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Fear the Fog Horror master John Carpenter set his Halloween follow-up in West Marin. BY PETER CROOKS John Carpenter’s 1980 supernatural thriller The Fog begins with a
scene shot on a Los Angeles soundstage. The late, great actor John Houseman is telling a campfire story to a group of children on what appears to be a beach in the fictional town of Antonio Bay. The story involves an old ship, damned to the sea, with a haunted crew that will one day find revenge on the townspeople who conspired to cause the crew’s watery demise. “When the fog returns to Antonio Bay, the men at the bottom of the sea … will rise up,” Houseman’s character says, sending chills down the spines of his young audience. It’s a wonderfully effective way to kick off the film — especially when the camera pans up, and, thanks to some editing magic, the audience sees a wide-screen image of the Point Reyes shoreline at night. The shot is both beautiful and eerie, setting the mood for what might be the most underrated film in Carpenter’s career. The Fog is the director’s follow-up to the 1978 slasher film Halloween, which was produced for $300,000 before becoming the
then-most successful independent film of all time. While Halloween terrified audiences by bringing back the kind of violence and terror of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, The Fog was a different kind of thriller. It’s a film that relies more on atmosphere than jump scares. The Fog builds suspense as secrets are revealed about a centuryold curse that brings the undead back to Antonio Bay, and Point Reyes’ seaside location serves the story perfectly. “The idea we had was to tell a classic ghost story,” Carpenter says in The Fog’s DVD director commentary. His co-writer and producer Debra Hill adds that the point of inspiration came when the former
MILL VALLEY FILM FESTIVAL GUIDE 2017 MARIN MAGAZINE
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