The Frighteners

After a car accident in which his wife, Debra, was killed and he was injured, Frank Bannister develops psychic abilities allowing him to see…

• Director:Peter Jackson
• Genre:Comedy / Fantasy / Horror / Thriller

Cast

Michael J. Fox : Frank Bannister
Trini Alvarado : Dr. Lucy Lynskey
Peter Dobson : Ray Lynskey
John Astin : The Judge
Jeffrey Combs : Milton Dammers

In 1995, a panicked woman named Patricia Bradley (Dee Wallace-Stone) runs from a Grim Reaper-like ghost seen through the shape of walls. She is saved when her elderly mother (Julianna McCarthy) shoots at the ghost.

Meanwhile, in 1990, once successful, but selfish and alcoholic, architect Frank Bannister (Michael J. Fox) loses his wife, Debra (Angela Bloomfield), in a car accident and gives up his profession, letting his unfinished “dream house” sit incomplete for years. Following his wife’s death, in which Bannister was suspected, but never convicted for, Bannister gains the power to see ghosts and puts this skill to use by befriending three ghosts named Cyrus (Chi McBride) (a 1970s black gangster), Stuart (Jim Fyfe) (a nerd, presumably from the 1950s) and The Judge (John Astin) (an Old West gunslinger). Cyrus, Stuart and Judge help Bannister by haunting houses in the area to accumulate work for Bannister’s ghostbusting business; Frank then proceeds to “exorcise” the houses for a fee (one of these houses is that of Dr. Lucy Lynskey (Trini Alvarado) and her husband, Ray (Peter Dobson)). However, Bannister is depicted by locals as a conman. He discovers that Lynskey’s husband has been killed and an encounter with his ghost leads him to discover that an entity resembling the Grim Reaper is killing people, and marking numbers on their foreheads.

Bannister tries to help the people whom the Reaper is after with his motivation being that his wife was found dead after the car crash with a similar (lower) number carved into her forehead. Because Bannister can see the numbers ahead of time, he can foretell the murders, but this puts him under suspicion by the police and Milton Dammers (Jeffrey Combs), an eccentric FBI agent who is convinced that Bannister is merely delusional. Bannister is eventually arrested for the death of a person he was trying to save. Lynskey visits Bannister while in prison, and realizing that Lynskey is the reaper’s next target, Bannister attempts to prevent her death and escapes from prison with the help of Cyrus and Stuart. Frustrated by his inability to fight the reaper, Bannister attempts to commit temporary suicide so he can stop the reaper’s killing spree, with Lynskey helping Bannister to go into suspended animation by using specialized drugs to temporarily stop his heart. Bannister confronts the Reaper and discovers that the killer is the ghost of Johnny Charles Bartlett (Jake Busey). Read more

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