John Astin as one of the spirits in ‘The Frighteners’ (Everett)

Everyone’s talking about Ghostbusters, the 1984 comedy adventure about a team of paranormal experts that just got rebooted with last week’s all-female version. But this week also marks the 20th anniversary of another film that mixed inventive special effects, comedy, and horror: The Frighteners.

The Frighteners didn’t have nearly the same success as the original Ghostbusters. But it marked an intriguing turning point, both as the arrival of a talent who’d go on to have an enormous effect on Hollywood in the years to come and as the last major screen role (so far) from an iconic star. Directed by future Oscar winner Peter Jackson and starring, in his final major movie role to date, Michael J. Fox, The Frighteners follows a man who can communicate with the spirit world.

A New Zealander, Jackson had made his name with a series of scrappy, gory genres movies. His first film, the long-in-the-works, anarchic alien-invasion comedy Bad Taste became a cult hit when it was finally released in 1989. Two more disreputable, hard-R-rated movies followed, 1989’s Muppet parody Meet The Feebles and 1992’s zombie pic Braindead, and Jackson and his partner Fran Walsh were soon wooed by Hollywood.

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Fox in ‘The Frighteners’ (Everett)

While in pre-production for his fourth movie, the true-crime tale Heavenly Creatures (which would win Jackson “respectable” critical acclaim for the first time), Jackson and Walsh wrote a two-page treatment for a film that would be their biggest-budget project yet. It would revolve around grieving architect, Frank Bannister (eventually played by Fox), who uses his newfound ability to see ghosts to con the locals of the small town he lives in, only to stumble into the case of a serial killer who might be murdering from beyond the grave.

Word was that Forrest Gump director Robert Zemeckis was looking for movie pitches that could be turned into movie spin-offs of the Tales From the Crypt HBO horror anthology series that he had produced. Jackson’s agent sent the Frighteners outline to Zemeckis, who loved the pitch, but as Jackson said in an interview later, “he didn’t want to use the story for Tales From the Crypt, because he thought it was unique and could stand on its own.”

The film ended up at Universal with a modest $25 million budget. Perhaps because Zemeckis, now a producer on the film, was vouching for the young director — who was just 33 at the time — Jackson was allowed to have final cut on the film. Not only that: He was allowed to shoot the U.S.-set film at home in New Zealand.

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This would prove useful in some ways. The film contained an enormous number of CGI shots for the time — 570, which Entertainment Weekly reported was more than what was in the same summer’s biggest hit Independence Day. Responsibility for creating most of the on-screen ghosts went to Jackson’s own recently-formed company Weta Digital, which were able to bring the effects in for a quarter of the price that Hollywood competitors were quoting.

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Robert Zemeckis, Michael J. Fox, director Peter Jackson, and producer Jamie Selkirk on set (Everett)

