Movies that Settle: The Frighteners

Welcome to Dursin’s Dungeon…. Oooooooooooohh. What a great title for the Halloween Season! Hope you are all enjoying the spooky season. I thought I would write a spooky movie to celebrate. And I got it in just before Halloween, no less. But first:

This is a thing I see people do on Substack a lot, but I figured it was only for more important (or famous) people. Now I realize that no one is important, not even famous people. We all watch and do the same mundane stuff. So here goes:

“What should we watch?” - This is the question I ask my wife almost every night we eat dinner at home. It is literally the most difficult decision we have to make all day. Here’s what we have been deciding lately:

Harley Quinn (animated, HBOMax): I’m not a huge Harley fan (although I love The Joker, so it occasionally crosses over), but this series is very well done. If you have any interest in DC stuff, or just fun animation, check it out. The voice actors they found are all spot on, they use so many familiar characters in unfamiliar ways, it is hysterical. Especially Bane.

Resident Alien (Sci-Fi, Peacock): What else can I say? It’s hilarious. Stop reading and go watch it. Then come back and finish the column.

Read ‘em and Weep: I read stuff sometimes. And you should too:

Follow Me Down - A Reckless Book by Ed Brubaker & Sean Phillips: I recommended the previous book in this column, so here’s the newest one. And whatever I said about that one still applies.

This post is about a movie I enjoyed back in 1996: Peter Jackson’s The Frighteners. What do I think now? Let’s find out!

Before Peter Jackson gained an absolutely silly amount of fame and nerd cred by directing three Lord of the Rings movies simultaneously, he was a cult horror director in the vein of Sam Raimi, and was apparently an admirer of Sam’s work, as you could see in his movies, particularly Dead Alive. He also gained some recognition for directing the award-winning Heavenly Creatures in 1994. But it wasn’t until two years later that the guy really won me over with his very slickly-directed The Frighteners.

The logline as posted on IMDB reads, “After a tragic car accident that kills his wife, a man discovers he can communicate with the dead, and he uses that gift to con people. However, when a demonic spirit appears, he may be the only one who can stop it from killing the living and the dead.” As loglines go, that is actually kind of long, but even a long logline (I feel like I’m writing the Bob Loblaw Law Blog) doesn’t really sum up the plot of the movie. In fact, if you have never seen it, the film is probably even darker than you imagine, even with a guy who can talk to the dead and a demonic spirit killing people. There is a pre-Columbine graphic depiction of a mass-shooting, and an insinuation that the man who can commune with the dead, played by Michael J. Fox, may have killed his wife, and yes, he does in fact, use his powers to con people into hiring him as an exorcist. and he’s supposed to be the good guy. So, we’re off to a rollicking start.

These interesting twists on the hero are thanks to Jackson himself, and Dame Fran Walsh, Peter’s wife and writer of just about everything he’s ever done. When we first meet Fox’s Frank Bannister, he is crashing a funeral, handing out business cards, trying to drum up some interest in his exorcist business. The fun part is that he doesn’t really have to drum up business, because he actually sends his ghost buddies (played by Chi McBride and Jim Fyfle, a.k.a. Jimmy the Geek from The X-Files) into houses and has them lift objects and slam cabinets, enough so that the occupants call him to remove the ghosts, which he does very humorously with the help of a device that is basically a toaster. Think of it this way; it’s like Walter Peck from Ghost-Busters was actually right and that the Ghost-Busters were frauds.

Of course, there is more to the plot than a fake Ghost-Buster. It turns out that people have been mysteriously dying in the small town where Fox lives. The latest victim happens to be Ray, Fox’s most recent client. Ray was a young man who worked out regularly (and annoyingly), but died of heart failure. Because Ray died under such strange circumstances, his spirit did not go “into the light,” and so his ghost is still walking around, and Fox can see and communicate with him. Fox ends up forming a bond with his widow, played by Trini Alvarado, as they attempt a Ghost-style seance. Although most of the townsfolk don’t trust Fox, she believes in him.

