Well made, old fashioned horror
“The Fog” was John Carpenter’s attempt at a ghost story yet when you really think about it, “Halloween” was really the first. Michel Meyers wasn’t so much a supernatural presence in the first one but as the series grew, he just kept coming back to life, doing the same haunts over and over again. “The Fog” works a bit like that, too. It’s something you might call a genre exercise more than a classic film but it’s a sturdy, effective assembly of horror tropes in a story that has just enough nuance to be seen as its own thing.
The film takes place in a serene, quiet coastal town called Antonio Bay, which is about to celebrate its centennial. The place has a history which Carpenter gets into in some detail but first he introduces us to people around the town like Stevie Wayne (Adrienne Barbeau), who owns the town radio station and broadcasts a smooth sound and voice from an old lighthouse right on the coast. Others include Nick (Tom Atkins) and Elizabeth (Jamie Lee Curtis); he’s a fisherman and she’s a hitchhiker and in a nice bit of quick character work, Carpenter sets up both as worldly adventurers and kindred spirits. Curtis’ mom Janet Leigh is also on hand as the chairperson for the town’s birthday festivities and Stevie has a son named Andy (Ty Mitchell).
Carpenter’s agile work here introduces us to these people and then quickly gets into the exposition with a strong side of the spooky to hold us over. The most important character here becomes Father Malone (Hal Holbrook), the grandson of one of the town’s founding members. He’s now found Grandpa’s diary and realizes that the town’s history is far more complicated than originally thought, involving a fortune, leprosy, a destroyed ship, and murder. Now the ghosts are out for revenge and they have ridden onto the shore in a glowing fog as cover. But not before several nerve jangling jump scares including a lot of unexplained crashes, mild earthquakes, things bursting into flame, and dead bodies that may not in fact be dead, all with Carpenter’s usual ominous synth score.
Most fun are the fog people themselves, all mysteriously adorned in fishing gear and veiled by darkness so you can’t see their faces but can make out their red eyes on occasion, the fog covers them, making it easier for them to suddenly emerge and pull their victims back into their wall of mist. Or they’ll just go with something more slasher- a sword, hook, or other pointy object will appear from the fog to find its target. Carpenter is very good at establishing what’s inside this trojan horse and so the fog itself becomes the most interesting character, slowly but methodically encroaching from sea.
As the final act really gets into the action it probably uses the most of horror tropes, including the hero who decides to climb up to escape the oncoming horde of baddies and the car that takes forever to start. What helps a lot of this go down easier is that Carpenter has given the film far more smart, resourceful characters than he has dummies who are there to get stabbed. Barbeau as the harried mother trying to get to her kid and Curtis and Atkins as the heroic outsiders particularly are of note.
In the end “The Fog” comes off as an imperfect film, surely, but one that gets a kick out of old fashioned horror craftwork, establishing atmosphere and dread in equal measure with shots that capture the stillness of the night and eeriness as the mist begins to envelop around these characters. This is such a great-looking film and one that has so much fun with its own skillful mythologizing and style that it’s hard not to find yourself enveloped by it just the same.