The Fog (1980) Review

 

The Fog (1980)

The Fog follows the residents of Antonio Bay, a small coastal California town, who, when a mysterious fog rolls in on the 100 year anniversary of the towns founding, must lay witness to the undead specters who’s very shipwreck caused the town’s founding, out for revenge agains the ones that wronged them a century ago. 

There’s few things that still send a shiver down my spine to this day like the combination of water and fog, and The Fog is precisely why. It’s been awhile since we’ve had a pure supernatural horror film on this page too, so who better to look to than the REAL master of horror (sorry Hitchcock), John Carpenter. Like most of his movies, The Fog is a methodical, slow burning horror that really takes its time, building tension and suspense that feels like watching water boil—nerve wracking knowing that at any moment, it could boil over. This is aided by his hesitation to fully reveal the killers, shrouding them in an eerie darkness and fog that adds to the auditory over visual quality this film shoots for. 

For once too, I also like how the perspective is spread out between multiple groups of people. Usually this is only introduced to up the body count but Carpenter expertly uses it introduce information sparingly so as to never let any one group discover too much about the fate that is befalling them. With the information spread out, it gives the story time to burn and so that when the fog rolls around, we destructively know how it will end but the characters are left clueless (which is super fucking stressful). 

We also get a great cast, starring Ty Mitchell, Janet Leigh, Hal Holbrook, Tom Atkins, and Adrienne Barbeau, as well as a Halloween reunion in Charles Cyphers, Nancy Kyes, and Jamie Lee Curtis. Aside from the geek-tastic union of mother in daughter in Leigh and Curtis, the two original queens of scream, I was particularly drawn to the uniquely drawn out performance of Barbeau and how she took what could’ve been a dull roll and made it both tense and terrifying, acting as our voice of fear and worry as the film descends into madness. Gave off a very War of the Worlds, Orson Welles type of scare where you can’t see the horror, just hear it. 

The Fog, directed by John Carpenter, is a foreboding terror that burns slow but never lets off the gas, while masterfully shifting the perspective to give us a classic ghost story for the ages. 

8.4/10