The Fog (1980)

               I found it helpful to remember while watching ‘The Fog’ that this was John Carpenter’s first theatrical follow-up to ‘Halloween.’ It had been in development for years as he’d gotten his first bit of inspiration for the movie while visiting Stonehenge during a publicity tour for 1976’s ‘Assault on Precinct 13.’ He tells a story about watching a fog bank roll across the countryside, which clearly inspired a few scenes in the movie. I find it helps because it reminds me that Carpenter was still relatively young (only 32) and still working outside of the studio system, and thus the ramshackle construction of the movie was unlikely to be solely Carpenter’s fault. ‘Halloween’ is considered a stone-classic now, and there have been so many sequels that it’s 100% a studio product these days, but like all of Carpenter’s movies until ‘The Thing’ it was put together through independent financing and barely scraped together into a completed film. Same thing with ‘The Fog,’ with the added complication that, by Carpenter’s own admission, the original cut of the movie simply didn’t work. They had to go back and do additional filming, and depending on who you listen up to 30% of the final version of the movie might be from these reshoots. I might be flattering myself, but I think going in with the knowledge of all of this helped me to understand the structural problems in the film.

              For once I don’t need to get much into the background of the people behind the camera since it was basically just John Carpenter and Debra Hill. He directed it, she produced it, and they both wrote it. Done, everyone knows who the two of them are. The cast is stacked with Carpenter regulars: Adrienne Barbeau as Stevie Wayne, the lighthouse-bound local radio dj. Tom Atkins as Nick Castle, a local fisherman, and Jamie Lee Curtis as Elizabeth Solley, a hitchhiker he picks up and hooks up with. There’s Nancy Loomis as Sandy Fadel, an assistant to mayor Kathy Williams, played by Janet Leigh in a nice little chance to work with her daughter. Charles Cyphers and George Buck Flowers are also in the movie because this is a Carpenter production, of course they are. A special shoutout to Hal Halbrook as Father Patrick Malone, the local drunk priest.

              Carpenter has cited several movies he drew inspiration from, most of which I’ve never heard of. There’s ‘The Trollenberg Terror’ from 1958, better known as ‘The Crawling Eye,’ about monsters hiding in clouds that descend onto a mountain (I knew that one). There’s a shipwreck in the film based on one that was depicted in 1975’s ‘The Master Gunfighter.’ Some have noted plot similarities to the 1965 Italian film ‘5 tombe per un medium.’ There are also nods to the poem ‘The Wreck of the Palatine’ by John Greenleaf Whittier. Which is nice and all, but the premise is so basic that it’d be more surprising if a lot of other movies or literary works weren’t similar to it.

              This is not a complicated movie. This is very much the opposite of a complicated movie. My eventual point is going to be that, while I did like this movie quite a bit, I’m going to have to consider it one of Carpenter’s minor films because it doesn’t quite elevate the simple premise and story with enough style to make it more than its premise. What it is is fine, it’s a solid ghost story, but it has structural problems and a lot of dropped plot threads. This is why I say that knowing that almost a third of the movie is made up of reshoots helps. It doesn’t make the movie cohere any better, but at least it gives me an idea of why it’s fractured in the way that it is.

              The movie opens with a little campfire scene as John Housman (from ‘The Paper Chase!’) tells a bunch of kids about a ship called the Elizabeth Dane which crashed against the nearby rocks, killing everyone aboard, almost exactly a hundred years ago. In fact, in a few minutes it’ll be midnight and then it’s the anniversary! I will shock you by revealing that this is the event that created the set of vengeful ghosts that will terrorize the town throughout the movie. This scene is all part of the reshoots, of course, the movie does a decent job of doling out plot information over the course of the runtime but clearly Carpenter was frustrated enough by how it came across that he just stuck this at the beginning as an info dump so viewers couldn’t miss it. Considering that the major discontinuities in the rest of the movie are logistical and informational it’s not a bad idea to make very sure that the audience gets the basics from the jump.

