Fog, The [Special Edition]

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"Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?"
--Edgar Allan Poe

Late one midnight a grizzled old fisherman sits beside a fire on the beach, relating a ghost story to a group of children: One hundred years before, he tells them, "...on the twenty-first of April around the water off Spivey Point, a small clipper ship drew toward land. Suddenly, out of the night, the fog rolled in. For a moment they could see nothing, not a foot ahead of them. And then they saw a light.... They steered a course toward the light, but it was a campfire. The ship crashed against the rocks...and the wreckage sank with all the men aboard. Then, as suddenly as it had come, the fog lifted, receded back across the ocean, and never came again. But it is told that when the fog returns to Antonio Bay, the men at the bottom of the sea will rise up and search for the campfire that lead them to their dark and icy death."

Writer-director John Carpenter had just come off one of the biggest independent film successes in history, "Halloween" (1978), and studios were anxious for this new, young Hitchcock to duplicate his success. Although "The Fog" (1979) was the fourth movie Carpenter had ever made, it was in essence only his second major film, and expectations were high. The result, however, was merely so-so, especially in the film's first edit. Preview audiences didn't think it was scary enough, so Carpenter hurriedly re-shot several scenes, adding more shock and more obvious mayhem to the proceedings before the film's première. The reworking may have spiced it up, but I've always wondered what that original film must have been like.

In any case, "The Fog" was not nearly the hit "Halloween" had been, nor did it get particularly good reviews at the time of its release. But it has built up a loyal following in the ensuing decades, and a lot of folks will swear today it's their favorite horror flick. If you haven't seen it before, perhaps it's best not to anticipate too much; it's a good, old-fashioned ghost story, but in reality it's probably not much more than an upper-middling example of the breed. Still and all, on a dark and stormy night it might just bring a few shivers to the spine, and that's worth something.

Carpenter keeps the movie moving along at a leisurely but steady pace, and the first half hour of the film is welcome and promising fun. It builds up an eerie, creepy, suspenseful mood by recounting the night the ghosts of the clipper ship return and seek their revenge on the little coastal community that caused their deaths a hundred years before. Unseen entities go bump in the night, and all kinds of weird nocturnal stuff starts happening all over town--clocks stopping, electronics going haywire, glass suddenly shattering, that sort of thing. While the second half hour seems more sluggish and doesn't continue to build the tension as strongly as the beginning did, and while the final half hour doesn't provide nearly the payoff we'd hope for, these last two-thirds aren't entirely disastrous, just a letdown.

Another minor concern is that the film can never make up its mind who its lead character is. Ostensibly, it's Adrienne Barbeau as Stevie Wayne, a lady who owns a small radio station and runs it out of her lighthouse home. But because Jamie Lee Curtis is also in the cast and because she was the big star of "Halloween," she gets top billing in all the ads, and her part as a drifting, hitchhiking artist gets more attention than necessary. Jamie Lee's real-life mother, Janet Leigh (of "Psycho" fame), is also in the cast as the chair lady of the town's centennial celebration. John Houseman, who normally portrayed urbane, sophisticated, intellectual characters, here plays against type by doing his bit as Mr. Machen, the old seafarer who tells the ghost story to the kids. Hal Holbrook plays a weirded-out, alcoholic priest (he's either a priest or a politician; he's got these parts nailed down), who finds his grandfather's old journal recounting the shipwreck and the town's complicity in its sinking. And Tom Atkins plays a local resident who picks up Jamie Lee, starts a romance, and investigates the mysterious happenings.

It's the fog, however, that's the real star of the show. It creeps in and around the shoreline and buildings of the community like some serpentine reptile. This fog is not always as smoothly rendered as it might be by the special effects people, but in most scenes it looks realistic enough. The fog is more realistic, I might add, than the ghosts themselves, who, with wormhole faces, come with the mist and appear too much like comic-book pirates, brandishing knives, swords, and hooks.

The real problem for me was that Carpenter's afterthought additional violence doesn't really make the story any the more scary, just more violent. I suspect the film may have relied more on suspense than on shock before the director started tinkering around with it, which is why I would have loved seeing the first edit. Now, the film seems a bit too heavyhanded to be frightening.

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