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Mistakes

Outside the chapel, when Frank backs into the pedestal the statue begins to topple over. In the shot facing up, as the pedestal falls and Frank puts his arms out to catch the statue, the wires used in this stunt are perfectly visible. See more...

Trivia

At the beginning of the film Lucy and Ray watch a videotape called 'Murders, Madmen and Phychopaths', with the news report of Johnny Charles Bartlett. The reporter is a genuine TV reporter in NZ (where the film was shot), cast presumably due to her real American accent. See more...

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Movie Mistakes blog

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The Frighteners (1996) - 10 corrections

Directed by Peter Jackson, starring Dee Wallace-Stone, Jake Busey, Michael J. Fox (add more)

Genres: Comedy, Fantasy, Horror, Thriller

Comments made in brackets are corrections from other visitors. To submit your own corrections for mistakes, just click "edit" under an entry, then choose "correct entry". You can also submit corrections for corrections, if you think a mistake has been unfairly removed.

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At the cemetery, Lucy is handcuffed in the police car and when Agent Dammers unbuttons his shirt, to reveal his badly scarred body, it is completely obvious that it is a fake latex chest. [It is not completly obvious, as there is nothing to give it away. We know it is fake, because it is a movie, but there is nothing wrong that gives the prop away.]
Edit
In the scene where Lucy is trying to get Patricia out of the house cause they know johnny is back and killing again they make a mistake on the number of people killed. Patricia is talking with Johnny although Lucy doesn't know it. They are waiting downstairs for Patricia's mother. We don't know yet but Patricia killed her mother upstairs. Johnny and Patricia are saying they should kill Lucy and make her 41 on their kill list. However, her killing her mother upstairs should be 41. In being so careful on counting how many people they killed all movie long they completely forget to count that Patricia killed her mom. She should be the 41st death and have that carved in her head. [She killed her mother by herself, thus the mother is not counted, as the list refers to the number of people that "he" killed. Her helping him is irrelevant, as it is still him who actually has killed the 40 people. This was the first murder that Patricia committed.]
Edit Corrected by Jazetopher
In the beginning of the movie the ghost of John Barlett is haunting the Bradley house, and attempting to kill Patricia. If he and Patricia have been reunited all along, why would he attempt to kill her? [He is pretending to attack her, so that no one suspects her involvement. This is known in the movie world as a "plot twist" which is not usually shown until near the end, so as to make for an interesting movie. It would have done no good to give away her involvement in the first few minutes of the movie.]
Edit Corrected by Jazetopher
When the Ragdoll grabs onto Lucy's shirt, you can see it's hands have been sewn to the shirt, it seems this was done to make it look like it's gripping and pulling it. [This would be a great mistake, but for one fact, when Raggedy Anne's hand is attached to Lucy's pajama top we do not see any thread or safety pin joining the hand to the top, not even a bit of it. Though we know that is what the crew did to achieve the effect, since nothing is actually visible it cannot be a deemed a legitimate mistake.]
Edit Corrected by lmao
In the posh woman's house Frank is shown a newspaper with a picture of him at a funeral on the front. You'll have to be quick but you can see that the picture is of him and Lucy at Ray's funeral, which of course hasn't happened yet. [The photograph on the front page of the Gazette that Mrs. Waterhouse holds up is the photo that Steve's partner snapped at the funeral for Chuck Hughes at the start of the film, as Frank handed out his business cards to the mourners. The actual photo shows Frank wearing a blue dress shirt and tie, giving his business card to a brunette with a hat - but it is clearly not Lucy Lynskey, with a man behind them holding an umbrella, as it was raining during that funeral. That brunette is also visible at the funeral, as Ms. Rhys-Jones says in voiceover, "..Thirty years later as the death toll steadily rises, it appears the grim reaper has once again..." To further stress the point, the day of Ray Lynskey's funeral, Frank was wearing a tee shirt under an open collar red shirt, unlike the photo.]
Edit Corrected by lmao
When Frank goes into the freezer he is wearing shoes. Then when he's a ghost he is barefoot for whatever reason. Then he goes to heaven and he has shoes. Then he goes back to his body and he's barefoot again. [You're confusing two separate events. When Frank walks into the freezer at the laboratory he's wearing shoes, but by the time Frank's spirit leaves his body (many shots later) his shoe is visible in the bottom right corner of the screen, which means he took off his shoes before he lost consciousness. Since he 'died' with his shoes off, that is why he is barefoot the entire time he's a spirit the first time and still barefoot when Lucy revives a much frozen Frank with the defibrillator on the lab floor. Later, when Frank (alive) and Lucy go to the Fairwater Sanatorium to sprinkle Bartlett's ashes in the chapel, Patricia kills Frank and he dies for the second time. So, since he wears shoes when he dies, his spirit wears shoes when he drags Patricia's spirit as he goes towards heaven. When he descends back towards earth and after he opens his eyes with Lucy, he is, of course, still wearing shoes.]
Edit Corrected by lmao
Director Peter Jackson makes a cameo as the punk Frank bumps into coming out of the newspaper office. A nice touch, but Jackson actually vanishes and reappears between the following camera angles. [When pierced Peter Jackson bumps into Frank, it is only in this close-up shot that he and his Grim Reaper tee shirt, are visible. In the next shot facing Frank, after he stares at the tee shirt, Frank starts to cross the street. In the third shot facing the Gazette newspaper building, the pierced guy is gone, though he did have enough time to 'mysteriously' vanish up the block between shots and he does not reappear in any other shot.]
Edit Corrected by lmao
How can Ray (when he is a ghost) be stuck in his own grave covered in dirt if he can go through matter? [Because as we have seen, the ghosts have to learn how to move though objects (notice when Michael J Fox shuts one half in the door he has trouble getting out) and earlier when Ray fell through the wall without meaning to.]
Edit Corrected by David Mercier
When Dr. Lucy Lynsky is first being "spooked" by Bannisters ghostly friends, she is on the bed when it floats into the air. You can clearly see the big lifting mechanism under the bed in the first shot. After it cuts away and cuts back, they finally remembered to remove it from shot in post production. [It's not a big lifting mechanism, it's rays rowing machine. You can tell it's just the rowing machine because it does not touch the bed. It is also impractical to use a hydraulic lift for the bed. It's much easier to have something in the wall, which is probably what they did.]
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In the cemetery Lucy hits the FBI agent square in the face with a skull yet he gets up a second afterwards. If someone got hit in the face with an object like that it would be more than enough to render them unconscious for a few minutes. [In the end, before he dies, Dammers, the FBI guy, opens his shirt, revealing deep scars and says, "My body is a road map of pain." He was probably used to being hurt, so the skull didn't hurt him. Plus he was really pissed off, so the adrenaline could have kept him going.]
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