              We then get a nice little interconnected set of scenes showing how the fog and its accompanying angry ghosts start to affect the town and the many residents who are inexplicably still awake and at work at midnight. First we have John Carpenter in a cheeky little cameo as Bennett Tramer (get it?), assistant to Hal Holbrook’s Father Malone, just now finishing his work at the church. After he leaves the father is startled when a large chuck of the stone wall of his study crashes down onto his desk, revealing a book concealed behind it. We don’t find out what’s in it for a while. We see a guy sweeping up a local grocery store where various items on the shelves start to rattle and a sign is partially dislodged from the ceiling. Outside Sandy’s house the cars on the streets have their lights and car alarms switched on at the same time. After Atkins picks up Curtis by the side of the road, they take some time to start flirting adorably, and then all of the windows in the car spontaneously shatter, almost causing them to crash.

              All the while this is going on we keep cutting back to Adrienne Barbeau’s Stevie in her lighthouse dj booth, nattering away between instrumental jazz numbers from the 50’s. It’s a weird radio station. She gets harassed over the phone by the local weather guy, who lets her know to broadcast to a trawler out overnight that a fog bank is rolling in near them. During a break she alerts the ship, named the Seagrass. We then cut to the ship, where all three crewmembers are borderline blackout drunk. They soon get enveloped by the fog, and then see a ghostly vessel pull up alongside them. Two of them go up on deck to take a look and are variously stabbed and hooked to death with fishing equipment by the crew of the vessel, who can appear like ghosts but look like the shuffling corpses of drowned sailors. It’s made clear over the course of the movie that these are the ghosts of the dead from the Elizabeth Dane, but in terms of how they function they’re intelligent zombies. A lot of banging against locked doors in this movie, no passing through walls.

The movie's not lying to you.

              It turns out that the fog and its accompanying spirits vanish at 1am. This is eventually explained. I will point out that the movie establishes this specific time by cutting to Atkins and Curtis in bed having clearly just hooked up when there’s a knock on the door. Atkins gets up to check and hears the face of his grandfather clock crack at exactly 1am, then when he opens the door there’s nobody there. This means that he picked Curtis up, the car windows shattered, he drove her to his place, they had sex and started cheerily cuddling, all in under an hour. Atkins has game, apparently. The sex was apparently so good, or his conversation so charming, that Curtis deliberately hangs around him for the rest of the movie despite all of the death and spookums. She turns down the chance to leave several times.

              The next day we follow three separate sets of people: Stevie, Atkins and Curtis, and Leigh’s mayor and her assistant Sandy. Stevie has a weird subplot where her kid picks up a piece of the Elizabeth Dane from the beach and brings it to her. She carries it around for a while, then when she’s back at the lighthouse it both leaks water and catches fire. Other than cluing her in to the fact that spookums are afoot I don’t know what purpose this serves. Atkins and Curtis follow up on the now-missing ship Seagrass. They head out onto the water and find it abandoned. They have a nice little character scene where they start to get to know each other and then a dead body drops on her. The mayoral pair visit the priest, who read only part of the book last night before stopping in horror. He details how there used to be a leper colony offshore lead by a wealthy man named Blake. He decided to move it to the mainland just a couple of miles from the town, which led the priest and five other prominent members of the community to murder them by building a huge fire on the shore, causing the boat to get lost, crash against the rocks, and sink. They then stole the gold the wealthy Blake had carried with him, using it to set up the town.

              Except spoilers they didn’t? I was confused for the longest time about this because most of the mayor’s time in the first half is spent preparing for the 100-year anniversary of the town, which is also happening that night. So apparently the boat sank, allowing the town leaders to loot its gold and use it to found the town, and they did so on that exact same day? And then it’s eventually revealed that they didn’t even do that, because the priest felt guilty afterwards so he stole the gold back and hid it in the church. Which means they sank the ship for what turned out to be nothing and still set up the town, then picked the day they did the murders as their founding date because …? I get the idea, their happy little town was founded on a lie and that lie is now coming back to punish them for past misdeeds, but the movie never really brings these points together in a coherent way.

              For example, much is made that there were six members of the conspiracy and that they planned the boat sinking between the hours of midnight and 1am. That’s why the ghosts were only active between those times that first night. With the movie so far. By the end of the film the ghosts have killed six people and gotten the gold back, thus ending their reign of vengeance. Again, fair enough. But it’s not satisfying because it’s six random people. It’s the three on the boat, an old lady looking after Stevie’s kid, a guy from the local weather station, and the priest. Apparently in the novelization it’s clarified that these six people are descendants of the original six conspirators, which at that point probably also includes about half the people in town, so maybe that works. But at the climax our characters are convinced that the ghosts only need one more victim, and none of them were present for or even aware of three of the above murders. They turn out to be correct, the ghosts do stop after six victims, but they had no way of knowing that would happen or what number they were up to.

