Ahoy, mateys. It’s 42 years since director John Carpenter and producer Debra Hill followed up on the slow but steady success of Halloween. For their second horror film collaboration, they invited back familiar faces from Halloween, among them actors Jamie Lee Curtis and Nancy Loomis, editor Tommy Lee Wallace, and cinematographer Dean Cundey. Joining in this time would be Adrienne Barbeau, Janet Leigh, Hal Holbrook and Tom Atkins. It was goodbye to Haddonfield and hello to Antonio Bay, the quiet of suburbia being replaced with the quiet of a seaside town.
Once filming for The Fog (1980) wrapped and the first edit was put together, Carpenter and Hill realized something was off. The score needed work. The monsters weren’t monstrous enough. And the scares overall were not very effective. That wouldn’t exactly be ideal for an audience seeking out their new scary movie. In what would be a rare time in his career, Carpenter went out with Hill to film additional footage, pushing the budget slightly higher. The Fog needed to be better, scarier, and with the release date fast approaching, there was little time to do it all. First things first: a new opening was put together.
The campfire scene at the start of the film was completed on a soundstage, quickly setting the mood for what was to come. John Houseman’s Mr. Machen sure knows how to tell a ghost story. The glowing fire before him doesn’t do all the work, it only enhances his performance. Every small town has a past, and for Antonio Bay, its lore goes back one hundred years. A clipper ship got stuck in a fog bank. Onboard, Captain Blake and his crew mistook a campfire on the shore for a much-needed light. Needless to say, it failed. “At the bottom of the sea lay the Elizabeth Dane with her crew,” Mr. Machen mutters, “their lungs filled with salt water, their eyes open and staring into the darkness,” After the sea captain finishes his story, The Fog continues on in building dread for what’s to come. The clock strikes midnight and Antonio Bay wakes up, inanimate objects aware of the danger before human residents. Car alarms go off. A gas station starts its car lift and a pump leaks the precious fuel. Capturing these establishing shots was Debra Hill. She went along with her camera operator Ray Stella and a second unit to film at night with simple tricks for more stylish flair. Using a flashlight and the headlights of her station wagon to shine on buildings, Hill and the crew even placed a tree branch before the lights to add some depth.
Setting the mood, suspense and scares were next on the to-do list. Carpenter talked to Fangoria back in 1980, explaining how he wanted to unsettle his audience: “I wanted to do Isle of the Dead or I Walked With a Zombie. I love (Val) Lewton's films--they're very shadowy, all suggestion, and he has all sorts of melodrama going. I was a real fan of that sort of thing." After seeing what the first edit was like, Carpenter’s initial concept needed to be tuned up. The monsters of The Fog, Captain Blake and his fellow revenants, had to be a more realized threat. Upon the first appearance of the undead, they target the Seagrass, a fishing ship. Horror cinema of the day was going in a more gory direction, which would only increase throughout the decade. The ghosts of the sunken Elizabeth Dane became more violent, their kills more severe and painful. Swords and hooks were shown to be striking the flesh of their victims. The following year, audiences would witness the (literal) explosive carnage of David Cronenberg’s Scanner (1981), where an iconic moment is of a head erupting into a chunky, red mess. After the kills in The Fog were given more focus, two big moments of suspense were included.
After hitchhiker Elizabeth (Curtis) and townie Nick (Atkins) discover the missing Seagrass, a dead body collapses for a jump scare. At the Antonio Bay morgue, Elizabeth is left alone and is blind to the fact the dead body isn’t on the gurney behind her anymore. The corpse is walking, having picked up a scalpel, and is silently advancing on her. It could bring to mind a certain slow boogeyman of Haddonfield. Later in the third act, the danger Stevie Wayne (Barbeau) gets into at the KAB radio station, was made more dire. Plus, it also emphasizes the lighthouse location the station is home in. She’s forced to retreat as the ghosts break in, having to climb up to the top of the lighthouse. She clings on for dear life, avoiding the swarming ghosts closing in on her and their rusted blades. Cut and print!
Alongside the additional footage captured, Carpenter took the time to clean up the score. As important as the opening scenes were to set the tone, the soundtrack of The Fog was possibly even more so. It’s at times pounding, other times pulsating synth that rolls out like the waves off Antonio Bay. To celebrate the 40th anniversary, Waxwork Records created a vinyl with a blurb that stated: “Carpenter strived to achieve a softer, understated fear rather than a heavy-handed, and obvious musical composition to a horror film. The now-classic score successfully captures the haunting emptiness of the 1980 gothic-ghost-story to The Fog.” It’s hard to imagine what the earlier score might have been lacking.
The original budget, around $900,000, got bumped up to $1.1 million for the reshoots. With only one month provided to get everything done, it ended up making for one-third of the finished film. These late reshoots and edits created a more effective horror flick in its moodiness and chills. This was never going to be the next Halloween. Not even Halloween 2 (1981) would be a carbon copy of that early slasher. Except for an odd edited-in zoom when Houseman speaks early on (once you see it, you can't unsee it), The Fog is quite perfect in Carpenter’s take on a classic ghost story. The effects for the vaporous shroud are still wonderfully low-budget and physical. The town, houses, and buildings targeted were outlined with black fabric. A fog machine would be turned on, and its fog would roll out. Then blackness would be edited out with the real footage of the locations switched in. Elsewhere, escaping cars or victims needed actions to be done in reverse due to the fog not being the most professional of actors.
Movie critic Roger Ebert chose to narrow in on the central menace as he closed a review for the movie. “A sentient fog may be photogenic (and this is a good-looking movie), but can we identify with it?” he wondered. “Is it the kind of villain we love to hate? Not really.” Compared to Carpenter’s evil-in-human form of Michael Myers, who was also kept to the background and nighttime shadows, the monster in The Fog might be too concealed. But isn’t that the point? The slithering fog, Captain Blake and his crew, are one in the same. It answers the question Carpenter once wondered, when he and Debra Hill traveled to see Stonehenge, and they noticed a fog bank out in the distance. Over four decades later, movie fans continue to learn the answer this cult classic posed. What could be out there, inside the fog? If unlucky, maybe a rusted sword the vengeful past pierces into your heart.