The Making of 'The Frighteners'

One of the wonderful things that movies can do

is bring you to places that obviously you can't see

anywhere else in the world or reality,

and one of those areas is tales that come from the other side.

And, uh, that's always been a mainstay

in our, sort of, movie diet.

And, uh, so my interest has always been in a lot of that dark stuff

and in a lot of that otherworldly stuff like in TALES FROM THE CRYPT

and THE FRIGHTENERS is... ls one step beyond all of that.

When my daughter Hayley was 18 months old,

we were in our basement of our building

in New York and we were doing laundry.

And, uh, in laundry machines. We weren't, like,

beating it against like rocks or anything.

And, uh, so we're down there and she, sort of,

toddled off into this disused room

and she just... There was nothing in this room.

I mean, it was literally just cinder block walls

and a light bulb in the ceiling,

and she just, sort of, pointed at this wall and said, "Baby!

"Baby!"

And I said, "There's no baby there, sweetheart.

That's just a wall." And she looked at me like,

"Baby.

"Baby-II

And my hairs on the back of my neck went "boing".

And so I said, "Let's go get Mommy."

So we ran upstairs and got my wife,

who jumped about 18 inches into the air

and said, "Let's go back down!"

So we ran back downstairs and, uh,

we put Hayley in the room and Leslie said,

"Hayley, show Mommy the baby."

And Hayley went over and was pointing at this thing and it, sort of...

She's, sort of, tracking it with her finger

and then Leslie said, "Hayley, can you go kiss the baby?"

And Hayley went over to it and, sort of, kissed this spot on the wall

and then tracked it with her eyes a little bit more and then

she just, kind of, stood back and came over like, "Hmm-hmm. What next?"

I believe that there must be,

something else other than this... This reality.

We must go somewhere when we die and I don't know where,

but I definitely believe and I would love

to see a ghost, but I've never seen one.

I know Peter's seen one.

It was about 6:30 in the morning.

It was an old apartment block that we used to be in.

It was only, like, a 100-year-old building and I was lying in bed.

Fran had just gotten up to go and make a cup of coffee.

And I was awake, I was certainly wide awake, I wasn't sleeping,

and the door of the bedroom was open.

And I was lying there

and suddenly a woman comes into the bedroom, in through the door.

And my first thought was that, not that it's a ghost,

my first thought was she was real.

That was actually really terrifying because

I thought, "What's she doing here?"

You know, there was only Fran and I in the building and

she was also very, very creepy-looking because she had a face

that was locked into a scream. Like a frozen scream.

Sort of like... Like quite a terrifying look.

And so, within a second or two, I'm taking this in,

I'm thinking, "it's a real person."

She's got a scream on her face,

making no sound, silent.

And my heart starts thumping and then after, like, two or three seconds,

because all this happens very quickly.

After two or three seconds, I realize

that she's a ghost, that she's not real.

She's... She's gliding across the floor. She's not actually walking.

And also, I guess, she was, like, transparent.

There was a... Sort of a... It didn't feel solid.

So I realize I'm looking at a ghost and that's almost a relief.

I mean, it's actually...

You know, it's almost a relief that it's not a real person

because they are more dangerous, I'm sure, than ghosts.

And so I'm watching her and she

goes across the floor and she slowly rises in the air

and my eyes are totally locked onto this figure

and then she disappears out of the wall

on the other side of the bedroom.

And the whole thing took maybe six or seven seconds

from the doorway across.

And I mean, I was, like, trembling. It was like...

You know, I felt exactly the same as you do

if you just have a near miss in your car or something, you know.

And you just feel kind of weak and your heart's pounding.

And I called out to Fran and she came running in.

Now Fran had lived in this apartment for, like, five years,

you know, prior to this.

And I said to Fran, "I think I've seen a ghost."

And the first thing that she said to me, and this is true.

The first thing she said to me was,

"Was it a woman with a screaming face?"

And I said, "Yeah, she had a screaming face."

