“Antonio bay has a curse on it.”
We had something like 40 trick-or-treaters last night. Not the highest number we’ve had, but certainly a rebound from the last few years. We’re competing with multiple “trunk or treat” events around the area as well, so we were pretty happy to see any kids (and disaffected teenagers). We watched our traditional showing of House of Wax and then ran 50’s monster movies (like Them!) until the last monster had shown up at the door. Then we sat down to our last horror movie of the night – The Fog. I ask my wife to choose the horror movie for Halloween and it was a tie between this and The Pit and the Pendulum. I decided we’d already watched a Vincent Price film, and besides – she’d never seen The Fog!
I was disappointed when I first saw The Fog. I feel like I say this about a lot of movies that I saw well after they first came out. It was the first movie John Carpenter made after Halloween and I think I expected it to be more fast-paced and violent. Scarier. I wasn’t expecting something this close to a classic ghost story.
Not to say there aren’t any scares in the movie – that whole attack on the beach house with the little boy and his elderly babysitter is pretty good in that department – but they were more eerie, creepy scares. We do get a few jumps, like the body on the fishing boat, and they’re actually more effective because of the time spent building up to them.
Watching it this time, I was impressed by the atmosphere, the eeriness of the town at night, and the slow buildup of tension. By the time the fog actually arrives, Carpenter has managed to ratchet things up to a point where I’m literally rooting for people to outrun a meteorological event.
The Medium
I have a copy of the Scream Queen Double Feature Blu-ray put out by Shout Factory, which contains both The Fog and The Howling. I think I bought this at a discount job lots store for a buck. The films look great, but I don’t think there are any extras for either film on the disk. If you’re looking for those, the individual releases from Shout are the way to go. If you’re looking for two great 80s horror flicks for cheap, though, this is a decent alternative.
For streaming options, The Fog is available for free (with ads) on Freevee and for subs on Prime and the Criterion Channel. It can also be rented on Amazon, AppleTV and Microsoft. As far as I can tell, there’s no way to purchase a digital copy of the movie right now.
The Movie
Carpenter sets the tone off exactly right with John Houseman as the Creepy Sea Captain, telling us – and a bunch of little kids up way past their bedtime – a campfire story. It’s about a ship, some fog and a campfire JUST LIKE THIS ONE that that led the ship and all aboard to their doom a hundred years ago today.
This turns out to be a pretty literal telling of an actual occurrence – though the good captain leaves out the part where the people on the ship were lepers hoping to start a new life, and the fire was set on purpose by the townsfolk to lure them onto the rocks. We find this info out at the same time as the town priest, Father Malone (Hal Holbrook), in a journal written by his ancestor. (Note an appearance by director Carpenter as the handyman in this scene.)
Some of my favorite parts of the movie are in the first 15 minutes, as the quiet coastal town is subjected to a series of mysterious events – pay phones ring incessantly, a gas pump goes off by itself, car lights turn on and their horns blare. It’s like some kind of invisible force is making its way through the town, probing, scouting.
It’s during this first witching hour, from midnight to 1am, that we’re introduced to the main characters. Stevie Wayne (Adrienne Barbeau) is the DJ at (and owner of) the local smooth jazz radio station. Her dulcet voice is the third person narration of events as the film progresses, and often ties the film together as the radio plays in the background of various scenes. I’d forgotten how rarely Stevie gets to interact with the other characters (other than her son). Her isolation is accentuated by Carpenter showing us the long walk and steep stairs Stevie has to take to get to her lighthouse radio station.
Then there’s fisherman Nick (Tom Atkins) and hitchhiker Elizabeth (Jamie Lee Curtis). They meet on the road just before the town goes haywire and all the glass in Nick’s truck shatters. While Stevie is the main character, both Nick and Elizabeth are the ones that take us from one creepy scene to the next. They’re both likeable enough characters, but I never really buy the relationship that they fall into. (Also, I love that Nick’s full name is Nick Castle, the same as the actor who played the Shape in the first Halloween movie.)
Other minor characters include a weatherman with an infatuation with Stevie (Charles Cyphers, playing a character named Dan O’Bannon – to keep those references coming), the mayor’s aide, Sandy (played by Halloween alumni Nancy Loomis) and the mayor herself, Kathy Williams (Janet Leigh). It’s fun that Janet Leigh, the original scream queen, is in this movie with her daughter, Jamie Lee Curtis. It’s a bit of a shame they only share a few scenes together towards the end of the movie, though.
And of course there’s the fog, present and directed enough that it could almost be a character itself. Considering the limits of the effects available at the time, they’re pretty impressive – from the long shots of the glowing fog descending on the town to the quick cuts of the fog seeming to chase people and cut them off. Sometimes it seems to pause a moment, before overwhelming a location. It’s a lot better looking than I remember.
The cinematography is quite good, and I’m reminded that Carpenter has a deft hand with outdoor scenes – I wish he’d do more of them.
This is a ghost story, and as such the actual scares aren’t as plentiful as in, say, a slasher movie. It’s mostly about mood and tension, with black shapes silhouetted against fog shrouded windows and grasping hands breaking through doorways. The assault by the ghostly sailors on the house where Stevie’s son is trapped, with his elderly babysitter, is a standout – with Stevie screaming on the radio for someone, anyone, to help her son – but there are plenty of other moments of creepiness as well. The corpse at the coroner’s office that gets up and moves. The piece of the wreck that seeps salt water and reads “six must die” before bursting into flame. The attack on the lighthouse.
The bad guys are great, with the fog, staging, and editing preventing us from getting a good view of what a leper might look like after a hundred years at the bottom of the sea. What we do glimpse of them (including a young Rob Bottin, who went on to do the effects on Carpenter’s The Thing) makes them seem like classic ghost pirates. Something out of a William Hope Hodgson story – or a Scooby-Doo episode, if the cartoon ghost pirates had managed to get a boat hook into Shaggy’s neck.
The movie bogs down a little in the middle, particularly with the reading of necessary plot elements from the journal (sorry Hal Holbrook). The town also gets strangely empty, considering hundreds of people are supposed to be out celebrating their centenial. But these are nitpicks, and overall it’s a great spookfest.
The Bottom Line
Time has been kind to The Fog, at least for me, and it’s much better and more fun than I remembered. Yes, the effects are dated, as are the fashions and the whole ‘pick up a hitchhiker and jump in the sack with them’ shtick, but The Fog is still an effective, moody ghost story. The perfect film to watch on a Halloween night.
Note: I know spooky season is technically over, but if you’ve already watched The Fog and are interested in more spooky ghost pirates, William Hope Hodgeson’s The Ghost Pirates is available for free online at places like Project Gutenberg and Wikisource.
