A Journey Through the Horror Films of Peter Jackson

Peter Jackson. He is many things to many people: one of the great filmmakers of the modern era, one of the great has-been filmmakers of the modern era, a visionary, a sell-out, a charming hobbit-man. Practically all of it stems though from the movies that made him a household name, and at least for a time, one of the only movie directors who could rival Steven Spielberg for mainstream popularity. Everyone loves the Lord of the Rings trilogy -many, myself included, would call it the best film trilogy in cinema history. It broke box office records, Academy Awards records, one of those rare instances of the critical and public consensus being on the same page for a major blockbuster. And Jackson has never hit the heights of The Lord of the Rings since. His King Kong, though I like it, is somewhat polarizing, and his Hobbit prequel movies even more so (and then there was that weird Lovely Bones movie that everyone forgot about). Since the last Hobbit film in 2014, he has stepped thoroughly out of the spotlight, co-writing and producing that disastrous Mortal Engines movie and only returning to the directors’ chair himself for a couple documentaries in which he can play around with the digital restoration technology developed at Weta, his technophile leanings seeming in full control of his career. Of these, barely anyone saw They Shall Not Grow Old (it’s okay), but The Beatles: Get Back became a brief sensation in late 2021 -the first time since Lord of the Rings that everyone seemed pretty positive on a Peter Jackson project.

The future for Jackson is uncertain -I would love to see him return to narrative filmmaking. He of course produced Steven Spielberg’s 2011 The Adventures of Tintin with the deal that he would then direct the sequel, and Spielberg has as recently as a few years ago still indicated that’s the plan, but there’s no evidence Jackson is actually doing anything there. He seems content in just working on projects that allow him to experiment more with digital effects technology, and while this is disappointing, it is perhaps not so unexpected as -much like James Cameron or Robert Zemeckis before him, the arc of his career has been one of chasing spectacle and innovating it, creating new special effects and perfecting them -even when that just meant making his own alien masks out of latex mold in his mothers’ oven.

To a lot of folks, Peter Jackson’s career begins (and arguably ends) with Lord of the Rings, but of course he had been making movies for more than a decade before Middle-Earth came a calling; and it is these early films, specifically his horror-comedy “splatter” films made on shoestring budgets with a couple larger scale exceptions later on, that point most consistently to the direction his fascinations would ultimately lead him in up to the present day. They are interesting, sometimes bewildering experiments that you would be hard-pressed to connect to the subject matter, scale, or thematic weight of Lord of the Rings, but speak a lot to Peter Jacksons’ sensibilities, even as they apply to that high fantasy context.

Jackson’s real story as a filmmaker begins in 1987, or rather 1983 as it took four years to get this thing made. A little micro-budget movie by a novice director in his early twenties shot in and around Pukerua Bay, his home suburb in Wellington, with mostly his own friends as cast and production crew, and just a little bit of funding provided towards the end by the New Zealand Film Commission. It was Bad Taste, a sci-fi horror comedy that plays as Ghostbusters meets Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Aliens in disguise have taken over a small town in New Zealand with the intent of harvesting humans for a galactic fast food franchise, only to be met with four agents of the Astro Investigation and Defence Service. The movie deserves a lot of credit for making due on its’ ambitions with so few resources -in the spirit of someone like Sam Raimi (a comparison that seems appropriate given this movie too has a mad hero with a chainsaw). It’s got an intense DIY charm to it, helped along by the fact the protagonists are essentially college-age kids, and the thrill for what special effects they can produce is palpable. Jackson himself plays both a lead hero and villain, and in one sequence finds creative ways to shoot them fighting each other. In fact there’s a fair bit of early filmmaking ingenuity that shows up here -he may not have gone to a film school but he knows the technical visual language of cinema and how to best express the needs of a scene. One sequence in a farmhouse is paced and shot like it might be Hitchcock if all he had was a camera and basic editing equipment.

