Credit: Dangerous Minds / Alamy / New Line Cinema / Trimark Pictures

There’s an argument to be made that Sir Peter Jackson made a genuine miracle happen with his take on The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Not just because those movies exist at all, not just because they’re good, but because from 2001 to 2003, those films were categorically the biggest thing in popular culture.

These profoundly dense, profoundly nerdy novels had been considered unadaptable in live action for decades. Even those who’d seen the animated versions from the 1970s still had reason to believe the books were unadaptable in any medium despite those films’ existence. Not only did the technology just straight up not exist to depict the sheer scale of the story convincingly, but even if you did find that, absolutely no one outside of the book’s die-hard fans would care. Those die-hard fans would also probably hate it.

Yet, spoiler alert, it worked. With no caveats or qualifiers. Pretty much everything about those films worked like a charm at the time and has aged impeccably. Because of that, the films completely changed the reputation of their director to the point where it seems utterly bizarre that, before the films were released, he was part of the reason people thought the whole endeavour would be a trainwreck. Not because people didn’t like his work, quite the opposite, but because he was the exact opposite choice that most would have gone for.

To direct the ultimate fantasy epic, people thought you’d need the ultimate fantasy director. The only people anyone thought had a shot of translating The Lord of the Rings to the silver screen were the likes of Ridley Scott, Steven Spielberg, or maybe John Boorman, for some of that Excalibur buzz if you wanted to go for someone a little out there. Instead, they got this scruffy Kiwi horror director best known for a scene where a zombie’s ear falls in her custard, and she eats it without question.

To call this a gamble is putting it lightly.

What did Peter Jackson make before The Lord of the Rings?

To put this in slightly more modern parlance, this would be like hiring Ari Aster or Mike Flanagan to direct the Dune adaptations – it wasn’t that Peter Jackson was a complete unknown, but his brand of proudly niche, gore-soaked horror-comedies seemed like the precise opposite kind of films to the prestige fantasy epic that The Lord of the Rings was being pitched as, it seemed like a spectacular mismatch on the surface, and, looking back at his work, one can see where the confusion was coming from.

This is a filmography that begins with a film called Bad Taste and doesn’t really deviate from that ethos for a while – that picture, Braindead and Meet The Feebles showcase a demented, gloriously puerile sensibility for campy, yet charming gross-out moments… I mean, Braindead features a house full of zombies turned into pâté by the movie’s lawnmower-wielding protagonist – the journey from this to “my friends, you bow to no one” makes the one undertaken by Frodo and chums look like a run to the offy on a Friday night.

However, there is a picture that quietly shows the filmmaker Peter Jackson was turning into. It’s not The Frighteners, a fairly charming attempt at translating his skill with horror comedy into Hollywood, it’s his spectacular 1994 picture Heavenly Creatures. A work that balances horror, romance, fantasy, crime and dark comedy with an artfulness that shows just what a talent Jackson had for combining seemingly disparate kinds of stories into one.

Honestly? The hard part of translating The Lord of the Rings into a film probably wasn’t the battle sequences or the CGI spectaculars. It was exactly that, the balance of heart, horror and hurt that makes an audience care about all these fantastical characters. Jackson had been getting that balance right for over a decade before taking on Tolkien, so it makes sense that, given the budget, the time and the space to get it right, he would knock it out of the park as definitively as he did on Rings.

The sad part seems to be that he’s spent the next two decades seemingly backed into that ring-shaped corner, unable to make a film that isn’t a mega-budget blockbuster. One hopes that he gets that chance to move back into that world sometime soon. After all, it’s not one he graduated from into Middle Earth, but one that informed and shaped his journey there.