"We're Honoring Murderers": THE FOG

Even when people wish to put aside the wrongs of the past, we are all too eager to revere the progenitors of our communities and our creeds within a sanitized history.  As Americans, we love to be the country that fought to free the slaves for instance, but we don't like to be the country where so much was built on the backs of slaves.  We also like the First Thanksgiving and the taming of the West, but turn a blind eye to the King Philip's War and Trail of Tears.  Don't believe it?  You might consider checking out conservative commentator Dinesh D'Souza's disturbingly backward documentary from this past summer, AMERICA: IMAGINE A WORLD WITHOUT HER, which received rave reviews from its Tea Party-based audiences.  Turning toward the darker side of our history can be a little, or even a lot, scary, and maybe we can't change what's been done, but we can try to fix what remains broken in our own time.  In hoping that the dark secrets of our past remain buried in the grave, you can be sure that they won't.

THE FOG  (HORROR/THRILLER, 1980) 
Directed by John Carpenter
Starring: Adrienne Barbeau, Jamie Lee Curtis, Janet Leigh, John Houseman, Tom Atkins, James Canning, Charles Cyphers, Nancy Loomis, Ty Mitchell, Hal Holbrook
Rated R for unspecified reasons (PG-13-level; intense thematic material involving terror/violence, and some disturbing images).
89 minutes
SCAREmeter: 4.5/10 (good old-fashioned chills)
GOREmeter: 4.5/10 (a maggoty face, drowned bodies, people killed violently but bloodlessly, nothing explicit)
LAUGHmeter: 4/10
OVERALL: 3.5/4 

The moment that the clock strikes midnight on April 21st, 1980, marking the 100th anniversary of the little coastal township of Antonio Bay, California, the supernatural is afoot.  Clocks shatter, objects move as if by themselves, car alarms blare without apparent reason.  In the town church where Father Malone (Hal Holbrook) preaches, a chunk of the wall breaks away, revealing the hidden diary of his grandfather, one of the town's six founders, and within, he discovers a dark secret.  At midnight, exactly 100 years ago, the six founders met and conspired to send a ship full of wealthy lepers, seeking to establish a colony a mile down the coast, to a watery grave and claim their gold, which they used to found Antonio Bay and build the church.  As a thick, luminescent fog rolls in, Father Malone, local radio DJ Stevie Wayne (Adrienne Barbeau), hitchhiking drifter Elizabeth Solley (Jamie Lee Curtis), her momentary ride Nick Castle (Tom Atkins), centennial celebration organizer Kathy Williams (Janet Leigh, Jamie Lee Curtis' real-life mother) and the rest of the townsfolk will struggle to make it through the 24 hours of the town's centennial, and shadowy, bandaged figures wielding rusty weapons are approaching in the fog because "6 Must Die".
THE FOG was considered a let-down from John Carpenter's just-previous HALLOWEEN, a bona fide landmark of the horror genre, and Carpenter was himself displeased with the film.  It had a troubled production, and after cobbling together the initial footage, Carpenter realized he had to go back to do extensive re-shoots.  Reportedly, about a third of the finished film is from the re-shoots, which were intended to make the film easier to understand and to make the film edgier.  When the film was released in 1980, the horror genre was about to break out into its goriest era, 1980s body horror, and gore-wise, THE FOG is extremely tame.  While some of the footage from re-shoots was intended to make the film gorier, I'm not convinced that it couldn't get a PG-13 rating today; in fact, I'm pretty sure that THE FOG is pretty well within a PG-13 rating.  A guy is run through with a sword, someone is stabbed in the neck with a hook, and very briefly, a body with the eyes gouged out appears, but never with any blood at all, which is almost always the clincher between an R and a PG-13.
THE FOG may not be as fierce or as tightly-structured as HALLOWEEN or THE THING, but it's full of top-notch spookhouse scares, unpretentious and fun.  It's chock-full of references to other movies too; Jamie Lee Curtis, who starred in HALLOWEEN and had been cast partially thanks to her connection to a star of Alfred Hitchcock's PSYCHO, Curtis' mother Janet Leigh, and in THE FOG, they both have supporting roles.  The character of Nick Castle, played by Tom Atkins, is named for the actor who played the adult Michael Myers, credited as "The Shape", in HALLOWEEN, before he went on to direct THE LAST STARFIGHTER and a bunch of crappy family comedies in the 1990s.  The local weatherman Dan O'Bannon, a schmuck played by Charles Cyphers, is named after Carpenter's film school friend who he collaborated with on the low-budget sci-fi comedy DARK STAR.  Carpenter and O'Bannon had a bitter falling out and O'Bannon went on to write ALIEN.  In THE FOG, O'Bannon is killed by an iron hook to the throat.
Even while THE FOG is a light horror film, more about spooky fun than wet-your-pants terror, there is a worthwhile subtext in the story of a community celebrating their heritage, a heritage created by murderers and thieves.  Carpenter, an unabashed liberal, may have been partially inspired by the bicentennial of the United States which preceded the film by four years, as well as the well-publicized Wounded Knee Incident of 1973 and other events of American Indian Movement in the early 70s.  While the corpses of the disenfranchised, the indigenous tribes that were ultimately forced from their land or, in some cases, wiped from existence, won't rise from the grave and claim vengeance on the living, the crimes of the past should not be left to stand, and when we look back on our heritage, we would do well to remember what out heritage is and learn from the lessons of the past.