Strange things start to occur at a coastal town in California when a fog bank starts to surround it.
Blaine: John Carpenter and Debra Hill really made something of themselves after “Halloween” became a huge hit and they inspired the slasher genre. John and Debra also could do any movie they wanted and so they decided to do another horror picture. The both of them were in England checking out the Stonehenge and out in the distance there was this fog bank and it almost looked like something was in it. And then this idea came to John and Debra about ghosts inside that fog. They started to develop of script and thought it should be the type of revenge story. John Carpenter had studied this real life story about the wreckage of a ship that took place in the 19th century in Goleta, California. These men were bringing in gold on their ship and the town hijacked the ship, crashed it into rocks and took all the gold. John thought that would be a great revenge story.
When they were putting together the ensemble of actors, Jamie Lee Curtis was the first person in mind to be apart of the project because John wanted to work with her again. John was married to Adrienne Barbeau at the time and he wanted her to be apart of the project as well. She would be playing the talk show radio host who works at the lighthouse, Stevie Wayne. Adrienne Barbeau said that John Carpenter’s movies have a lot of strong women characters in them and she liked that he wrote a heroine character for her to play in “The Fog”.
Janet Leigh was a huge fan of John Carpenter's after she saw “Halloween”. She was very impressed with what John did to make that movie so scary and so she called up John saying she would like to work with him because she really admired his work. That meant a lot to John because he has always been a big fan of Janet Leigh. So John and Debra wrote a part for her. She would be the mayor of the town. Janet Leigh would be in the same movie as her daughter, Jamie Lee, but they wouldn’t have any scenes together until the main characters hide in the church from the fog. Hal Holbrook played the priest, Malone, of “The Fog”. Father Malone is someone who feels a lot of shame for his great grandfather after finding out the truth that he had stolen gold from sailors and is responsible for their deaths by crashing and sinking their ship. Father Malone finds all this out through a journal his great grandfather had written in. The truth also makes Father Malone predict that something evil will be heading towards the town. They only shot John Houseman for a day because he only shows up at the beginning of the film telling the kids a story around a camp fire and that’s it, you don’t see him for the rest of the movie.
They wanted the fog to be a character too and it had to look like it was an evil force. They used these machines to create the fog and that was the easy part, but the hard part was taking it away like when it came to the end scene where Stevie Wayne is on top of the lighthouse and all the fog is suddenly going way. What they did was rewind that scene backwards and Adrienne Barbeau would have to act that scene in reverse. First she would look up as she notices the fog is go away, then put her head down and turn her head left and right while they would blow the fog in.
Like Alfred Hitchcock, John Carpenter made a cameo in his own movie. At the beginning of “The Fog” you see John Carpenter at the church tiding things up.
The film didn’t look all that great when it was put together because it wasn’t scary enough, so they did some re-shoots. They added more ghosts and added these strange things like electricity power turning on by itself, car alarms going off and dogs barking around the town. They had very little time to do these re-shoots because “The Fog” was getting close to it’s release date. They also added a scene where Tom Atkins and Jamie Lee Curtis are bellow the deck looking for the crew members who have disappeared. Tom is telling Jamie this story, then all of a sudden something comes out of the locker on the side which is just some junk, but that’s not what is supposed to scare you. The real thing that scares you is the dead body that comes at Jamie Lee from behind one second later.
Audiences didn’t think “The Fog” was scary enough for them during it’s first day. They wanted to see people getting stabbed or gutted in slasher films more because those were starting to become very popular in the 80s. “The Fog” is more of a gothic horror. I like the movie because it did scare me...in the concerning way, during the last half hour. You don’t want any of the main characters to be killed by the spirits. You’re hoping they stay alive. Your also afraid for Stevie Wayne because she is all alone at the lighthouse, the ghosts are surrounding the place, she has no where to run and she is on top of the lighthouse doing everything she can to dodge them. I also think “The Fog” is clever because John Carpenter and Debra Hill used something from real life and turned it into something scary. I also like “The Fog” because it’s very creative. “The Fog” was a critical success and as more people saw “The Fog” some thought it was the scariest movie they had ever saw. As decades passed, “The Fog” became more and more popular to fans of the horror genre.
My rating on “The Fog” is five out of five stars.
Music by John Carpenter
John Carpenter and his leading ladies, Adrienne Barbeau, Jamie Lee Curtis and Janet Leigh
