The Frighteners

• Robert Zemeckis originally eyed Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh's spec treatment as a possible Tales From the Crypt spinoff, then decided Jackson should direct it himself — executive producing the film and getting Universal to fund it, which made this Jackson's first major Hollywood studio gig.
• Exteriors were shot in Lyttelton, near Christchurch on New Zealand's South Island, standing in for the fictional town of Fairwater, California, while interior scenes were filmed at Camperdown Studios in Miramar, Wellington.
• Despite Jackson trimming violence hoping to land a PG-13, the MPAA slapped the film with an R rating anyway — so Jackson doubled down, making villain Milton Dammers' death even more gruesome by blowing his head off instead of just shooting him.
• Michael J. Fox did many of his own stunts and broke his foot falling during a nighttime forest shoot; Jackson used Fox's week of recovery to keep polishing the script and editing footage.
• Weta Digital, Jackson's then-fledgling effects house, delivered more than 500 visual-effects shots for the film — the heaviest digital effects workload attempted up to that point — and the infrastructure built for it fed directly into the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
• The film made back roughly its budget worldwide (about $29.3 million on a $30 million budget), but only about $16.8 million of that was domestic — international and home-video money kept it from being a flat loss.

Frank Bannister doesn't just see dead people, he's already one of them. His car crash survival mirrors the Patricia Bradley murders, and the film's afterlife bureaucracy reads as his own purgatorial processing. The ghosts he 'works with' are fellow spirits stuck in the same loop.

Patricia Bradley isn't simply a manipulated accomplice; she's a latent psychic whose trauma at Johnny Bartlett's hands repressed her abilities. The fact that she can perceive and resist the ghostly attacks suggests she shares Frank's gift but has been gaslit into believing otherwise.

The Grim Reaper figure isn't a supernatural entity at all but a projection of collective death anxiety in a town saturated by tragedy. Its skull-faced design mirrors the hospital's sterility, making it less a demon than the personification of medical failure and institutional neglect.

Michael J. Fox trades Marty McFly's swagger for a deadbeat psychic grift, chasing ghosts through a haunted New Zealand town posing as small-town America. He runs cons with three spectral companions — Cyrus, Stuart, and the gunslinging Judge — until a Grim Reaper-looking entity starts carving through the population, and suddenly his scam becomes a survival problem. It's Jackson's first Hollywood studio picture, made with Robert Zemeckis executive producing right before Lord of the Rings turned him into a franchise director, and it crams splatstick comedy, serial-killer procedural, and afterlife bureaucracy into one manic package. The bleached hospital corridors and ghost CGI still look stranger than anything in his later, more respectable work.