The Fog

The Fog opens with an elderly man telling ghost stories to children on a beach. Although brief, and (by all accounts) added after reshoots, the interlude is this film's version of the Dr Loomis' framing diatribes seen in John Carpenter's earlier film, Halloween. We are told about the destruction of a clipper, the boat shorn apart on rocks after the crew mistook a campfire, set by greedy locals, for a navigation light. The yarn helps us understand the psychological viewpoint of something betrayed and dead, a cold thing at the bottom of sea that hates the living and wants to strike out at them. Despite such a simplistic set-up, The Fog is still a little flabby. Themes fire off in a million different directions but never quite coalesce - Director Carpenter and cinematographer Dean Cundey spend a lot of the film's screen-time (beautifully) photographing smoke prowling over various landscapes. 

Attacks are few and far between and none of the human characters are interesting enough to really anchor a sense of creeping dread. The Fog's other major problem is that the menace keeps shrinking. We start out with the idea that everybody and everything in Antonio Bay is imperilled. Unfortunately, this concept is quickly ditched. We trade a full-scale attack on a town for a less demanding six man countdown. The Fog, like all camp-side tall tales, rambles on, but the ghost attacks themselves are great. The drowned sailors are swollen, rotting lumps, drained of colour and detail. They snatch at the living; clawing at them with fish hooks or plunging kitchen knives into their warm bodies. Considering its adult rating and the viciousness of its killers, The Fog does end up being unusually anaemic. Instead of arterial blood, Carpenter uses a suite of visceral sound effects to turn basic stunt mobbing into something suggestive of a crunchy, X-rated cannibal attack.