‘The Frighteners’ Turns 30: How Peter Jackson’s Lost Horror Movie Helped Build Wētā and Pave the Way for ‘Lord of the Rings’

You’d be forgiven if this is the first you’ve heard of Peter Jackson’s “The Frighteners” in 2026. Released July 19, 1996, on the same day as the Atlanta Olympics’ opening ceremony and in the wake of “Independence Day” — then the second-highest-grossing movie in history — “The Frighteners” is no stranger to being upstaged. At 30, it shares the spotlight with another Jackson film, “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring,” which turns 25 in December.

Those two films, however, are inextricably linked. The former leading into the latter as part of a growing ambition and scaling up of production, for which “The Frighteners,” Jackson’s fifth feature film, represents a definitive turning point.

“The Frighteners” started as a two-page treatment conceived by Jackson and Fran Walsh while on a walk during the writing of 1993’s “Heavenly Creatures.” The outline was a far cry from what the film became, but it caught the eye of Robert Zemeckis as he sourced ideas for longform spinoffs of his “Tales from the Crypt” series. After a brainstorming session in Los Angeles, Zemeckis invited the duo to develop “The Frighteners” into a Hollywood-backed standalone feature. 

For the first time, Jackson had access to a major studio budget of around $30 million; a significant leap from the estimated $5 million budget of “Heavenly Creatures.” Supporting the larger scale of “The Frighteners” would be 570 digital effects shots from a steadily growing Wētā Digital (now Wētā FX). Jackson, Richard Taylor, and Jamie Selkirk founded Wētā Digital in 1993 to provide visual effects for “Heavenly Creatures,” leasing a single Silicon Graphics workstation to process the handful of digital shots that complimented Wētā Workshop’s practical effects. 

The story — of widowed architect-turned-psychic-conman Frank Bannister (Michael J. Fox) as he learns to leave the dead behind — was lauded for its technical ambition but failed to capture theatrical audiences. Yet it also augured what was to come as “The Frighteners” brought together the splatter horror found in “Bad Taste,” the teenage killers of “Heavenly Creatures,” and the comic absurdity of “Meet the Feebles,” beneath the umbrella of a broader enthusiasm, inquisitiveness, and compassion that would become even more apparent in Jackson and Walsh’s later films. “An autumnal movie,” is how Jeffrey Combs, who played the film’s antagonist, Agent Milton Dammers, described “The Frighteners” — which only made its high summer release more baffling.

Since the film’s release on VHS, however, “The Frighteners” has enjoyed a continuing renaissance. “It would have been nice to have the success at the time,” Jackson told IndieWire. “But I’m pleased people are enjoying the film, and have enjoyed the film.”

To celebrate the 30th anniversary of the theatrical release of “The Frighteners,” IndieWire spoke to director Peter Jackson, Wētā co-founders Richard Taylor and Jamie Selkirk, visual effects pioneers Wes Takahashi, Matt Aitken, and Gray Horsfield, New Line Cinema executive Mark Ordesky, and actors Jeffrey Combs and Jim Fyfe about how the “The Frighteners” came to be, how it helped keep Wētā alive, prepared the team for “The Lord of the Rings,” and laid the groundwork for New Zealand to become an industry leader in visual effects through Wētā.

The following interviews have been edited for clarity and length. 

Once Zemeckis and Universal had agreed to let Jackson shoot “The Frighteners” on location in New Zealand, Jackson and Wētā had to work out on the fly how to make the film.

Peter Jackson (Co-writer/director): We thought Bob [Zemeckis] was going to direct it and we were going to be the writers. We didn’t limit ourselves when describing effects. We just assumed that he’d be using Industrial Light & Magic, and it wouldn’t be our problem. He turns around and says, “Do you want to make it, Peter?” At that point, it was like, “Jesus, how are we going to do it?”

Jamie Selkirk (Editor and producer): We ended up getting quite good visual effects out of “Heavenly Creatures,” but we had all this equipment which we’d rented, we had to either get rid of it or buy it. We set up Wētā Digital so we could actually retain all the equipment for [“The Frighteners”].

Jackson: It was obviously achievable with CGI, even at the time. “Jurassic Park” had come out, and it blew my mind. I couldn’t believe the dinosaurs and how real they were. But we only had one computer and one CGI artist. We had to ramp up quickly and ramp up in New Zealand. We found a couple of really good local guys. I managed to persuade Matt Aitken, who was living in the UK, to come back to New Zealand for it.

