By Tristan Bishop
At the dawn of the 1980s John Carpenter was riding high on the success of Halloween, which had been released in 1978, and had, after many months and much word of mouth, become an enormous success, making upwards of $65,000,000 on a budget of just over $300,000. Nowadays of course the major studios would have immediately secured him to direct the latest mega-budget release, but back then things obviously played a little differently, as Carpenter’s next project was the 3 hour long 1979 made-for-TV Elvis: The Movie, starring Kurt Russell as the titular bequiffed hip-swiveller. Next up Carpenter signed a two picture deal with AVCO Embassy which resulted in 1981’s $6 million budgeted Escape From New York, and 1980’s considerably more modest $1 million production The Fog.
Despite pretty much defining the genre cinema of the late 70’s/early 80’s, Carpenter was looking back as much as he was looking forward – for a man that changed the face of horror films with Halloween and its fully-formed slasher template (although he took inspiration from 1974’s Black Christmas and the giallo films of Dario Argento), Carpenter’s love for the cinema of the 40’s and 50’s shines through in his earlier work, especially the films of Howard Hawks, whose work Carpenter remade twice – once unofficially (Assault On Precinct 13 being an urban update of Hawk’s western Rio Bravo) and once officially (The Thing is based on Hawk’s 1951 The Thing From Another World). The Fog was intended as another exercise in mining the favourite films of Carpenter’s youth, this time the creepy black & white ghost stories of the 1940s; presumably Carpenter had the eerie, low-budget films of Val Lewton (Ghost Ship, Cat People) in mind, which would have been a world apart from the gore-splattered celluloid making waves with horror audiences back in 1980.
Apparently inspired by seeing a rolling bank of fog whilst visiting Stonehenge in the UK, Carpenter and his producer (and ex-girlfriend) Debra Hill took this visual image and welded it to the plot of the 1958 British sci-fi movie The Trollenberg Terror (known in the US as The Crawling Eye), a superior sci-fi offering which featured alien creatures hiding in the mist at the top of a mountain. Carpenter and Hill then co-scripted a story about the sleepy Californian coastal town of Antonio Bay, which comes under attack from murderous ghostly pirates hunting for their long-lost gold, during the towns 100th anniversary celebrations. The basic idea was pretty straightforward, but featured a nice twist (SPOILER ALERT!) whereby it transpires that the founders of Antonio Bay deliberately caused the shipwreck which originally killed the aforementioned pirates, and used their ill-gotten gains to build the town and church, which works a ‘sins of our fathers’ angle into the plot, and asks questions about personal responsibility, the moral status of organised religion, and possibly even comments on the birth of America itself.
Anyone familiar with Carpenter’s work in his peak period will be aware of his knack of putting together a great cast, and The Fog is up there with his best, pulling together people he had previously worked with in Charles Cyphers as a weather man, and Jamie Lee Curtis as a spunky hitch-hiker, quite apart from the virginal college girl that made her name in Halloween; established but culty actors in Hal Holbrook and George ‘Buck’ Flower; Carpenter’s then-wife Adrienne Barbeau taking the lead role as Stevie Wayne, the owner/sole DJ of a jazz radio station based in a lighthouse; her friend Tom Atkins stealing the show with an unrepentant masculine charm as a beer-swilling driver who literally picks up Jamie Lee Curtis; and even a bona fide old-time Hollywood star – and, in what is probably nowhere near a coincidence, Curtis’ real-life mother – in Janet Leigh as the town mayor. With such a large cast for what is basically a quick, low-key horror picture, you might think that you might have a bit of a mess on your hands, but here it really serves to make the town of Antonio Bay feel real and alive, especially in the way that the characters interconnect at various points – Stevie Wayne’s voice drifting over the airwaves in scenes where she is otherwise not present brings a solid sense of place and community.
Unfortunately, on his first viewing of a rough cut of The Fog, Carpenter was deflated – “I had a movie that didn’t work, and I knew it my heart.” As previously mentioned, audiences in 1980 expected more visceral scares (Cronenberg’s Scanners had just hit the box office by this point), and Carpenter went back and added more footage with the ghostly pirates (on the original attack on the Seagrass, the pirates were not seen at all!), more gore (although The Fog is hardly a gorefest), and, perhaps most iconic of all, the opening scene with John Houseman as Mr Machen (one of a great many in-jokey names referencing horror films, books and Carpenter’s buddies that appear in the film!) reading ghost stories on a deserted beach to a group of children at midnight. The reshoots apparently make up half an hour of the film itself.
Yet despite these production problems, and an initial dismissal by critics of the time (which is common to nearly all of Carpenter’s best work) the film works as well now as it did in 1980, as a limp and easily-dismissed 2005 remake helped to highlight. I’ll make a personal confession here – I LOVE The Fog. I probably watch it on average once every six months. I can quote along with the dialogue word for word. I was even inspired to start a radio station by Stevie Wayne’s character in the film (sadly I still don’t get paid for that OR live in a lighthouse yet). If I wasn’t quite so wary of stating ‘favourite films’ I’d call it my favourite film. But why? It doesn’t have the scares of The Haunting (1963) or the visceral buzz of The Texas Chain saw Massacre (1974), nor the layered intelligence of Don’t Look Now (1973), and it’s certainly not a perfect film – see the rather perfunctory script, one or two great lines excepted.
Well, I think it’s a combination of factors. Firstly, it’s concise at 89 minutes – a remarkable achievement in editing considering the large cast and amount of event in the film. Secondly, it looks and sounds amazing – Director Of Photography Dean Cundey worked with Carpenter again (after first collaborating on Halloween) and brings a similar crisp widescreen vision to the sleepy coastal town locations (one of which is Bodgea Bay, which was famously used in Hitchcock’s The Birds), and Carpenter’s own soundtrack, whilst not as iconic as his scores for Halloween or Assault On Precinct 13, is just as effective, with sparse synth work and tumbling piano lines. Thirdly, it’s just damned creepy at times – the sequence at the start of the film at the dead of night with lights mysteriously coming on, car alarms going off and the contents of a local shop shaking and shuddering is one of Carpenter’s most effective sequences, and the ghostly pirates, shown in silhouette with demonic glowing eyes are an impressive threat (their leader Blake, incidentally, is played by FX whizz Rob Bottin, who would become a household name to horror fans for his work on Carpenter’s The Thing). Or it could just be that Carpenter’s love of folky ghost stories, comics and Italian horror combined here to make something appealing to fans of all three.
So 35 years on, like all of Carpenter’s work from his golden era, The Fog stands up better than it ever has, and if it’s been a while since your last viewing, or if you’ve never before visited Antonio Bay, now might be the best time to look for The Fog.