The Fog

The idea came to John Carpenter and Debra Hill in England, promoting Assault on Precinct 13. At Stonehenge they watched a fog spread over the landscape. On his DVD commentary Carpenter traces the wrecking and plundering story to the Frolic, a ship sunk near Fort Bragg, California, in the 19th century. Carpenter disliked the rough cut. He wrote the opening in which John Houseman tells ghost stories to children, shot it on a soundstage rather than a location, then added scenes and reshot others to make it clearer and bloodier. Roughly a third of the finished film comes from that extra work, and the budget rose from $900,000 to $1.1 million. Adrienne Barbeau, Carpenter’s wife at the time, was making her first feature; Jamie Lee Curtis appears alongside her own mother, Janet Leigh. AVCO Embassy spent over $3 million on the campaign, part of it on fog machines placed in the lobbies of selected theatres showing it. Carpenter shot in anamorphic 2.35:1 despite the small budget and wrote the score himself. A good fit if you want horror built from sound, synthesiser and empty frame rather than display. Not for anyone expecting a single hunter and a steady climb; Vincent Canby complained in The New York Times that it runs on too many lines at once.