But one of the great things about Bad Taste, even as its’ plot grows dull and its’ cast of characters (but for Jackson) even duller, is the excitement with which it illustrates its’ gore and grossness. There’s a definite juvenile taste in there -for no reason at all, the aliens in their natural form waddle around with their asses exposed- but it has a certain relatable sensibility. One of the silliest bits involves an open wound on Jackson’s character Derek. He gets knocked out in a fight and comes to with a defined gash in the back of his head, out of which his brain is leaking; his solution is to just tie his belt around his head to keep it in place behind the scrap of cranium that is basically like a door that won’t shut all the way. Over the course of his continued fights with the aliens, he starts stuffing bits of their brain in there to make up for the lost tissue. It’s absurd, but that is where the movie is at its’ most delightful -Jackson finding over-the-top, creative ways to showcase his weird, cheap artistry. This extends especially to the aliens, the most elaborate visual effect, with giant skulls and moveable mouths -it honestly wouldn’t be out of place at the Mos Eisley Cantina -even if the excess fat in the latex means they have to move about awkwardly. I watched a behind the scenes feature from that time, done for a local news program apparently, and twenty-six year old Jackson is so enthusiastic about showing off the various low-budget ways they pulled off these effects, like using cheap dental alginate to mould an impression of Jacksons’ face for the purpose of a vomit effect. That fascination with sick would continue into his next project.

Meet the Feebles I imagine was pretty uncomfortable to watch back in 1989 -and in 2022 it’s mostly wretched. An immature, ugly, offensive movie that has no reason to exist beyond its’ transgressiveness -the worst movie Jackson ever made. See, the idea behind it is to take The Muppet Show and twist it from earnest and charming to dark and perverse. The shabby, low budget of the piece doesn’t help matters, making it feel all the more seedy and discomforting -no doubt the intent. Shockingly, this was the first collaboration between Jackson and Fran Walsh, who of course has been his life and writing partner ever since, as well as Stephen Sinclair, who would contribute both to the scripts of Jackson’s following film and The Two Towers more than a decade later. The premise is that a puppet theatre troupe is hoping to make a transition to television with a big variety show, but everyone involved is highly volatile. The leading lady Heidi the Hippo is a primadonna romantically involved with the shows’ producer Bletch the Walrus, a gangster. Star Harry the rabbit is a sex addict suffering through a particularly gross STD, tormented by a tabloid reporter Fly. There’s a heroin-addict frog with violent Vietnam flashbacks (in which the movie feels comfortable engaging in extreme racism), an irate fox director who is a gay stereotype; and even the innocent hedeghog newcomer with a crush on a poodle quickly slut-shames her after she is nearly assaulted by a pornographer rat. There’s puppet nudity and fetishism to the point the film feels pornographic itself, a deep, deep cynicism punctuating everything, and even a mass shooting. It’s all incredibly unpleasant, an Aristocrats joke of a movie.

And yet there is an appeal there for Jackson that I can sort of understand, much as I question his script motivations and general lack of taste. Going off of his interest in weird effects work, Meet the Feebles provides a lot of opportunities for that through the puppet aesthetic. Even though it doesn’t much fit the genre narratively, I lump it in with these horror films because the designs of its’ characters are so terrifying and hideous. That seems to have been Jackson’s goal, creating a world of these warped non-human figures (unless you count another racist puppet Indian). In some ways it is the next challenge after Bad Taste, and with barely a bigger budget. More importantly, Jackson had a valuable resource in the special effects company Weta Workshop, which made their film industry debut with Meet the Feebles. The same company that would later make complex orc armour and design Gollum got their start creating puppets that could masturbate or shoot up. But it is a lot of detailed work regardless. There’s a twisted creativity in this film coming from Jackson and Weta, some artistic ideas would even carry over into their later films -it certainly seems to suggest the origins of those few worst, most juvenile jokes in the Lord of the Rings extended editions. Though I think Jackson didn’t need this tribute to shock value to exercise his impulses for weirdness -especially when his next film had been percolating longer than this one.

1992’s Braindead is the best of Jackson’s splatter films, demonstrating the right kind of excess for its’ style, tone, and practical capabilities. It is apparently considered one of the goriest films ever made, which might be true technically, though the gore is so absurd and unreal it’s easy not to view it as such. Peter Jackson’s zombie movie takes after George A. Romero’s interesting experiments with the undead and pushes them further to a ludicrous degree. There are rat-monkey carriers, ears falling off into soup, a zombie baby, flesh being torn through like silly putty, and some graphic Freudian imagery. Skull Island is name-dropped as the source of the outbreak, where rats mated with monkeys, and one is now taken back to the Wellington Zoo. There it bites Vera Cosgrove (Elizabeth Moody), the overbearing mother of Lionel (Timothy Balme), trying to escape her control in his love of a shopkeeper’s daughter Paquita Sánchez (Diana Peñalver). Vera of course begins the process of a zombie contagion, physically decaying before dying, reanimating, and turning others into zombies, while Lionel and Paquita’s relationship gets caught up in it all. The melodrama of this man under the wing of his mother is consciously silly, playing like the relationship between Seymour and Agnes Skinner, and the film is full of great exaggerated archetypes including a careless explorer, a thug played by future orc and dwarf performer Jed Brophy, and a mad doctors’ assistant played by Jackson himself. The plot is insubstantial, but it’s unafraid of its’ own camp, embracing a B-horror sensibility in such things as its’ wild zombie baby who sounds like Salacious Crumb and lines of dialogue like “I kick ass for the Lord” from the local priest fending off the undead.

