He helped define the slasher film, but John Carpenter came of age at the Saturday matinee of the 1950s and 60s. He knows his Jack Arnold, his Hammer horrors and his old atomic age killer squirrel flicks. Rather than remake Halloween over and over (he turned down the chance to direct the sequel), Carpenter had a mind to expand his work into different kinds of creature features. Enter The Fog.
It’s sort of a slasher flick since the victims here die by the knife, but it’s more a ghost movie and a strange-thing-in-the-mist movie (Carpenter cites The Crawling Eye from 1958 as an influence). The terror descends one night in the fog on a small, cozy spot on the California coast. Next thing you know, glow-eyed ghosts from a hundred years ago show up to cut down some of the townies. Now, Tom Atkins, Jamie Lee Curtis, Adrienne Barbeau and Hal Holbrook have to stop it—and that’s about it. It’s fast-moving and so lean and efficient that Carpenter’s first cut was too short for the studio (how often do you hear about THAT happening?). He had to go back and shoot about ten more minutes. The seams don’t show.
Decades later, not only is this still entertaining, but it’s also one of the more kid-friendly horror films of the 1980s. There’s no blood. Not much talk-talk or exposition, either. It keeps rippin’ and roarin’ at a pace to please short attention spans. Also, maybe in response to criticism at the time of the lingering death scenes and killer’s POV shots in Halloween, this film is all about quick kills and keeping the monsters at a distance. We never see behind their eyes or even get a good look at them behind the mist and shadows. You can’t glamorize them. You can’t even cosplay them unless you hang out in the dark all day long and bring a smoke machine. They’re just a part of the fog.
A lot of horror directors in the splatter-ific 80s might have had problems with such limitations, but not Carpenter. He still made a fun movie. How?
It’s that old Saturday matinee education, I tell you. Carpenter doesn’t need the gross-out. He can play by the old rules because he knows ’em by heart. As long as the kids jump out of their seats every few minutes, it’s a good movie.