Barbeau leads as Stevie Wayne, a late-night DJ in the town of Antonio Bay. Stevie's overnight shifts in a lighthouse allow her to witness and report the arrival of a mysterious fog that coincides with the disappearance of three local fishermen, including the husband of town mayor Kathy Williams (Janet Leigh). As the coastal California town prepares to celebrate its centennial, the local priest, Father Patrick Malone (Hal Holbrook), discovers his grandfather's diary and learns that a cabal of six founders started the community with a shocking act of betrayal, which is now literally coming back to haunt the townspeople on the hundredth anniversary of the crime. Meanwhile, hitchhiker Elizabeth (Jamie Lee Curtis) gets a ride into Antonio Bay with town resident Nick (Tom Atkins), and their efforts to find out what happened to the fishermen lead them to numerous close encounters with the supernatural threat.
Despite reshoots that bowed to the increasing expectation for gory ghosts and peril, The Fog remains a classic haunt at its core, with the eerie titular fog getting a lot more screen time than the spectral mariners. The opening campfire tale, also a late addition, sets the mood with John Houseman telling a group of children about the wreck of the Elizabeth Dane, a ship carrying a colony of leprosy victims to the bay. Between the introductory ghost story and the diary found by Father Malone, we know pretty much everything we need to know about why these murderous spirits are emerging from the fog to avenge themselves a century later. The fog and its ghosts are not so much mysterious as they are unstoppable, a conjoined force of fate that moves at its own pace, slowly but surely descending on Antonio Bay until the town's debt is fully paid. The goriest scenes happen early, with the murders of the fishermen and the subsequent discovery of just one corpse by Elizabeth and Nick, but these are pretty tame compared to Jaws (1975) or other horror films of the era, and mostly the mariners are shadowy figures who drag their victims away into the fog. John Carpenter has talked about his desire to make a movie inspired by Val Lewton's subtle but chilling horror classics (see this 2022 Collider article for more on that), and it's easy to see their influence even after the additions meant to appeal to the horror-going audiences of 1980.
While I love the Lewton-inspired atmosphere of The Fog, I also appreciate its commitment to agency and variety for its female characters. Co-writers Carpenter and Debra Hill offer us more women than men as our central characters, with Carpenter's wife at the time, Adrienne Barbeau, in heroic mode as a single mother who strives to protect the community and also find a way to save her young son as the fog closes in on him and his elderly babysitter. In a different horror movie, Jamie Lee Curtis's hitchhiking Elizabeth might be condemned to a gory death in her underwear, but instead she's smart, empathetic, and able to recover quickly from each close call. Janet Leigh doesn't have any scenes with her daughter until the third act, but her character is also presented as a fully realized individual, and despite her small town political status she's far more likeable than the mayor in Jaws. She's prickly with her assistant but grateful for her all the same, and she strives to forge ahead in her mayoral duties even as she worries about her missing husband. The two male leads, Hal Holbrook and Tom Atkins, seem perfectly comfortable with their female costars, and their characters both eschew the casual sexism exhibited by the fishermen and weatherman Dan O'Bannon (Charles Cyphers). Not every character who gets killed by the ghosts deserves that fate, but the picture doesn't see women as obvious victims just because they're women, and several of the male victims give us little reason to mourn their loss.
For more great ghost stories, try The Uninvited (1944), The Haunting (1963), The Changeling (1980), and Lady in White (1988). Adrienne Barbeau also appears in Carpenter's Escape from New York (1981), Wes Craven's Swamp Thing (1982), and George A. Romero's Creepshow (1982). Jamie Lee Curtis became an iconic scream queen in the 1980s thanks to films like The Fog, the Halloween series, and Prom Night (1980), but over the decades she has proven herself a versatile actress and great comedic star, eventually winning an Academy Award for her role in Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022). Her mother, Janet Leigh, is of course best remembered for Psycho (1960). For my other favorite John Carpenter movies, see Escape from New York, Christine (1983), and Big Trouble in Little China (1986).
As of October 2025, you can watch a wide range of John Carpenter films on the Criterion Channel, which is celebrating the director with a curated collection of his work.
See also: "Hogarthian Gothic: Imagining the Madhouse in Val Lewton's BEDLAM"
No comments:
Post a Comment