DVD Artwork
The town of Antonio Bay is cursed.
Mr. Machen (John Houseman), at a seaside campfire, tells the tale of the doomed ship, the Elizabeth Dane. Lepers all, cast out from their homes, approached the township with gold, asking to purchase part of the land so that he and his kind can have a real home. The town fathers agreed. However, on the night the deal is to be completed, bad things happen. A secret pact is made to destroy the Elizabeth Dane and its diseased occupants. That night, as an unearthly fog bank rolls in, a fire is set on Spivey Point, giving out a light the Elizabeth Dane mistakes for the lighthouse beacon. The ship wrecks on the rocks, plunging the ship to the floor of the bay and its inhabitants to their doom. Legend says that when the fog returns to Antonio Bay, so will those who lost their lives aboard the Elizabeth Dane, and bad things will certainly befall the town.
As Antonio Bay’s Centennial celebration nears, so does the glowing fog that holds the angry ghosts of the Elizabeth Dane. When midnight strikes, the spirits roam the streets of the town, seeking revenge. Lights go out. Car alarms blare for no visible reason. In the church, a small earthquake knocks blocks out of the ancient wall, revealing to Father Patrick Malone (Hal Holbrook) a journal written by one of his ancestors, detailing how the men of Antonio Bay deceived Captain Blake and the lepers aboard the Elizabeth Dane.
Caught in the middle of this horrific crossfire are Nick Castle (Tom Atkins) and his lovely hitchhiker companion, Elizabeth (Jamie Lee Curtis), town historian Kathy Williams (Janet Leigh) and her assistant, Nancy (Nancy Loomis) and local DJ, Stevie Wayne who, in her perch above the bay in her lighthouse radio station, uses the airwaves to warn an unsuspecting town of the terror that lies within the fog.
The Fog is, at its heart, a ghost story, pure and simple. It isn’t a flat-out gore and splatter film, like many of its 80’s counterparts. The strength of this movie lies in its understatement. Let’s take for example the beginning of the film.
Midnight strikes and the town goes berserk. At the gas station, the headlights of about twenty cars go on and their horns blare. The gas nozzle comes out of the pump and petrol spills all over the ground. Dogs bark. Bottles rattle and shake in the convenient store.
This is not a sequence that requires CGI; if you have stagehands, you can make that scene happen. But the effect of that inspires more chills than any big budget computer generated brou-ha-ha of the last ten years.
The Fog actually relies on storytelling skill and camera tricks more than cheap special effects. In this one, the fog itself poses more of a malevolent presence than the computer generated mist in the remake. And this fog was made with a smoke machine! How is that possible?
I think the answer lies in the fact that this film has heart. It has a soul. Made on a shoestring, The Fog carries more emotional weight and wallop than any of the Soylent Shit movie-cubes that have come dripping from the colon of the Hollywood remake machine.
This is an underrated movie. I understand that. And it does sort of fall apart at the end, especially with Hal Holbrook’s overwrought performance. But The Fog’s reliance on what you don’t see as opposed to crappy special effects that you can see give it a psychological edge over most movies made since. Carpenter’s The Fog is one of the finest American ghost stories made in the last twenty-five years and is certainly worth more than a look.