Fran said that about three years earlier, she had woken up

in the middle of the night, she was by herself, and opened her eyes

and at the foot of the bed was a woman with a screaming face

who was standing at the foot of the bed, staring at her,

and this was the same room.

And so, you know, that's the sort of thing that you can't make up.

I mean, Fran had never told me about that experience that she'd had

and then I saw the same ghost, you know, three years later.

So, I don't know.

I mean, I've always believed in that type of thing, I guess

because I just generally believe in most things.

And, you know, I think that ghosts do exist.

It's not the reason why we made THE FRIGHTENERS, however.

And certainly, you know, THE FRIGHTENERS is supposed to be

a lot more entertaining and funny

than what that particular ghost was.

I mean, there's gotta be some kind

of rational explanation for all this.

Oh no.

You're next, pal.

Another one gone.

I mean, that's actually quite a nice shot, though.

Wobble, wobble, wobble, wobble, and crash!

Cut!

During 1992, Fran Walsh and I were

working on the script of HEAVENLY CREATURES.

BRAINDEAD was in distribution around the world

and we started working on our next project.

During the course of writing HEAVENLY CREATURES

we used to take breaks and go for walks

just to, kind of, clear our head,

and I remember one Sunday afternoon

we were taking a walk along the Seatoun seafront

to the local shops to buy some milk

and we were talking about some ideas for films.

And I think because HEAVENLY CREATURES was so factual based,

it was a true story, our minds were,

sort of going into more imaginative areas,

you know, making things up and

we talked about ghost story ideas

and we came up with the seed of THE FRIGHTENERS

during that walk to the shops,

which was basically the idea about

the psychic con man who runs the scam,

has the ghosts scaring people and earning money for him.

So that was the seed of the idea.

We came back and had to carry on working on HEAVENLY CREATURES,

but we managed to write a two-page story outline

that was the basis of our idea at that time.

It doesn't actually bear a huge resemblance

to the finished movie when you look at it today.

It has all sorts of things like the local sheriff was the big villain

and the mayor of the town was embezzling somebody.

There's a whole lot of stuff in here

that never made it into the movie.

So having committed it all to paper

we send it off to Ken Kamins at ICM, our agent,

and we forgot about it for three or four months.

We were busy working on the HEAVENLY CREATURES script.

And we got a call from Ken sometime later.

He'd sent the story idea to Bob Zemeckis.

Now, Bob, at that stage, was working on

ideas for possible TALES FROM THE CRYPT feature films.

And, you know, Ken thought this might be a possible idea for him.

Bob read it.

He liked the idea, but didn't think

it was suitable for TALES FROM THE CRYPT.

But he wanted to develop it as a stand-alone project.

In January, '93, Fran and I were in Los Angeles.

We had lunch with Bob. It was the first time we met him.

We sat down and had lunch

and they pitched me this very intriguing and bizarre story

which I immediately fell in love with.

You know, we talked about our ideas

and we, sort of, knocked some other ideas together at lunch

and basically Bob said, at the end of that lunch

that he'd really like us to develop the screenplay.

And this was something that I was looking

to do, but not make myself,

but I have a real, you know, affinity toward this type of film

and Peter was at a place where he wanted to really do something

that would, you know, stretch

the bounds of computer graphics and storytelling,

which is what this does.

So we were both in the right place at the right time.

We were about to get lost in HEAVENLY CREATURES for quite a long time

because shooting was due to commence very soon

and Bob said, "That's fine," because he was

doing FORREST GUMP, I think, that same year.

So nothing much happened with THE FRIGHTENERS

for the next, you know, six, seven, eight months.

We were busy shooting HEAVENLY CREATURES

and just, you know, lost ourselves

completely in that project for a while.

By the time HEAVENLY CREATURES came to the editing process,

which takes several months,

we turned our attention back to THE FRIGHTENERS now

and started to think about some more story ideas

and we developed the script and the story

a lot further than obviously what's on these two pages here.

The idea of the villains

was very much re-worked.

And, in fact, we incorporated some themes from HEAVENLY CREATURES

into the villains of THE FRIGHTENERS at that point.

We liked the idea of the teenage killers