Ticket Stubs #2: Slay misty for me
The Fog, a 1980 chiller from John Carpenter, is an unnerving experience.
Ticket Stubs is a movie column reviewing new and not-so-new releases, Hollywood classics, nostalgic trash, and more obscure cinematic fare.
The Fog
John Carpenter, 1980
One hundred years ago, on the 21st of April, a small clipper ship, the Elizabeth Dane, neared Antonio Bay, California.
Aboard the nocturnal voyage were a colony of lepers who had bought, so they believed, the right to settle on the shore and begin a township. In fact, they had been deceived by locals who took their gold but, repelled by the idea of a leper colony nearby, had lit a campfire by the rocks. Engulfed by fog, the Dane set course for the light and crashed, sinking to the bottom of the ocean and taking the men on board to their deaths. Local legend says that, one day, the wronged men will rise out of their watery grave and exact vengeance on the six town elders who double-crossed them.
A century later, it is 1980 and Antonio Bay is preparing for its centenary celebrations, a festival being arranged by town busybody Cathy Williams (Janet Leigh) and her surly assistant Sandy (Nancy Loomis). (Cathy: ‘Sandy, you’re the only person I know who can make “Yes, ma’am” sound like “Screw you”.’ Sandy: ‘Yes, ma’am.’) They go to the local Episcopal church to enlist Father Malone in their civic do-goodery but Malone, a grave, haunted drunk played by Hal Holbrook, is troubled by the discovery of his grandfather’s journal detailing his role in the double-cross of the lepers. Across town, Stevie Wayne (Adrienne Barbeau) heads to her job as a DJ at KAB 1340, the town’s lighthouse radio station, leaving her son in the care of an elderly babysitter.
Rounding out our ensemble cast are Nick Castle (Tom Atkins), a rugged, creased-faced everyman and Elizabeth Solley (Jamie Lee Curtis), the taciturn hitchhiker he picked up on a lonely stretch of road the night before. As the 100th anniversary celebrations get under way, the fog rolls in from the ocean, across the bay, flooding the town’s electrical substation and downing its telephone lines along the way. This is no ordinary fog: inside its eerie, glowing folds are the drowned mariners, back from the beyond to wreak their revenge. Street by street, home by home, the fog’s deadly pursuit claims one resident after another before cornering our principals in the old church on Beacon Hill.
The Fog was John Carpenter’s first theatrical release after Halloween but the tone could not be more different. Halloween is a relentless exercise in understated violence while The Fog is an old-fashioned ghost story, the kind of movie Edgar Allen Poe might have made had he been born a century later and tried his hand at directing. It is small-town American Gothic, and Californian Gothic at that. Ghosts, hauntings and the moody macabre are all at home in New England and the South, two regions where America’s British origins still linger here and there in custom, architecture, manner and cuisine, but there is something uncanny about watching Old World superstitions besiege the sunny laboratory of perpetual progress. The Fog is not a cold-sweat nerve-jangler like Halloween; it is an eldritch mood piece that unsettles more than it shocks.
It is a movie that, according to Carpenter, was made in the editing room. The rough cut just wasn’t scary and producer Debra Hill felt the recent release of David Cronenberg’s Scanners, with its intense body horror, had marked a new threshold that The Fog would have to meet. A series of visceral close-ups were shot and inserted to accent the violence of several scenes, including an attack on drunken fishermen and the dispatching of a luckless local weatherman whose instruments are driven haywire by the sinister mist. Zeitgeist-jumping is almost always a mistake in movie-making but the inserts keep the gore to a minimum and are in keeping with the broader tone of creeping unease. The sudden but brief eruptions of frenzy perfectly punctuate the deliberate pace and portentous mood.
That mood begins building right from the start. Droopy-faced old-timer Mr Machen (John Houseman) scares the bejesus out of some kids with a campfire tale about the town’s shady past. Dean Cundey’s camera then tilts up from the darkness to a brooding establishing shot of Drakes Beach, the Marin County seafront that doubles as Antonio Bay, before taking in the town’s modest landmarks as one after another falls prey to supernatural phenomena: the general store that tremors uncontrollably, the closed gas station whose pumps abruptly glug into action, the parked cars whose horns blare in sudden unison. Over at the church, Father Malone is working in the sacristy when a stone crashes down from the wall, revealing a hidden journal, while out on an abandoned road leading into town, the windshield of Castle’s truck shatters moments after Solley climbs into the vehicle. The strangeness is scored by the omnipresent tones of KAB radio, a waxing and waning between Stevie Wayne’s smoky-voiced narration and oldies instrumental jazz. The musical choice was budgetary — Glenn Miller cost less to license than contemporary pop or rock — but it gives the broadcasts that unsettling, out-of-time quality often found in Carpenter’s movies.
In 2005, the movie got an inevitable remake, complete with Tom Welling, bad CGI and Fall Out Boy on the soundtrack. It is a flaccid, empty waste of a running time — a reimagining without imagination — as turgid teen stars trek tediously through every tired trope. It is a horror movie without the faintest hint of menace or thrill or atmosphere. None of these are its worst offence. That distinction goes to the script’s sap-headed rewriting of the vengeful sailors as supernatural justice warriors, pricking the town’s conscience by graffitiing the local cemetery in scales-of-justice symbols and meaningful Scripture verses. Even more objectionably, it works, and the movie ends with Selma Blair as Stevie Wayne broadcasting A Very Important Lesson to the town about righting the wrongs of the past. (Blair cannot touch Barbeau’s sultry, breathy performance but at least gives the role a decent go.)
The Fog (1980) — our Fog, the real Fog — has no truck with such mimsy mush. The inhabitants of Antonio Bay are settlers and their close descendants. They are hard-handed and hard-headed. They worked to build this town and aren’t about to give it up without a fight. They never endorse their grandparents’ bloody deeds but nor do they wallow in self-flagellating guilt, an indulgence at the best of times let alone when you’re being pursued by an undead leper with a rusty hook. There is no justice in this world, only retribution, survival and the cruel caprices of fate. Carpenter always wanted to make westerns but came along too late, after that genre had gone into a cultural recession and the studios that produced them had been battered by television, a string of big-budget flops and other economic headwinds. Yet in its basic components (small settlement, threat rolls in, locals rally, final showdown) The Fog is a spiritual western, as are other Carpenter movies like Assault on Precinct 13, Halloween, Prince of Darkness and Ghosts of Mars.
Carpenter seems not to be as keen on The Fog as on his more feted movies, and it is true the film enjoyed less critical and financial success than Halloween but it is a veritable horror classic. Whether it is the ominous mood; the ensemble performances (Atkins, Holbrook and Barbeau are particularly fine); the score (written and performed by Carpenter); the practical effects (Rob Bottin); or the set-pieces (a Jamie Lee Curtis sequence in an autopsy bay will send a sliver of ice down your spine), The Fog hits all the right notes. It’s sometimes accused of having aged poorly but all this means is that the movie’s rich mood and expertly built pacing are at odds with the banal jump scares and frenetic editing of contemporary movie-making. The Fog belongs to an earlier era of horror but its power to raise raw, tingling gooseflesh remains undiminished.
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