"The Frighteners" should have been named "The Murderers". Its about a mass murderer and there's nothing incredibly frightening at all in the movie. There are lots of ghosts but they're mostly outrageous characters who just happen to be able to walk through walls and possess other typical ghostly skills. The movie turns very violent during its last third which is no doubt why the movie was originally rated R. I watched the Director's Cut of the film and it was entertaining but it seemed liked Peter Jackson had a hard time ending it. The movie's final chase scene seemed to drag. Also I found the FBI agent character Milton Dammers to be rather distracting because his role was to prosecute Michael J. Fox's Frank Bannister. The attempts to incarcerate Bannister just didn't seem that important to the story because Bannister is far too likable of a character. Dammers was just weird was painted largely incompetent and basically served the story as a pain in the ass nothing else. It would have been sufficient to just let Bannister pursue the bad guys/ghosts without the distracting Dammers jumping in just to muck things up. There is a lot of early CGI special effects in "The Frighteners" and it is interesting to view them compared to what we see today; 12 or 13 years later. The effects aren't really convincing but they work within the movie pretty well. The best effect is the Death character. Its movements are impressive and it is threatening. Overall I'd suggest that this is a good movie and Jackson's direction makes for some interesting shots and scenes but the story has a few too many distracting elements that take away from the very likeable Frank Bannister.