As for the murders, Fox realizes that several of the victims are people that he has interacted with, and only he can see a bizarre number on their forehead just before they die. It turns out that the deaths are not random at all but it is a killing spree being continued by the spirit of a long-dead killer, Johnny Bartlett, (Jake Busey) who gunned down 12 people in a hospital years ago. This spirit of Bartlett would be bad enough, but it is actually possessed by a demon resembling the Grim Reaper himself. Bartlett and his girlfriend, who can see and interact with him the same way Fox interacts with ghosts, are trying to keep up with the the most prominent serial killers of all time, hence the forehead numbers.

As the story progresses, it begins to get darker, as we discover that Fox’s wife, who was thought to have died in a car accident while Fox was driving, and he always blamed himself for, was actually killed by Bartlett’s ghost. Her death caused Fox to quit his promising career as an architect and get into the death business, although, as one of his ghost pals, an Old West cowboy named Judge (who Fox mistakenly kept calling “Doc” during filming) tells him, “Death ain’t no way to make a living.”

It’s bound to be pretty depressing, in fact, but I suppose for Fox, it’s better than moving on from your wife’s death. Both of these nuggets serve to add layers to Fox’s character, because a story’s protagonist can’t just be a shyster. Plus, as a writer, you need to have these kinds of things in your toolbox.

Eventually, after the Grim Reaper/Bartlett has taken down all of Fox’s ghost pals and targeted Alvarado, she and Fox team up to defeat Bartlett and his girlfriend when Fox actually kills himself for a little while so he can fight (and defeat) Bartlett on his turf. After the whole fracas, Alvarado can also see and communicate with the dead, but since Fox isn’t making his livelihood off of it, he’s less grumpy and they both presumably live happily ever after. I mean, there was no sequel or spin-off series, like there would be if the movie came out now.

So, what, then, is the legacy of The Frighteners? Other than the fact that Peter Jackson went on to become one of the most prolific directors of his generation, I can’t really think of anything. Maybe some impressive CGI effects at a time when that was still new and cool. If I asked ten people if they remember this movie, how many would say they did? I recently watched it with my wife, because it was recommended to us by one of our streaming services, and she had never seen it, and I don’t believe had even heard of it.

But what about my personal connection to this movie, i.e. why am I even writing about it?

Like I said, I watched it recently for the first time in many years, and I had definitely forgotten about the dark elements of it. As I mentioned earlier, the mass shooting by Bartlett and his girlfriend takes on a different meaning now, as mass shootings have unfortunately become commonplace in this century. So much so that employers have lockdown drills on a regular basis. My colleagues and I had one this week, in fact, and the presenter told us that, “In 3000 school shootings, no one has ever breached a locked door, so lock the door.” I know he has to say that kind of stuff, but it really didn’t soothe my anxiety. I mean, someone is bound to get through a locked door with a gun one of these times.

The point is, I originally recalled this movie as being a light-hearted and funny ghost story, starring the affable Michael J. Fox, who interacts with some funny dead people, including Chi McBride playing a 70’s pimp-ghost that I feel like Craig Robinson has been imitating for years. Having seen some of Peter Jackson’s earlier work, I was excited to see what he could do with an actual budget, and I was not disappointed.

Watching in 2022, I’m not sure if my sensibilities have changed, or we just live in darker times, or a little bit of both. There’s no overt racism or sexism in it, or moments that you cringe at while thinking, “well, they wouldn’t say that if it were made now.” No, what made it cringe-worthy was the amount of gruesome murders that took place. I’m not opposed to violence in movies. In fact, I love a good shoot-’em-up where hundreds of people get killed. The fact that the very subject of the movie was death makes you think, “is this a horror comedy, or just straight horror?”

To bring it back to the Ghost-Busters comparison again, imagine if halfway through that movie, you discover that Peter Venkman had a wife that he thinks he killed in a car accident, but was actually murdered by Slimer. And now imagine that he still goes after Dana Barrett, even though she is very recently widowed and Peter was talking to her dead husband. It would certainly change the way the movie was perceived. Or maybe not. I mean, it is Bill Murray, after all.

I still enjoyed The Frighteners this time around. I love the creative story-telling, the special effects, the Sam Raimi-ness of it all. But the death really got to me this time. Possibly because I’m 26 years older now, but probably because we have all seen so much death in those 26 years. And that is why I’m writing about this movie in 2022.

Thanks for reading. Happy Halloween, everyone! Don’t forget to subscribe at the button, and check out all my fun wares at my linktree!