The Fog Review: Excellent Atmospheric Horror

As gloomy campfire horror done right, John Carpenter’s The Fog leans on a strong sense of atmosphere and an excellent synth score to amplify our fear of the unknown.

The Fog was John Carpenter’s theatrical follow-up to the 1978 classic Halloween, but the two films differ substantially. Halloween has long served as the poster movie for cinematic slashers, establishing both its setting and antagonist as horror staples, while The Fog is a stripped-back exercise in generating a foreboding atmosphere that champions mood and shadow. Both were initially met with a lukewarm critical response and while the former has gone on to be universally regarded as a pillar of the genre, the latter is rarely considered to be among the strongest of Carpenter’s works: a crying shame, as it tops all but his Antarctic expedition in the eyes of this author. 

Drawing inspiration from low-budget chillers and B-movies from the 1940s, The Fog drops us into the fictional Northern California town of Antonio Bay as its townsfolk prepare to celebrate its centennial. Among them are Stevie Wayne (Adrienne Barbeau, Escape from New York), a radio DJ who broadcasts out of the town lighthouse; Nick Castle (Tom Atkins, Lethal Weapon), a local fisherman; Elizabeth (Jamie Lee Curtis, Halloween), a hitchhiker passing through who strikes up a dalliance with Nick, and Father Malone (Hal Holbrook, Into the Wild), the local priest who uncovers a dark secret about the true nature of the town’s formation.

And on the eve of this landmark anniversary, a mysterious glowing fog bank encroaches upon the shore. It first envelops a fishing trawler out to sea, where the vengeful spirits within the fog, wielding fishing hooks in hand, begin claiming victims as recompense for their suffering at the hands of the six founders of Antonio Bay, before the deadly weather formation descends upon the town.

From the opening moments until the final frame, The Fog is entirely driven by atmosphere. Carpenter actively chose to avoid the kind of set pieces that made Halloween so memorable, instead preferring to emulate the tone of Val Lewton-produced horror movies for RKO, which Carpenter described when talking to Fangoria back in 1980 as “very shadowy, all suggestion”. The Fog follows a symphonic structure that builds meticulously and culminates with a climactic crescendo, at all times encompassing both the characters and us, the viewers, in an everlasting haze of dread and tonal gloom.

This pervasive and overwhelming sense of confusion and ominousness becomes even more valuable to the effectiveness of The Fog when one considers the lack of development provided for the various characters, as well as the shadowy wisps lurking in the mist. Many of Carpenter’s other horror projects released in the early ’80s brought more tangible, actualised frights; bouts of intense, claustrophobic paranoia in The Thing were routinely divided by jolts of disturbing body horror, while Christine delivered a simple antagonistic force in the form of a violently possessive Plymouth Fury who curdled the mind of a teen desperate to grow into the man he longed to be.

We don’t fear the entities who occupy the fog—cheap-looking, visually obscured remnants of the past returned to right wrongs, reduced by their surroundings and swallowed up with near totality. Instead, we fear how the invasiveness of the dense, arcane phenomenon rolling in from the open water signifies a reckoning to come.

Isolation and disconnection are two themes that have frequently formed the backbone of Carpenter’s cinematic language, and both percolate the quiet, empty streets and the spread-out topography of Antonio Bay. Movies such as Assault on Precinct 13, The Thing, They Live and Prince of Darkness to name a few have each offered up troublesome scenarios where their respective protagonists are tasked with keeping danger at arm’s length without the possibility of outside assistance, and this is especially true of The Fog. Characters are scattered across town, isolated by their individual will to avoid unnecessary human interaction, and forced as a result to piece together the mystery at hand largely on their own.

Antonio Bay was founded on the bones of mortal sin, and every major character demonstrates the sort of solemn world-weariness that would have you believe they are as cursed as their forebears, or those damned to return as phantoms in the fog. Stevie Wayne is the model example, isolating herself from everyone except her young son and turning down requests for a date from weatherman Dan O’Bannon (Charles Cyphers, Halloween Kills), explicitly stating her “idea of perfection” is a voice on a phone.

Nick and Elizabeth are unified by their brief unsentimental physical encounter but are otherwise two drifters on their respective paths. Father Malone spends much of his time mourning the information he discovers, crushed under the weight of the actions committed by his ancestor and the company he kept. Carpenter directs The Fog with a pragmatic approach to telling authentic human stories, contrasting the otherworldly nature of the undead mariners with characters that feel organic in how loneliness separates and divides them.

It’s this aspect that makes The Fog stand out as a ghost story that differs from the typical Hollywood formula. Supernatural hauntings have become the norm for ghostly horror films, and customarily the protagonists will represent either the paragon of virtue facing off against pure evil, or a darker shade of humanity who the audience patiently waits to see served up karmic justice. The Fog doesn’t have innocent characters, but neither are they guilty; they are simply the unfortunate victims of long-standing injustice a century overdue.

The Fog isn’t nearly as ostentatious as similarly themed horror flicks: it doesn’t possess the theology angle of fellow meteorological hair-raiser The Mist, and neither does it possess the same splash as perennial favourite Halloween. Over time the film has inadvertently found itself nestled between camps who proclaim it as a misunderstood gem or a stodgy slog, and while it might appear rather workaday on the surface, it is certainly not the latter.

Carpenter is an expert manipulator of eerie atmospherics, able to conjure up the most frightful of images through sight or sound, and The Fog combines both remarkably. It draws us in with a synth score that can barely be bested, and a robust understanding of visual grammar that invites us to share in the uneasiness of a town masking suffering with celebration. It’s a quintessential campfire ghost story brought to life by a master of his craft, and it deserves a place on the pantheon of the esteemed moviemaker’s many filmic triumphs.

The Fog (1980) is now available to watch on digital and on demand, and on DVD & Blu-Ray.

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