              The reason I keep complaining about the way these movies dole out the backstories on their ghosts is because so often trying to figure it out is all that the characters in the present are doing. They don’t have anything going on in their lives besides researching dead people. This movie flips it a bit because everything happens over the course of twenty-four hours and most of these characters are too busy running around trying to understand what’s even happening to do much investigating. Most of this movie is made up of these three sets of characters driving around from place to place before everyone except Stevie end up at the church where the priest simply tells them what’s going on and why. None of them independently know about the Elizabeth Dane, none of them figure out a way to fight the ghosts, all they do is wander around being confused and running away from the fog until finally the priest sacrifices himself as penance for what a different priest did 100 years ago. If every single character in this movie except the Father simply left town when spooky things started happening it would have ended exactly the same.

              The events also feel completely disconnected from the other residents of the town. There are a couple of scenes with decently big crowds at the 100-year celebration. There’s even some frisson as the mayor, fully aware of the lie the town is based on, reads her prepared remarks about how great the town founders were. This’d be a great moment for the ghosts to pop up, all angry, but nope. Soon the fog has deliberately invaded the local power station and shorted out the generators. They also take out the phone lines during an important phone conversation. The century old ghosts have been paying attention to technological advancement, it seems. So this mass of people are now standing around in the dark. Prime time for ghost mariners, right? Instead the mayor gets her assistant to drive her home since she’s not feeling well just in time for the fog to start enveloping the town, street by street. It’s pretty fun watching them slowly panic and take up evasive driving to avoid the fog. It’s some great imagery, but I kept wondering about the crowd of people back in the park, still milling around. Did they get attacked, did anyone die? The people in the church are sure that only five people have died so far, but it could’ve been ten times that.

              Adrienne Barbeau is isolated from the rest of the cast except for one scene with her son. She gets a couple of phone calls but that’s it. There’s a decent section at the end where the fog starts climbing up the inside of the lighthouse, driving her outside and up onto the roof. When the climax happens and the ghosts vanish she’s in the middle of getting swung on by two of them. Why were they trying to kill her of all people, who mentioned several times she’d recently moved to the town, when they only had the Father to go? I know the whole descendants thing is only in the book version, but if they’d gotten her would they have let the priest live?

              The logic of the movie falls apart several times by the end if you try to focus on any of the details. More importantly, none of the characters we were following had any impact on the story itself. They just ran around until the priest read the rest of the book and figured out that if he returned the stolen gold and gave himself up as the last victim the ghosts would be satisfied, and that’s what happens. The gold, by the way, was forged into a huge cross, meaning either the priest had a sideline as a smelter or had one for a friend who could really keep his mouth shut. Nobody learns any lessons, nobody has a character arc, and poor Stevie out in the lighthouse has no idea about anything that’s happened. Maybe the townsfolk were slaughtered, maybe everyone had a weird couple of foggy hours and then went to bed. Be nice to know.

              I don’t want the movie to sound terrible, there are some fun characters and the acting is fine. It’s a Carpenter film so it looks great, even if the fog effects have gotten pretty dated. It’s minor Carpenter, not bad Carpenter, and those are very different things. I think he learned some things on this production that helped with his legendary run of 80’s classics, a lot of the problems here aren’t repeated in those movies. It’s kind of funny that I’ve now seen all the early roles that lead to Jamie Lee Curtis’ reputation as a scream queen, and while she’s good in all of them I’m going to rank this movie as third behind ‘Halloween’ and ‘Roadgames’ and quite a bit ahead of ‘Prom Night’ and ‘Terror Train.’ It’s certainly worth seeing, and I like how the first ghost movie of the 80’s is the first to really start bringing in the obvious special effects. We’re not done with the artsy “ghost as metaphor for loss” movies by any means, but we’re also going to start getting into the real schlock, which I’m very much looking forward to.