The Frighteners (Peter Jackson, 1996)

There is no question that Peter Jackson is the king of horror comedy. The Frighteners is another proof of how great he is when he is using that hilarious subgenre of the horror comedy. The film is a trip through craziness, disturbance and endless laughter, all packed together in an insane ride that has everything from disturbed young women till ghosts and voices speaking. The Frighteners has that ingenious characteristic of really balancing between the absolutely ridiculous and the one that scares the shit out of you. But the most important element of the movie is that crazy feeling that it has. That eccentricity, that sense that you are watching a completely lunatic film. And that is definitely the element that makes the biggest difference in any horror comedy. Horror comedies are movies that have as biggest attribute their own insane agenda. They are films that wouldn't be made by a normal director. And Peter Jackson has proved that he is capable of anything. He is capable of making the most absurd film that you can think of. And The Frighteners is exactly that. An absurd ride between fear, psychosis and everything else equally abnormal. The thing that you can easily say is that there is nothing that smells of normality in that movie. Everyone and everything has that smell of the one that has definitely left the station.

The Frighteners is a movie that you definitely enjoy to watch. And by that I mean that there is more to that film than the facade. The Frighteners is a wild ride inside insanity. It's a wild ride inside the one that we are all afraid of. It's a dive inside disturbance and fear. It's a dive inside the one that stays hidden inside of us and we are afraid to talk about. Because The Frighteners is a movie that has a lot do with people that are been taken for insane. And the boundaries between sanity and insanity in that movie are very vague. To say it better I would say that in this movie the really crazy are been taken for normal and the ones that are normal are been taken for lunatics. But that is the game of that film. It's like a farcical metaphor about the people and their problems. It's about how society digests people and how it puts labels upon them. It's about the craziness that surrounds us and what we do with it. The Frighteners is a movie that comes as a hilarious horror comedy but in reality there is more there to watch and observe besides the obvious and highly enjoyable laughter.