The Fog (1980)

 

Director: John Carpenter

Screenplay: John Carpenter and Debra Hill

Cast: Adrienne Barbeau as Stevie Wayne; Jamie Lee Curtis as Elizabeth Solley; Janet Leigh as Kathy Williams; John Houseman as Mr. Machen; Tom Atkins as Nick Castle

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

It is pretty much established how legendary John Carpenter is in genre cinema, so there is little point in overturning heavily covered ground already. What is worth repeating, especially as you hit his legendary run between the late seventies to the late eighties, is the importance of how classic Hollywood cinema has influenced his work. Also factoring in that into the nineties his work is underrated, least if you bear in mind the existence of In the Mouth of Madness (1994), the factor which comes in to a film like The Fog is how heavily indebted to slow, atmospheric world building, depicted with the help of cinematographer Dean Cundey and carefully managed to pull a viewer into the stories. The first ten minutes of The Fog are completely alien to how many horror films multiple decades after set themselves up; a ghost story on a beach establishing the plot, about the ghosts of men wrecked at sea getting their revenge on a coastal town, followed by snatches of different characters going about going about their lives as a series of ghostly circumstances take place at the witching hour. It is the hundredth university of the town of Antonio Bay, and from this night onward through the film, a supernatural fog envelops the region and anyone caught within its prescience is under threat from the ghosts within it.

The film altogether has the tone of a short ghost story in its simple, sharp sense of foreboding, as much as the story itself is short in its time frame of only a couple of nights and the events. The resulting film feels expertly put together as a classic chiller, bolstered by its short running time and the incredible sense of mood which sends shivers down one's spine.  As with Jaws (1975), the coastal town both evokes a quaint and peaceful community with rich personality, but also fears of the unknown connected to the sea, ancient lore of the ghosts of the shipwrecked in this case where the malevolent figures, with their shrouded faces and ragged clothes, evoke more the Knight Templers of the Tombs of the Blind Dead films from Spain than the ghosts that would appear over the decades from the eighties. Were it not for the brief moments of gristly death, aspects of the new slasher films Friday the 13th (1980) would bring in appearing in characters trying to escape the ghosts, than The Fog would entirely by closer to the films of Val Lewton, drenched in the environments of fog shrouded sea banks as easy listening jazz plays on late night community radio, hosted by Stevie Wayne (Adrienne Barbeau).

The cast as well adds to the class of the film. An argument can be made, for an intentionally small tale, that there are probably too many characters, meaning the likes of Jamie Lee Curtis as a young free spirit do not get a great deal of screen time, but having even small characters like the priest Father Malone played by someone like Hal Holbrook who can add gravitas to exposition is a virtue a lot of horror films would actually benefit from. Curtis, her own mother Janet Leigh as the wife of the town major Kathy Williams, Tom Atkins as the male hero, and people from Nancy Loomis to Holbrook among the cast all raise the bar by being interesting in their appearances. The individual who stands out the most, with the most screen time and with a role delicately written for her, is Adrienne Barbeau; her voice as the radio host having been canonised by horror fans, she is also completely believable as a single mother who, in the midst of this supernatural fog, has to turn her concerns in protecting her young son. A simple character as the mother fearful of harm to her son not turned into merely one note but, for a straightforward ghost story, done with character to it. It is an example like with the best of short form storytelling that streamlined characterisation does not mean being one dimensional but still sympathetic in mind to the limited length and plotting available.

In general the reason why The Fog stands out as well as it is, as with Halloween (1978) to The Thing (1982) among other films by John Carpenter, is due to the high standard of quality felt in the film. It explains why the likes of Village of the Damned (1995) struggle as, whilst again not as bad as its reputation suggests, it was a film which felt cracks in this quality. Closer to his idols of classic Hollywood cinema, Carpenter even though he innovated and was part of the more explicit horror and action genres of the seventies onwards had feet firmly entrenched in the past where the importance of character actors and production style were incredibly important. The result of this, like other American directors who innovated in the seventies but were firmly influenced by older cinema, is that he is able to bring the best of classic Hollywood cinema but invest it with new ideas to create visceral and moody films like The Fog.