It's now December 1996 and, although it's only 8am where he is, jackson is on the phone from his Wingnut Films office in Wellington, New Zealand, talking about The Frighteners. And, as in now customary he's already eager to dive into his next project, a re-make of the classic 1933 version of King Kong, a film he has always acknowledged as one of his greatest creative influences.

Jackson has come a long way since cobbling together, over a period of four years, his microbudget, 1988 zombie movie Bad Taste, which was eventually completed with financial help from the New Zealand Film Commission. More importantly, he's succeeded on his own terms, always shooting his films in New Zealand, working with his own crew of technicians, and, since the spiteful splatter-puppet movie Meet The Feebles, co-scripting his films with his partner Fran Walsh. Their much deserved joint Oscar nomination for the Heavenly Creatures screenplay recognised the new maturity evident in this chilling study of teenage girl killers, and The Frighteners, although initially different in tone, employs the same unsettling blend of the fantastical and the frightening real.

According to Jackson, this similarity of tone stems from the fact that The Frighteners began life as a two-page outline conceived by Jackson and Walsh during a break from writing Creatures. "Fran and I just wanted a break from Creatures for a few hours. We just wanted to talk about something else. So we went to the shops to buy some milk.

I'd had an interest in doing a ghost story, and during the course of the walk we came up with the basic idea of The Frighteners.  It wasn't really the story, it was the set-up about a con man (Michael J Fox's Frank Bannister) who lives with ghosts and uses them to scare himself up some business.

"I've realised in hindsight that the thinking behind The Frighteners was very similar to that behind Heavenly Creatures, where you basically use burnout and funny situations to meet the characters that you're going to be following. So you get to like them, you get to laugh along with them, and you relax and think, 'These are quite funny people.' And then the screws start to tighten. In the case of Creatures, it was when the girls start plotting the murder, and in The Frighteners it's when the Grim Reaper figure comes to town and starts to kill people, and hero Frank has to stop goofing around and get serious about saving lives."

The brief outline eventually found it's way, via Jackson's American agent, to director/producer Bob Zemeckis (Death Becomes Her, Forrest Gump), who at that time was looking for scripts for a series of Tales From The Crypt feature films. But while it was never intended that The Frighteners should be part of that series - Zemeckis knew from the outset that the material was not in keeping with the style of William Gaines' horror comics - the producer was intrigued enough to want to develop it as a separate, stand-alone project.

After meeting with Zemeckis early in 1993, Jackson and Walsh knuckled down to making Creatures, so it wasn't until over a year later that they delivered the finished script. Almost immediately, the film went into pre-production,

Zemeckis brokering a remarkable hands-off deal that allowed for the film to made entirely in New Zealand with Jackson's usual crew and a huge special effects team.

"The filming was scheduled for six months," says Jackson, "which Universal told us at the beginning was the longest shoot they had ever green-lit. One or two shoots, like Waterworld, went over that eventually, but starting out this was the longest shoot that they'd ever approved." Jackson has nothing but praise for Zemeckis, who protected them from studio interference throughout: "I don't think it was just the geographical distance between us and Universal that gave us such incredible creative freedom, it was Bob's presence as well. A situation developed whereby any discussion that the studio wanted to have about the film always had to be channelled through Bob, and I'm sure he often told them to leave us alone."

This may have proved increasingly necessary as filming progressed, because although the early scenes featuring psychic swindler Frank Bannister (Michael J Fox) and his trio of live-in ghosts are very jokey, the tone of the film darkens considerably later on when serial killer Johnny Bartlett (Jake Busey), fried in the electric chair 30 years before, returns from the dead as a malevolent spirit determined to increase his tally of victims.

Bartlett's then 15 year old girlfriend, Patricia Bradley (Dee Wallace Stone), cleared of any involvement at the time, is now a timid recluse, kept prisoner in a gloomy Gothic pile by her mother, Old Lady Bradley. But is Patricia really the innocent victim she appears to be? Or should we believe her crazy, over-protective mother when she says: "They said she (Patricia) was an accessory after the fact. I know the truth. It was cold... blooded... murder."

"It's interesting that so many people have told us what a radical shift of tone they feel at that moment, because we thought of it as being more of a gradual thing. But it's obviously true that when the film stops being a supernatural thriller and becomes the story of this resurrected psychopath, it takes people a bit by surprise. I think it's also possibly down to the performances of Dee Wallace Stone and Jake Busey. If the tone really shifts at that point then I think it's obviously partly due to Dee and Jake doing such a good job."

One area of confusion in the film lies in the ambiguous characterisation of Johnny Bartlett, who at different times seems to be either a reincarnated serial killer or a manifestation of pure evil, The Grim Reaper himself. "It's probably not as clear as it should be," admits Jackson. "Our initial thinking was, 'What happens to someone who's inherently evil if they're put to death?' In the afterlife, do they retain their inherent evil-ness?

"And since Johnny is so into his role as the Angel Of Death, we thought that when he dies it actually gives him a lot more power than he ever had as a human being. He's an even more dangerous killer now, because he can change hi appearance, walk though walls and dress up in various ethereal disguises. And if Johnny was going to choose a disguise, which one would he choose? And we thought, because he's so fixated with his power to take life away from people, he'd want to disguise himself as The Grim Reaper, he'd want to become Death."

As well as negotiating these shifts between fantasy and reality, Jackson had to supervise the 450-odd in-camera, motion control effects that enabled the ghost character! to be presented not merely as scary spooks, but as characters in their own right
"The ghosts in The Frighteners were played by actors," explains Jackson. "So we had to shoot them during the live-action filming, but. they couldn't be shot at the same time as Michael's scenes because they were transparent and glowing. That meant we had to shoot Michael first, by himself, and then the ghost actors afterwards, against blue screens."

The most memorable ghostly creation is John Astin's "Judge," a horny old cowboy who's afraid that, because his "ectoplasm"-has all dried up, he's now "firing blanks." Jackson and Walsh had a lot of fun with this idea - "I just thought it'd be funny if the ectoplasm of one of the ghosts had all dried up, because he himself was so withered and ancient. So John Astin's 'Judge' became this skeletal old guy, which gave his scenes a more desiccated feel.

"We thought it might help with the American ratings board (the MPAA, Motion Picture Producers Association) too, because they tend to object more to anything involving fluids and liquids. If it's dry, it's better than if it's wet. They don't like fluids, and they particularly don't like spurting."

Strangely enough, the MPAA found nothing to object to in the judge's fluid-free scenes, or even when a fellow ghost's face is blown through the back of his head by a blast of fly spray. Since these things were being done to ghosts they posed no problem. However, when it came to the shift from the fantastic to the real, well, that was quite a different matter..

Knowing that he was obliged to deliver a PG-13 rated film, Jackson had been careful to show as little explicit violence as possible during the climactic carnage. Even so, the MPAA insisted that these scenes justified an R rating (the equivalent of our 18). "The ratings board said, 'The last 20 minutes is just totally R-rated territory.' And I said, 'But you don't see anything!' But they kept insisting, 'No, it's the tone.' So we tried to cut the stuff right down, but at the end of the day, they just said, 'No way. We can't give this film a PG-13.' Actually, it was quite good for the movie in the end, because everything we'd cut out to try to get a PG-13, we immediately stuck back in again."

Jackson is unlikely to experience similar problems on his next movie, a re-make of that classic 1933 horror film King Kong. Since he and Fran Walsh are still putting the finishing touches to a script that is due to be delivered to Universal early this year, Jackson is wisely keeping details to the minimum. Even so, the project is already in pre-production, with a team of 30 people already working on visual effects.