But of course the movies’ real feature is the final act, which is basically one long sequence of ridiculous gore at a housewarming party. Already there had been faces engorged and cheekbones ripped through, but here Jackson lets loose with deranged enthusiasm a torrent of goofy, sickly graphic effects. It is a zombie feast where people are disemboweled and cannibalized, Lionel’s asshole uncle loses his head, a zombie basically punches right through a persons’ skull, its’ arm coming out their mouth, and most vividly the baby peels open a womans’ face right down the middle. And then of course there’s the monstrosity Vera turns into, a zombie-rat-human abomination whom Lionel is forced to defeat through Freudian fantasy made manifest -swallowed up in her womb and forced to gore his way out! The movie ends very abruptly after this, the main romance secure and the audience in the meantime treated to a hell of a show. This was Jackson’s most expensive movie to that date, and I have to imagine most of it went into Weta. It’s insane what they managed to do using a combination of molds, puppetry, miniatures and prosthetics. Braindead became a hit on the midnight circuit, its’ tone and humour in addition to its visceral gore lauded -Simon Pegg cited it as a major influence on Shaun of the Dead, and you can see it. This was the apex of Jackson’s splatter phase, the weirdest, funniest, and most successful in its’ vision of the lot.

I wonder if the year after Braindead, Jackson saw Jurassic Park. I wonder how he found digital effects technology and decided that would be his new avenue to siphon his creative tastes and pursuit of new spectacle through. Of course there was some time between this and his next big experiment, and I’d be remiss not to at least touch on the movie that facilitated his ambitions in Hollywood, the movie that is by far his best after Lord of the Rings. Heavenly Creatures, though certainly containing elements of horror, was Jackson proving he could work outside of his niche genre and direct mainstream drama. It was a movie based on the true story of the Parker-Hulme Murder case, wherein two girls in Christchurch in the 1950s murdered the mother of one of them. The movie, which had a proper budget from the New Zealand Film Commission behind it, introduced the world to both Melanie Lynskey and Kate Winslet, both extraordinary. And while it didn’t involve the kind of tools Jackson had been utilizing in his horror films, he notably honed in on the fantasy world the girls’ imagined as an escape from their troubled lives. Heavenly Creatures is great, it netted Jackson and Walsh an Oscar nomination for their screenplay, and it directly paved the way for everything that would come next in their careers, Lord of the Rings most notably.

But first, Jackson had one more horror comedy left in him. After a mockumentary called Forgotten Silver that I didn’t see but which doubtless expanded on the classic film-mimicking techniques that also show up in Heavenly Creatures, Jackson cashed in on his new clout in Hollywood to make a movie based on a concept he’d been developing for a few years. 

The Frighteners is basically Jackson’s Ghostbusters, with a similar visual effects aesthetic, supernatural world, and attempt at irreverent humour. This is the second time that 1984 comedy has come up, it clearly had an effect on him. Produced by Robert Zemeckis and filmed in a Wellington utterly failing to convincingly portray some Midwestern American city, The Frighteners centres on a con artist played by Michael J. Fox who can see the dead, and uses his friendship with several ghosts to run an exorcism scheme. They haunt a house, he comes in and gets rid of them for a price. That in itself is a really fun premise, Jackson found a way to make Ghostbusters even more cynical; the only problem is it’s not exactly what the movie is about. The actual plot concerns a mystery ghost acting as the Grim Reaper and killing people, leaving a mark on their forehead -for some reason Fox’s Frank Bannister is the one investigating this. And it’s all tied into a serial killer Starkweather clone played by Jake Busey and an insane FBI agent tailing Frank played rather thrillingly by Jeffrey Combs. There’s also Frank’s love interest, a doctor played by Trini Alvarado, whose husband didn’t believe in Frank’s scam, then died only to watch Frank subtly romance his widow. Suffice it to say the movie doesn’t ultimately coalesce in an interesting, satisfying way.