Matt Aitken (CG supervisor): [Wētā Digital] had grown from two people when I joined in 1994 to about a dozen when we got started on “The Frighteners” in 1995. 

Gray Horsfield (CG supervisor): I believe I was the fourth person to turn up. Wētā was wrapping up on “Heavenly Creatures,” so I had a bit of a hand on that. I pretty much came in right on the ground floor of “The Frighteners.”

Aitken: That growth was driven by the work we were doing on local New Zealand productions, including Peter’s “Forgotten Silver.” One of those local productions had around 150 digital shots, so we were well underway establishing a pipeline that supported large-scale digital effects production.

Richard Taylor (Creature and miniature effects): Being us, we just rolled with it. I don’t want it to sound like it wasn’t daunting but it didn’t cause trepidation, because our ignorance was too great to know what it might entail. We just rolled into it because that’s what you do with Peter: He’s fearless.

Peter Jackson, Jamie Selkirk, and crew behind the scenes on ‘The Frighteners’Wētā

Wētā Digital would eventually move into the Wētā Workshop and later its own Miramar campus, though its early days were more domestic — initially set up in a house Selkirk used for editing.

Selkirk: We had the editing facility in the bedroom and all the other stuff in the lounge. Then we moved to a house down the way.

Horsfield: We were still living in a small townhouse in an outer suburb of Wellington [when production began]. We didn’t even move to the Miramar studio until quite a bit later on.

Jeffrey Combs (Agent Milton Dammers): We went to Peter and Fran’s house and read through scenes. On a break, we got into a van with Peter and drove back into Wellington, and to this kind of Victorian home. It was filled with young people in front of computers.

Horsfield: A bunch of geeks in a room with some computers. It was a far cry from what visual effects studios look like today. We weren’t really on a spreadsheet. We didn’t know how many shots we had to do because it was changing all the time.

Combs: It was kind of cozy!

Horsfield: Peter had an idea of what he wanted. We put our heads together, tried to figure out a good path, and we marched forward from there. It was real seat-of-the-pants stuff. It might have been ballsy but, at the same time, it was thrilling. We were a bunch of Kiwi lads just trying to pull it together and make it work.

Jackson: We always used to just rent space and at the end of the film you would have to clean it out. After “Heavenly Creatures” we thought this should be a permanent thing, and we should buy a building that we can set up as an effects space, and not have to move every time the film finishes.

Taylor: We had moved workshops nine times before finally buying the building. It was an old psychiatric hospital from the turn of the century; it is still a psychiatric hospital [laughs]. Wētā Digital was in the front of the building, in a part of the building that we now run our retail store out of. 

Even as Wētā coalesced physically, that seat-of-the-pants improvisation continued as “The Frighteners” got underway.

Selkirk: Peter went into “The Frighteners” with exactly the same process as his other films: just shooting from the hip, coming up with ideas on the day. He always wanted to push to get the best shot. There was a lot of working with the digital side and making sure we’d supplied them with the right frame counts. That was all a new thing for us to do.

Horsfield: I have great admiration for Wes Takahashi, who came on and helmed a vision for the film throughout. We got through 80 percent of the film without outside help but it would have been near impossible to finish the show without him.

Wes Takahashi (Visual effects supervisor): I had worked closely with Bob [Zemeckis] on all three “Back to the Future” movies and “Death Becomes Her.” Out of what seemed like the blue, he called me down to meet him in L.A. Bob went over the premise of “The Frighteners” and asked if I was interested in heading up the visual effects. I mentioned that it would be a hard sell, given I wasn’t familiar with any movie with notable visual effects that had come out of New Zealand. He showed me a sequence that included a handful of wildly imaginative and funny temp ghost effects that had been accomplished by the existing crew, which sold me on the project.

Peter Jackson and the Grim Reaper behind the scenes on ‘The Frighteners’Wētā

Takahashi’s first job was to compile a visual effects breakdown and let Zemeckis know if “The Frighteners” could stay on track and budget.

Takahashi: I was given a script and realized the film was close to 500 visual effects shots, which was tantamount to the number of visual effects shots on “Casper,” which was the biggest visual effects film in production to date at [Industrial Light & Magic]. ILM had hundreds of personnel to throw at it. Wētā’s digital team consisted of about seven guys at the time. Feeling somewhat like a Universal mole sent to spy on this rogue New Zealand production, I told Peter that he had to lock the script, which he eventually did.

