The Frighteners (1996)

It didn’t dawn on me until sitting down to watch this movie that I’m not all that equipped to talk about the career of director Peter Jackson. Outside of The Lord of the Rings trilogy (and the first Hobbit movie), I haven’t seen any of his earlier films in the horror genre nor any of his attempts at more serious filmmaking (Heavenly Creatures, The Lovely Bones). Heck, I haven’t even seen his remake of King Kong, which seemed like a really big deal in 2005. However, I have seen a lot of the work of our good friend Robert Zemeckis, whose fingerprints are all over The Frighteners, to the point where it feels like the kind of madcap film he could have made in the Death Becomes Her vein if he hadn’t taken a turn toward slight respectability after helming Forrest Gump. Continue reading →

The Haunting (1963)

Ever since the creations of Bram Stoker and Mary Shelley were brought to the screen, it’s been hard to keep Hollywood from adapting a great novel about things that go bump in the night. While Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House isn’t the most over-adapted example of these by any means, it does seem to get an adaptation once every few decades, most recently with a 2018 Netflix series, which followed a 1999 movie adaptation as well as the one I’ll be reviewing today that are both called simply The Haunting, a title suggested by Jackson herself. Her novel doesn’t necessarily lend itself innately to film, just because it’s fairly subtle in spooky atmosphere, but somehow this first adaptation manages to embody the source material while infusing it with enough thrills and chills to keep you on the edge of your seat. Continue reading →