Customer Reviews

The Frighteners: A Novel

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

He may be a legend now, but there was a time when Peter Jackson was just a guy trying to make the movies that he liked to watch. And he started out making gore and horror movies. Breaking out of this genre, he made the landmark psychological crime story Heavenly Creatures; he then made The Frighteners, which would be his last movie until The Lord of the Rings - The Fellowship of the Ring (Widescreen Edition) five years later. "Heavenly Creatures" got critical raves, but you would have thought that Jackson had then mooned a busload of schoolgirls by the reaction that he got with "The Frighteners". Too bad. Too bad for them. "The Frighteners" was a funny, and suspenseful flick that I saw after my brother recommended it. I didn't even know that there had been a novelization published until recently, and I ordered it from Amazon.

Most of us read novelizations for any number of reason, but the most common seems to be that we want to re-live the movie experience, but in a different manner. Most novelizations are written from the original script and are written simultaneously with the shooting of the movie, so while they will have the same source material, the movie and novelization can both end up being completely different products. And "The Frighteners" is one of those that end up being different than the movie. As this review progresses there will spoilers for those who haven't seen the movie or read the book. There will also be references to things that might be confusing to those who haven't seen the movie.

For those who haven't seen the movie, it, and the book, starts off with an attention grabbing set piece as the Bartlett House and its occupants are being terrorized by a violent specter. The same haunt that is serially killing people in Fairwater. We then quickly switch to a rainy funeral where Frank Bannister, with his typical lack of class, is trying to pump up support for his business. Bannister is a sleazy second tier psychic. He sees dead people, and he saw them a long time before Haley Joel Osment did, and he's trying to pay the rent by being a medium. He gets tossed out of the funeral, and on the way home he skids through the meticulously kept front yard of Ray Lynsky, much to Ray's verbose and belligerent disconcertment.

Meanwhile his wife, the newly minted young doctor Lucy Lynsky is substituting for Dr. Kamins, who is at a funeral (see above). One of her stops is the Bartlett House, whose occupants are Mrs. Bartlett and her daughter Patricia, who once was the sidekick of a famous mass-murderer, and who Mrs. Bartlett has been watching over since the early sixties.

Until the halfway mark, this novelization is pretty much on the money, with everything intact, including Bannister having the four ghostly sidekicks of the black disco disaster Cyrus, the white nerd (Stuart), the old coot (Judge), and the hound dog Rustler. But, after the halfway mark, the story starts out on a different path. The plot is essentially the same, but there are some real differences in the story itself. If you've seen the movie then you know the fate of Judge, and his heroic second death. His fate is completely different here, as is where he meets it. The same is true of the fate of Special Agent Milton Dammers. And there are different things in the book than there are in the movie; the whole fight in the graveyard is different, and the graveyard has TWO guardians instead of just one.

Still, these are the reasons why we read novelizations; we get a glimpse of what the pre-shooting script was like. However, just between you and me, and don't let it leak to Jahn, the movie's improvements on the original script were better than Jahn's adapted version. The whole section where Bannister is chasing Death to the graveyard just doesn't work in the book, though it does in the movie.

Another thing that the movie had besides script improvements, is a sense of humor. The movie was state-of-the-art entertainment, with great special effects, AND a sense of humor. You could be thrilled one minute and laughing the next. Jahn's version seems to be humor free.

Jahn's novelization, while professionally done, clearly reads like it was speed written. We get gaffs like Dammer's hand is NEARLY sliced off, when it is NEATLY sliced off, and in the freezer scene we are told that Bannister is "frozen solid". Eh? Say what? No, he was not cryogenically frozen, you can't revive a totally frozen body.

As you read this, once again you are reminded how essential actors can be to filling out a screen character. As the novel progresses you realize that you will never know what any of the characters look like, and you realize just how much Michael J. Fox, John Astin, Jeffery Combs, Jake Busey, and Dee Wallace Stone just owned their characters. It could be an awesome experience just watching them chew up the scenery. Combs, Busey, and Wallace in particular just demolished all that stood before them. And none of that is really here.

All-in-all, this is not a book for the casual movie or horror fan. It is only a book for a true fan of the movie, as you can see that the finished movie product is far superior to the original script.

For this site I have also reviewed these other movie novelizations:

"Barb Wire": Novelisation
Ju-On
Ju-On Volume 2
Mutant Chronicles
Rabid