Jackson: We hadn’t factored in that we were going to have to shoot a lot of scenes twice. We had to shoot them in motion control because we wanted Michael J. Fox and the ghosts to walk around the room and talk to each other. That required that we shoot Michael by himself and then shoot the ghosts against blue screen. Any movement with a camera, we had to record it with a motion control system.

Jim Fyfe (Stuart): They would shoot a plate then they would shoot the scene with us doing the dialogue timed out. Later on, often on a rainy day, they’d call us in and [we’d shoot] blue screen stuff. I saw it as very old school. Méliès was doing that.

Jackson: We ended up going over schedule. It was a six-month shoot; much longer than it should have been, really. Michael did a lot of acting in sets that were full of motion control gear. It was very painstaking and very complex. But it was sort of easy in the sense that we knew what we were doing. We just took a long time to do it.

Combs: Peter was very prepared. He knew exactly what he wanted to do. At the same time, he was wide open for any kind of inspiration or a better way. He wasn’t stubborn about keeping an idea if a better one came along.

Fyfe: I think they wanted people who could say the words as written. But also, “Look, if we decide to do a little something, is that going to freak you out?” The answer from me was a clear, “No.” It definitely felt informal and fun and relaxed, but competent.

Taylor: I just remember it being a joyfully interactive, collaborative group of really lovely people. A maybe unique quality of Peter and Fran — because Fran plays a big part in the casting — is they’re extremely intuitive in not only hiring amazingly talented people, they also know how to hire amazingly good people that are kind and delightful.

Selkirk: The enthusiasm was always there. Everyone wanted to always be backing Peter all the time, making sure he got exactly what he wanted. He would really push you to get the best that you can.

Jackson: I just want to wake up in the morning and be happy that I’m going to work to make a film, and I want everyone else to feel happy. I’m very open to ideas. Most of the time, they’re not something that I want to do but occasionally they are. I always try to make people feel welcome.

Fyfe: We had a blast. We laughed nonstop. The Grim Reaper was where it was completely digital. I remember seeing test footage of it, and they also had a practical version. The Reaper was terrifying.

Taylor: We wanted to do these things digitally within the film, but we didn’t leave it to chance. We did a huge amount of development [on the Reaper] and filming of tests with puppetry; both life-size suit-work with rigs on the back of the person to change the shape of the human anatomy, down to little hand puppets with rod-controlled arms.

Behind the scenes on ‘The Frighteners’Wētā

To achieve the “slinky” effect Jackson wanted, Wētā Workshop experimented with a range of materials. This included a trip to Rick Baker’s studio prior to filming to discuss the possibility of him working on the makeup for the decaying spirit, the Judge.

Taylor: Peter wanted the fabric of the Reaper to look rotten. Not like it was fabric, but like it was fleshy. We got some samples from Hong Kong of a new type of Lycra that had a very high elasticity content. [Baker] was doing some very early tests with hot-melt adhesive and gave me some samples. Of course, I immediately started playing with it. I discovered we could melt it down — we were just using an electric frying pan! — and impregnate it into fabric, and it had the same hardness and elasticity as this incredible fabric. We were able to make both small-scale puppets and the large-suit character. 

Further experiments included working out how a practical Reaper might attach to the top of Bannister’s car by driving up and down the road outside Wētā Workshop — which also happened to be in front of a Christian Fellowship School.

Taylor: I can’t imagine what the kids must have thought! The actual puppets were really successful. Had there never been a digital pipeline, I think we would have actually achieved some really interesting stuff with the puppets. But we would never have had the freedom of choreography that the digital technology allowed.

Jackson: I could see that the puppets weren’t going to give us the slinky killer guy that we needed. Cloth, at that particular time, was one of the weaknesses with CGI. It was easier to do a dinosaur than it was to do cloth. Gray Horsfield was someone who put his hand up and said, “I’ll have a go.”

