter Jackson later blamed the film's box-office disappointment mainly on Universal's marketing, including a poster he said 'didn't tell you anything about the picture.'
- Six weeks into filming, cinematographer Alun Bollinger was seriously injured in a car accident, and his replacement John Blick alternated duties with him for the rest of the shoot.
- The Frighteners received an accelerated release date, four months earlier than planned, and an additional $6 million in financing, with fifteen digital animators and computer workstations, some of them borrowed from Universal and other effects companies in the US.
