Viking Night: The Fog
By Bruce Hall
February 14, 2012
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Yeah, there you go. Now you're interested. More specifically, The Fog is an early John Carpenter film, somewhat forgettably shoehorned in between Halloween and Escape From New York. It wasn't quite as big a hit - or as good - as Halloween, but it succeeds in comparison simply by being more ambitious and not falling flat on its face in the attempt. It wasn't nearly as memorable - or as slick and sexy as Escape, but still does a better job of achieving its goals.
Carpenter excels at making claustrophobic, ultra low budget films that don't look quite as cheap and constrained as they are, and The Fog gets the nod here because despite being somewhat less watchable than the films it's sandwiched between, in many ways it does more with less in ways Halloween didn't need to, and Escape never really attempted.
The Fog benefits most of all from the tried and true conceit that sometimes what we fear most is what we can't see. It's an old fashioned campfire yarn that literally starts out that way, with a grizzled old sailor weaving a tale of horror and woe around a beach side blaze to an audience of rapt youngsters. The calendar is about to mark the hundred year anniversary of the seafront town of Antonio Bay. The year the town was founded, a terrible shipwreck occurred under suspicious circumstances. Legend has it that precisely one century later; a terrible curse would descend upon the unsuspecting town as a result.
It's an effective opening, especially since the clock happens to strike midnight right as the old codger wraps things up. Oddly, the dude comes dangerously close to spoiling the whole plot right here. But effective storytelling is often more in the delivery than the content, and the scene makes for an effective bookend to what ultimately is nothing more than the sort of crap story your Scout Leader would make you listen to over s'mores after a long day of basket weaving and square knots.
As if to prove this, The Fog proceeds to introduce us to some of the cast as strange things start happening around town right at the stroke of midnight. Lights flash, windows break, televisions flicker; anything and everything that isn’t nailed down becomes a prop designed to telegraph what we now all know is coming. As all this is going on, Father Malone (Hal Holbrook) is a Catholic priest (because in horror movies, for some reason, evil has no interest in Protestants) who stumbles across a hundred year old journal written by his grandfather (who was also a Catholic priest, which raises questions, but...never mind...), describing all the unholy details the old sailor left out.
Not surprisingly, it seems things are about to get worse.
Detour - I want to point out that in one of the more interesting plot contrivances you'll ever see, the journal almost literally falls out of the sky. Seriously - John Carpenter's hand appearing from behind the camera and handing it to the guy would have been no less jarring. Now, before all you Carpenter-philes email to say I'm stupid, I get that it's a supernatural thing. But it just comes across as clumsy and weird. Imagine if, instead of Obi-Wan handing Luke his father's lightsaber, George Lucas walks into frame in his street clothes, hands it over and says "Here you go, Mark".
Yes I'm exaggerating. But only a little.
Like any good campfire fantasy, there are just a handful of main caricatures characters. As the town flings itself apart, Jamie Lee Curtis appears as a buxom hitchhiker, accepting a ride from a drunk driver twice her age (Tom Atkins) and casually propositioning the guy after he's already agreed to give her a ride. Yep - it's immediately clear that one of the most iconic screen heroines of the 1970s is only here to fill out tight sweaters and high-waisted jeans. I guess that's the old school misogyny of the 1980s for you. Somewhere, Ellen Ripley is spinning in her cryo-pod.
At least in space, no one can hear you scream.
Meanwhile, a languid late night radio deejay (Adrienne Barbeau) helps pace the story from her bird's eye view in the town's lighthouse. She gets a tip that a massive fog bank is rolling into the bay, and an inbound trawler is in its path. She beams a happy how-do you-do to the ship, passing on the warning to the drunken, belching crew. Sure enough a shimmering fog appears, seething with obvious malice and fury. It envelops the ship, and the body count begins.
Of course like most small town deejays, this one is also an amateur Nancy Drew. So when a mysterious piece of driftwood comes into her possession the next day, she starts digging into the disappearance of the trawler.
Simultaneously, Nick the Drunk and Liz the Hitchhiker are up to the same thing, for reasons that aren't really important right now. What IS important is that all of this is going down while the town's Mayor (Janet Leigh) is preparing for the community centennial celebration. As the deejay, the drunk driver, the slutty hitchhiker and the priest begin to uncover the horrible truth, will they be able to convince the mayor to act in time, or will history repeat itself? Of course like most horror movies, the answer is "no", and then later..."maybe".
Reminiscent of its namesake, The Fog is inundated with the idle mist of countless horror movie tropes - an isolated town with a Dark Secret, a square jawed hero who wants to uncover the Dark Secret, someone in a position of authority who drags their feet about the Dark Secret, a total lack of law enforcement activity except for one Fat Sheriff, a Kid in Danger, an Intrepid Priest, and of course, Jamie Lee Curtis Screaming Her Ass Off.
But that's not necessarily a bad thing. There's nothing new under the sun as the saying goes, and this is especially true of the horror milieu. And as with most of his early work, Carpenter makes excellent use of all of it. The Fog is equal parts grotesque, dull, self righteously Spartan and yet it remains luridly compelling. People die, but in what might be an unconscious precursor to the PG-13 caste, every act of violence is brutal - but almost entirely blood free. The net effect of course is that one can extend the amount of time you can murder people without it seeming gratuitous. It’s a subconsciously striking contrast when it's used effectively.
The interminable periods where little or nothing seems to be happening are critical in this type of film - those expecting blood and gore will be distracted by the Chunky Soup style bits of (often clunky) expository dialogue. But even in an average film, it’s easy to see that actions carry more weight when there is meaning behind them. When all is said and done, the mystery of Antonio Bay is straight up Scooby Doo, but the slowly evolving trail of bloody bread crumbs is what ultimately gives the story ballast (nautical pun intended). Not to mention, Scooby Doo would have been a whole lot less stupid had the Scary Pirate Ghost hacked someone's eyes out once in a while.
And, maybe a generation of kids would never have slept again. But that’s beside the point.
Like a soap opera that's been on too long, The Fog falls back a bit much on its meager resources. We’re repeatedly told that the US Coast Guard is investigating the trawler’s disappearance, but at no time does anyone from the Federal Government show up to ask questions or investigate anything. We’re left with the town’s Standard Horror Movie Sherriff, a corpulent, balding twit who makes Boss Hogg look like Eliot Ness. But this IS a horror flick, and one belonging to a sub-genre that requires the cast to be completely isolated from both civilization AND logic. They exist in an existential fishbowl, and the only thing that matters is what happens in that dirty, brackish muck.
When all is said and done, what matters most is whether or not the story was effective. Three decades on, The Fog is more of a quaint curiosity than anything else, but it's still effective, albeit in the way my grandmother's turntable is when I want to listen to my LP collection. I can tell you one thing - it may be quaint, it may be derivative, and maybe sections of it are slower than a Klingon wedding - but like the best of John Carpenter, it's all made well by a strong setup, and a clever final scene. It's often said that you can't write a good story until you know how it ends - and if everyone at least knew how to begin and end a film the way John Carpenter once did, movies would be a grip ton more fun.