Horsfield: It was an interesting challenge. I used an obscure piece of French software that’s pretty quirky: TDI Explore. As part of the Explore suite, there was a particle system called Dynamation, and it had the concept of springs. You could connect two particles with a spring and exert a force. I figured I could take the base model of the Grim Reaper and put it into Dynamation, connect it with springs, and then run a particle simulation. I would have a sequence of text files in ASCII, and then all I had to do was pop back into the original model, replace the coordinates, recalculate the normals, and then shove it back into the renderer. Now you have cloth! It was a fusion of a polygonal modeling system and a particle system that supported springs as a dynamic construct. A friend of mine, Mark Dippé, directed “Spawn” the year after and he gave me a call and said, “Dude, how did you do that cloth?”

Behind the scenes on ‘The Frighteners’Wētā

Technical improvisation didn’t stop at cloth. The Judge, his dog Rhustler, and the Reaper moving across walls and under carpets — dubbed “Wallpaperman” — inspired similar innovations.

Aitken: We tried various approaches to create the “Wallpaperman” effect.

Taylor: We took an actor and we made a very large casting as if they were draped with a large piece of carpet. Then we made that into rubber and we tried to give the sense of this character— not flowing under the carpet, but as if they had stopped and they were looking around under the carpet. It wouldn’t have worked.

Aitken: [We settled] in the end on a full CG solution where the surface being occupied by the character was replaced with geometry [shapes and points of vector data].

Taylor: I was deeply relieved when Matt Aitken over at Wētā Digital, and Gray Horsfield, said that they were successfully finding possible solutions.

Aitken: The commercial 3D software we were using at the time didn’t have deformation tools with the required complexity to represent that character’s form with the detail we wanted, so I wrote a standalone deformer that did the deformation for us. I remember realizing that it didn’t matter if our animated figure poked through the deformed surface here and there because we weren’t rendering the figure, just the surface. We could dial how closely we wanted the surface to match the animated figure on a shot-by-shot basis.

Horsfield: Pushing the bulk of the ghost shots was pretty straightforward once we got the pipeline. We did have a somewhat automated system: We developed a program where you put your parameters in and made it look good called SetSpook and DoSpook just plants it on some machines to render. The computers were always cooking. But there were a lot of custom ghost shots that required a lot more effort. For the Judge, I had to model it like a CGI insert of ribs and hips and match move it to footage. I shit you not, the footage that I’m match moving is 8-bit grayscale, 320×240 pixels.

Aitken: A lot of tools and techniques we take for granted today weren’t available in commercial graphics software packages at the time.

Horsfield: This was before distributed rendering [a technique for splitting a single render job across many computers in a network]. You would remotely log into a machine and you would have to bring in your task, execute a job and copy the plates over, and copy the product back. A lot of that was pretty manual.

Horsfield: It was a combination of a lot of fun development. Peter had some really cool concepts, and we had a lot of interesting experiments trying to bring them to fruition, because there wasn’t really a template. We did come after “Terminator 2” and “Jurassic Park,” so ILM was pretty much laying the groundwork. But we didn’t have its tools; we didn’t have its pipeline. We pretty much had to build it all from scratch. ILM was owning the landscape and, as far as I was concerned, we were trying to play catch-up.

Guiding it all was Jackson, who was ever-present across seemingly every step.

Selkirk: Peter really likes to be involved in everything.

Taylor: The most extreme being “Meet the Feebles,” where he was actually in the workshop building the puppets.

Takahashi: As soon as I got to New Zealand, I was able to meet him at his home. Which I soon realized was a rare event, given he was directing A- and B-teams day-and-night, and was still writing the script with his wife, Fran, on the weekends.

Horsfield: I value those times pretty highly because it’s not often you get to have a conversation with your director over your shoulder while you’re adjusting a keyframe, or animation, or lighting a shot.

Selkirk: We kept adding different layers of what Peter wanted and how to create the final scene we wanted. It was a fun film to edit. But it was quite complicated at times. Someone like Gray Horsfield was trying to do visual effects with very limited software and programming, and it was amazing.

Taylor: Gray Horsfield is one of the most significant unsung heroes of Peter Jackson’s journey. Gray’s innovating new methodologies for digital effects is second-to-none. He was brilliant at it from the first day we met him, and a local Kiwi that just came and interviewed with us and got a job.

Selkirk: That guy, he used to come up with these visual effects overnight, and we’d look at it in the morning and we’d say, “Well, that’s going to work great, can we just try to change it?” And he would say, “Oh no, I can’t change it. I didn’t save it!”