The narrative though seems far from Jackson’s mind as so much of the movie makes use of new digital technology to render ghosts, gore (albeit strictly PG-13), and the afterlife. Even with Weta though, the curse of mid-90s CGI hits this movie hard, and not a single visual effect holds up. The fact a lot of them are fairly elaborate effects really doesn’t help matters. The blue sheen around the ghosts just looks like a Haunted Mansion filter, the compositing anytime a human character is interacting with a supernatural element is wonky, the walls through which this Grim Reaper roams are plastic, and the void between living and dead, where Frank is sent briefly is rendered in extremely limited green-screen. Even Jackson’s directorial creativity is hindered by the sophomore computer graphics -a man loses his head in what’s meant to be a nifty head-on shot, but every element is so unbelievable and intangible. That’s the main problem: nothing has any substance, and even a story about ghosts requires they have some kind of palpable reality or texture. As in the ghosts of Ghostbusters. Here though, because there’s no practical component, the actors clearly removed from the setting, they stick out as not belonging to the scene -and I could imagine this as an artistic choice related to their existence on another plane if Jackson didn’t try so hard to show their relationship with the corporeal world. Add to that that Frank’s friendly ghosts are essentially Disney comic relief sidekicks, each being a stereotype from a different era: Chi McBride is a 70s gangster out of a Blaxploitation flick, Jim Fyfe is a 50s nerd obviously modeled on George McFly (a nod perhaps by Jackson to his producer and fellow effects-chaser), and John Astin –whose son incidentally would have a key role in Jackson’s next film project- is a crotchety Old West judge with a loose jaw. At that stage they might as well just be animated.

And yet while the visuals are extraordinarily dated and impossible to take seriously, there is something compelling about The Frighteners, especially as it relates to Jackson’s subsequent career. It was his only real Hollywood project ahead of Lord of the Rings and emphasizes more than his prior efforts that those aspects of his vision and specifically his compulsion/reliance on spectacle techniques and evolving special effects technology, criticized in some of his later projects, have always been there, just tempered somewhat.  

It’s true of all of these horror movies he established himself on -foreshadowing the preoccupations both good and bad that would define his career as a mainstream movie director. The quickly dated, intangible CGI of The Frighteners is not all too different from that of The Hobbit trilogy. The extravagant gruesomeness of the insect-pit scene from King Kong is but a degree removed from something out of Braindead. Even the minimal use of fantastical dreamscapes in dark drama Heavenly Creatures is exacerbated tenfold in the ridiculously overbearing dreamscapes of dark drama The Lovely Bones. Lord of the Rings is not exempt from this. Both Braindead and The Frighteners feature liberal close-ups during scenes of personal intensity, much as Rings would do especially for Frodo. The manufactured environments and perspective tricks of the trilogy have their precursor in, of all things, Meet the Feebles. That blue sheen aesthetic to the ghosts of The Frighteners finds its’ way to the green of the spectral army of the dead. Each of these films in some way or another are about underdogs facing seemingly insurmountable odds, all of them see their special effects as a storytelling tool. And hell, the orc Gothmog from Return of the King, the most distinct, hideous orc of the trilogy, bears a certain resemblance to the aliens of Bad Taste.

These movies that so few people have seen give a greater impression of who Jackson is as a filmmaker, what his style and sensibilities are, than the series that he is best known for. That’s not to discredit The Lord of the Rings as visionary –indeed Jackson stepped up to the plate and grew as a filmmaker through making those movies. It’s not even to shortchange his skills as a writer and storyteller, he and Walsh were after all deservedly Oscar-nominated for Heavenly Creatures’ screenplay. His creative impulses are strong, which can’t be denied by any of these movies, diverse in quality though they may be. But his vision cannot be disentangled from the tools and techniques of spectacle, and just about every one of his movies up to and including his documentaries, has made substantial use of them -in retrospect, Heavenly Creatures is all the more the great outlier of his filmography.

Peter Jackson’s horror movies are more than mere early curiosities of a filmmaker who subsequently became one of the biggest names in the industry. They are in some way vital to understanding the kind of artist he is, even if it was for a brief moment obscured by the pretensions of his high fantasy epic. And I don’t think it’s something necessarily bad or ill-fitting (although he should be ashamed of Meet the Feebles); his special-effects chasing did pan out for him stupendously in Lord of the Rings, making for some of the greatest movie moments. I think he truly sees cinema as an art form built to show us what we’ve never seen before, and what we have seen before, to make it better. That impulse, honestly and thrillingly related on screen with an ingenuity and zest that seems absent in some of his later work where refined digital wizardry has replaced imagination, is the greatest effect of Bad Taste, Braindead, even The Frighteners.

I think it’s high time Peter Jackson made another horror movie.

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