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Today, we celebrate one of the Horror Master’s very best films as John Carpenter’s The Fog turns 45. On this day in 1980, Carpenter’s theatrical follow-up to his breakout success Halloween first hit theaters cementing him as a true master of genre storytelling. Instead of another slasher, Carpenter set his sights on telling a chilling ghost story set in the fictional town of Antonio Bay.
This seemingly quaint seaside village is overtaken by a thick cloud of (you guessed it!) fog as exactly 100 years ago, a ship was wrecked here under mysterious circumstances. Similarly, the ship met its grim fate in a thick, eerie fog. A century later, the long-dead seamen have returned from their watery grave with bloody vengeance on their minds.
Carpenter and his producer/co-writer, the legendary Debra Hill, had no trouble securing financing after the success of Halloween. But the pressure to deliver the goods was on as Carpenter’s seminal slasher was, at that time, the most successful independent film ever. Rather than do the easy thing and make another masked slasher flick, which began cropping up like weeds in the ‘80s, the filmmaker decided to put his stamp on another sub-genre.
“Halloween was a haunted house story, and an attempt to do a horror film which incorporates all of the devices that you would expect from a horror film,” ,” Carpenter told FANGORIA in issue #5 of the magazine back in 1980. “No need for an extensive plot – just pure evil on the loose on Halloween night. We gave the evil form, and a reason to do what it does – and just let it go from there. On the other hand, The Fog is a ghost story.”
“You don’t really see the ghosts in The Fog as much as you think you see them,” Carpenter added. Not unlike Steven Spielberg with the shark in Jaws, Carpenter takes a less-is-more approach to the ghastly ghouls in the film, alluding to terrible things hiding in the mist more than actually showing us what’s there.
The film reunited Carpenter with Jamie Lee Curtis, who portrayed Laurie Strode in Halloween. The cast also includes the likes of scream king Tom Atkins and Adrienne Barbeau, who also worked with Carpenter on his made-for-TV movie Someone’s Watching Me, among others. The film also required far more effects work, with Rick Baker’s protege Rob Bottin coming in to handle that job.
Getting the pieces to fit together nicely was no easy task. “It was really bad. I mean, really bad,” Carpenter said in the 2003 DVD commentary of the first cut. After reshoots and retooling though, they managed to get it together. The version we all saw works like gangbusters, as the film is a remarkably tight, enduringly effective creepy tale that still works to this day.
Though not as big as Halloween, The Fog was still a critical and commercial success in its day, taking in more than $21 million against a $1.1 million budget. It remains a shining example of Carpenter’s ability to do a whole lot with relatively little. That’s something he would continue to do throughout the ‘80s on other classics such as Escape from New York and The Thing, among others.
In 2005, Sony Pictures decided to remake The Fog under the direction of Rupert Wainwright, with a cast led by Tom Welling and Maggie Grace. “This was not my favorite experience of my own career making The Fog,” Carpenter said to IGN at the time. It was difficult.” So, why be involved in a remake then? “Why not?” Carpenter said. “If everybody else is making remakes and they want to pay me money to make a remake of an old movie of mine, why not?”
The Fog remake was a critical disaster and made just $46 million worldwide on an $18 million budget. The original, meanwhile, has stood the test of time and has gained a serious following as the years have gone on. It has since been given a release on just about every home video format there is, including 4K Ultra HD release by the folks at Scream Factory. Today, we say happy birthday to this wonderful little ghost story.
For more, check out some goods from Fango’s archives on John Carpenter and The Fog including…