Horsfield: This was before incremental saving! We had these juggernaut movies from ILM — we had a minimum viable product — but we wanted to exceed that whenever we could. I know my max hours were well in the three digits over quite a number of months. We all realized that we were working towards a collective goal. Success didn’t ride on individual achievement, but it did ride on as all making the show look good. Peter really helped a lot with it. He did an amazing job being present. He was available all day and all night.

‘The Frighteners’©MCA/Courtesy Everett Collection

As the film slowly came together for its October release, Universal was hit by production delays in its summer slate and turned to Wellington to fill the void.

Jackson: Universal, seeing all the early footage and getting buoyed up with the film, they convinced themselves it could be more than just a Halloween movie. In hindsight, I would say that was a mistake, but at the time we just went with the flow. Then the MPAA gave the film an R-rating. That sort of annoyed me because if I knew I was making an R-rated film, I would have made an R-rated film.

Combs: It was a pyramid of misfortunes. Universal came to Peter and said, “Listen, ‘Daylight’ has run overbudget and isn’t going to be ready in time for summer. ‘The Frighteners’ is going to be a Halloween movie but we would like, if it’s okay with you, to move it up and have it ready to fill that slot.”

Selkirk: We were still very much involved in putting the film together and the deal was: “If you want to do that, we need more people and we need more computers.”

Takahashi: Bob flew down to New Zealand and, with Peter, we hatched a plan to accomplish finishing the production true to Peter’s vision. That entailed creating a sizzle reel with a lot of flashy effects in hopes of convincing Universal to get behind the new budget and schedule. The executives at Universal were so excited after screening the reel, they gave us what we asked for which allowed me to create the infrastructure, pipeline, and employee base.

Aitken: We scrambled to find artists who could come down to New Zealand at short notice to help us out and got people from the US, France, UK, and Australia. We quickly doubled our crew size and delivered the film to the new release date. Bringing in overseas talent into New Zealand to boost local artists numbers has been fundamental to our approach ever since.

Takahashi: We finished production, and the employees I had gone to every major visual effects house in the world to borrow on the promise I would return them were able to do just that.

Fyfe: I thought the film came out really well. The only thing that was not great about it was the fact it got put out in the summer. I think the different tones in the movie were confusing for people.

Combs: It starts kind of benign: a funny ghost story and then — wow, it just corkscrews into something really dark. Really dark. Universal basically promoted the first half of the movie, because the first half is like live-action “Casper” with Michael J. Fox.

Selkirk: It was disappointing that it didn’t do as well as we hoped. I think it was good. I still look at that movie and think it was a fun movie to make, and it was interesting to see a more comedic movie that got quite dark at the end.

Fyfe: I think people have caught up with that. I think it actually works better than it did then. Peter’s a fantastic filmmaker. I’m glad people are discovering it and rediscovering it.

Horsfield: I honestly don’t give a shit about the box office. We made a really cool picture. I think it’s a lot of fun. I know it has its critics, but I also know it’s got an awful lot of fans.

But as “The Frighteners” came to a close, and before the team eventually shifted to “The Lord of the Rings,” other roadblocks emerged.

Selkirk: We had all these staff. We can’t get rid of them because we need them for the next show. There was just not enough work for them in those days. We had to figure out ways of keeping the good guys there.

Jackson: Fran and I wrote a treatment for a film that was called “The Renaissance of the Planet of the Apes,” where Roddy McDowall would be playing a sort of Leonardo da Vinci type. We also had a first look deal with Miramax. We had all these projects, and they were all big effects projects. What were we going to do? I wanted to do “King Kong” — “Kong” is my favorite film — but we also wanted to do “The Lord of the Rings.”

Jake Busey, Dee Wallace Stone, and crew on the set of ‘The Frighteners’Wētā

It led to a deal which saw Miramax and Universal come together to produce Jackson’s version of “King Kong” followed by two “The Lord of the Rings” films. 

Jackson: Part of the reason why we were attracted to those projects was the fact that we knew we had these 30 computer artists working on effects for “The Frighteners.” Were we going to let these people go? Or were we going to continue to pay them? Because if they were going to be paid, it would just be Fran, and I paying them out of our own pocket unless we had a project. 

The arrangement displeased Harvey Weinstein, however, who believed he was putting up two films to Universal’s one.

Jackson: That’s how Harvey got his hands on “Shakespeare in Love.” “The Frighteners” came out, and it wasn’t successful at all, and Universal got very touchy on the whole “King Kong”thing. Then “Godzilla” was being made, and “Mighty Joe Young.”

