I have discovered in the last year or so that I really like the work of director John Carpenter. That means catching up on a lot of the movies he made, many of them beloved flicks for horror fans, and so far, I haven’t been disappointed.
Factor in that 1980’s The Fog is leaving Shudder soon, so I might as well check it out while I can.
The town of Antonio Bay, California is getting ready to celebrate its 100th anniversary, and there’s a problem there. During the credits, days before the actual anniversary, weird stuff happens. Machines flip on and off, objects move, and rows of pay phones all start ringing at once. The town’s Catholic priest, Father Malone (Hal Holbrook) finds his grandfather’s journal and learns why: a century earlier, the town’s six founders arranged for a leper ship to sink, killing all onboard. The ship was owned by a wealthy man, and the founders used his gold to start the town. Malone’s grandfather was among those six.
Now, on the 100th anniversary, the ghosts of those lepers are coming back in a fog for one hour, out to kill six people. Which six? They don’t seem to care, and even take out three sailors a day early. If they can murder six, they’ll go away. Is that justice for the unavenged dead? And who is going to volunteer to be one of the six?
Carpenter, unsurprisingly, set up a good horror movie here. It’s a supernatural event that’s hitting the town, and he lays down the rules early on. The ghosts come in the fog, only for an hour, and they will only kill six people as an act of revenge for what happened to them when they were still alive. Beyond that, there’s not much anyone can do but try to evade the fog as it sweeps through what looks like a model town (some of the special effects haven’t aged as well). The cast includes a couple prominent screen queens, beginning with Carpenter’s then-wife Adrienne Barbeau, along with his Halloween star Jamie Lee Curtis and Curtis’s mother, Psycho shower victim Janet Leigh. Holbrook brings a bit of gravitas, and actor Tom Atkins as Curtis’s love interest got a nice start here for future horror movie work.
But the thing I note about Carpenter’s work is I usually dig them because Carpenter just does such a masterful job of set-up and execution of his ideas. Sure, his more recent work may not be what it once was, but his old stuff is classic horror and sci-fi for a reason. The man knew what he was doing and how to use the conventions of the genre to tell a compelling, tense story. Maybe the effects haven’t aged well, but the nice thing about fog is Carpenter can keep his angry ghosts obscured by that very same substance and a lot of shadow, and that sort of thing will only make them look more effective. So, while The Fog may or may not be among Carpenter’s best-remembered work, it’s still a fun horror movie, and sometimes that’s all a person really needs.
Besides, in these days of stay-at-home social distancing, this was a movie that asked the residents of a town to stay indoors and away from windows for their own protection. That might be a little more thematically appropriate for these times than I thought they would have been when I selected the movie to watch.
Grade: B+
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