Taylor: There was a general consensus that two ape movies coming out at the same time would be a bad thing. It was a desperate situation because we didn’t have the money to pay out these contracts because suddenly all funding on “King Kong” just stopped.

Jackson: Bob Zemeckis [and Steve Starkey] kindly sent us the “Contact” wormhole scene. He could have had that done in the States, but he knew we were trying to survivem and we wanted to keep our guys together. It kept everyone going for four months, which gave us that bridge between the end of “The Frighteners” and the beginning of “The Lord of the Rings.”

Selkirk: We learned a lot from [“The Frighteners” and “Contact”]. It really enabled our whole visual effects team, and Wētā Digital in particular, to keep going. We knew we had the ability then to create visual effects for other movies. If it hadn’t been for “The Frighteners,” Wētā probably would never have existed.

Mark Ordesky (New Line Cinema executive): Providence features prominently in “The Lord of the Rings” and providence also played a role in how the films came to be. Had Universal proceeded apace with “King Kong” after “The Frighteners,” Peter might not have pivoted Wētā to “The Lord of the Rings.”

Yet that’s exactly what Jackson did after Weinstein demanded that “The Lord of the Rings” be condensed into a single film, as detailed in Ian Nathan’s “Anything You Can Imagine,” and the appeal of “The Renaissance of the Planet of the Apes” faded once James Cameron and Arnold Schwarzenegger became involved. 

Jackson: It was hard for us to figure out how to put them into our story outline. I hadn’t met Jim at that time, so that was kind of serious. I thought, “God, I don’t want to direct a movie that has Schwarzenegger and Cameron. I have no power at all.”

‘The Frighteners’©Universal/Courtesy Everett Collection

Instead, Jackson pitched “The Lord of the Rings” to New Line where “The Frighteners” was only a boon, despite its commercial failure.

Ordesky: The box office wasn’t a consideration. What “The Frighteners” represented was a validation of the culture of boldness and creative and technical innovation that Peter fostered at Wētā. That culture definitely informed the proof-of-concept materials that Peter shared with New Line for “The Lord of the Rings.”

Selkirk: That came as a bit of a shock to us, because we’d been working on getting “King Kong” made before that and that was when Universal decided to pull the plug on it. I had no idea he was going to do “The Lord of the Rings.” He came in one day and we were sitting having some lunch, and he said, “Hey guys, we’re going to be talking ‘The Lord of the Rings.’”

Aitken: Looking back, we couldn’t have done “The Lord of the Rings” without doing “The Frighteners” first. By the end of “The Frighteners,” we were a crew of about 50 people. With Wallpaperman and the Grim Reaper, we had established an early version of our digital character pipeline. We were learning how to deal with digital colour in a pipeline that started and ended on film.

Selkirk: It certainly helped us figure out how we were going to do it. It helped us figure out the best process of what you have to supply to the digital side and enabled us to ensure that we were getting what we wanted.

Horsfield: The work we put into “The Frighteners” did build a pipeline, but I think it did more to build crew experience and competence. By the time we hit “The Lord of the Rings,” though, there were a lot of people that just knew how to tackle anything. The closeknit bond we built with Richard and his practical team on “The Frighteners” was instrumental in order for us to even approach “The Lord of the Rings” in the first place.

Taylor: Our master leather worker uses a knife to scive leather that can be found repeatedly in the hieroglyphs of Egypt, unchanged for 4,000 years. Within 30 meters of that person is a suite of 35-40 3D printers. That is what I think a modern-day craft workshop should be: an absolute bravery to explore and use every new technology while retaining as your foundation handcraft skills. I would say that is how “The Frighteners” got made. 

Jackson: It’s strange to be talking about a film that I haven’t seen for so long. You’ve got to wait until the film becomes so vague in your memory that you can sit and enjoy it as a movie and not relive it as an experience of actually making it. I spoke to Derren Brown once about the concept of: “Could you hypnotize me so that I had no memory of making this film, and then I’d have a very clear perspective on what was wrong, what worked, and what didn’t?” He thought he could. I’ve never got him to do that for me, but 30 years is much the same thing. I’d be able to watch “The Frighteners” again with a clear head now. It was an enjoyable film. A hard film to make, but a lot of fun and it’s nice to be able to put my head back into that world.