DOUBLE FEATURE: John Carpenter’s ‘THE FOG (1980)’ is a supremely suspenseful homage to Hitchcock, while the 2005 remake is a muddled misfire
#31DaysOfHorror — October 7th and 8th, 2016
This October, as I have for the last three years, I’ll be watching 31 horror movies in 31 days and reviewing them all! You can see the ongoing list of what I’ve watched and reviewed here.
THE PLOT(S)
The Fog (1980) —
As the clock strikes midnight on the 100th anniversary of the founding of Antonio Bay, residents of this sleepy, secluded Pacific coastal town begin to experience strange occurrences. A priest finds an old journal hidden in a wall. A gas pump falls off its hook, spilling gasoline all over the ground. Car alarms begin to sound. A woman’s dog stares out to sea, snarling. A trucker picks up a pretty young hitchhiker over on the side of the road, only to have all of the windows in his truck shatter as they’re speeding down the highway. And out on the ocean, a strange, glowing fog rolls in, heading East while the wind blows West…
THE FOG (2005) —
The day before the unveiling of a statue dedicated to the four founders of the happening tourist town of Antonio Island, a shipping boat’s anchor dredges up a number of barnacle-encrusted artifacts that have lain dormant on the ocean floor. As the artifacts wash ashore, so too do ghostly, fog-shrouded apparitions that bring with them fiery flashbacks to a previous life for a pretty young girl returning home to Antonio Island for the first time in a while.
As she and her boyfriend look into the history of the creepy objects, the ghosts wreak havoc on the town, killing indiscriminately, seeking revenge for their fiery deaths at the hands of the founding fathers.
MY REVIEW(S)
Each year I’ve done this #31DaysOfHorror thing, I’ve watched an older horror film immediately followed by its remake and then compared the two. The first year, I watched the original The Town That Dreaded Sundown and then its 2014 remake, finding the remake to be an excellent homage to the original while still forging its own, new path thematically. It made me believe that remakes are worthwhile and can still find new things to stay using old formulas. Then, last year, I watched both House(s) on Haunted Hill, and I despaired. I found that remake to be a cynical cash-grab, trading on a classic name as an excuse to deliver awful CGI, terrible acting, and boring setpieces.
Whereas I had never seen any of those four movies before starting #31DaysOfHorror — it was my first time watching both originals and both remakes — this year, I decided to do something different. Back in 2005, when I was an impressionable young teenager, I was very interested in ads for The Fog. LOST was my favorite show, you see, and I loved Maggie Grace’s character Shannon for reasons I can’t even begin to remember. So, to see her make the leap to movies… I was convinced she was a huge star on the rise.
So I saw The Fog, knowing nothing of the original, and… I was just bored. The plot is overcomplicated and under-explained. It’s badly acted, badly edited, weirdly shot… I hated it. But I’m getting ahead of myself. I didn’t really know much of anything about film at the time, though, so my opinion pretty much amounted to “it’s bad.”
In seeking out a remake double feature for this year, I decided I would go back and watch the original The Fog now that I’m much more familiar with John Carpenter’s career, and then revisit the remake to see if I could pin down what exactly about it was so disappointing to 15-year-old me. I expected to dislike the original; if The Fog (2005) couldn’t make itself into a good movie, then clearly there wasn’t much source material to work with, right? (Remember, I knew very little about film at the time.) Instead, I was very happy to see that John Carpenter’s The Fog is supremely suspenseful, and is perfectly in line with some of the over-arching themes I’ve been thinking and writing about so far this month. Namely, it’s a story that’s deliberately constructed like a folktale, a cautionary parable that Says Something about the American psyche, reminding us why we watch horror movies. And then I rewatched the remake. And now I know why I hated it.
First things first: Carpenter’s original.
The Fog (1980) begins with an elderly mariner sitting around a campfire with a group of children. He tells them that they are approaching midnight, on the 100th anniversary of the founding of Antonio Bay. The children lean in, eyes wide, as he tells them about a clipper ship that sank out in the waters near Spivey Point when it ran aground after seeing a distant campfire through the fog. “It is told by the fishermen, their fathers and grandfathers, that when the fog returns to Antonio Bay, the men at the bottom of the sea out in the water by Spivey Point will rise up and search for the campfire that led them to their dark, icy death.”
Starting the film this way firmly situates the story in the realm of the folktale. The sinister fog, we assume based on the title of the movie we’re watching, is indeed about to return to the waters near Spivey Point, and we imagine that we are about to witness the next chapter in this local legend.
Storytelling is a motif throughout the film. Adrienne Barbeau plays a radio DJ who narrates the film in voiceover for both the audience and the characters within the film, at one point calling out street names over the radio as she describes the encroachment of the fog on the town, which she can see from her radio station in the lighthouse, so that characters in cars can outrun it. (It’s reminiscent of the segment in Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds where a radio announcer describes for listeners the invasion of New York City that he can see from atop the Broadcasting Building). Another storytelling device comes from the journal that the priest discovers inside the wall of the church; while the fog invades in present day, the priest reads various characters excerpts of one of the founding fathers’ recollections of how they murdered the leper colony.
Campfire stories are meant to tingle the spines of youngsters, giving them something to ponder as they crawl into their sleeping bags at night. Or, as the mariner says, “One more story to keep us warm.” Urban legends told around campfires also serve in many cases to deliver lessons to their young audiences. Think, for example, of the story of two young teenagers parked out at Makeout Point who hear on the radio that a hook-handed man has escaped from a local asylum, only to discover the man’s severed hook dangling from the door-handle when the girl gets spooked and makes the boy drive her home. It’s safer for teenagers not to bother making out in cars in secluded areas, isn’t it! Or, remember the girl who stops for gas on her drive home and is then followed all the way to her house by a man who keeps flashing his high beams; when she finally confronts him, he explains that there’s a killer in her back seat who kept rising up to slit her throat, and the high beams made him crouch back down. Wouldn’t it be better if girls didn’t drive alone?
Horror movies can serve many of the same functions as folktales and urban legends. Like I wrote about in my review of The Hills Have Eyes, the genre is full of repeated elements and remixed narratives, just like urban legends passed down from generation to generation can change slightly over time. Horror movies can serve as cautionary tales, as well — just think of that seminal slasher film cliché, which Carpenter himself helped set in stone with Halloween: don’t sneak off and have sex, or you will die.
So, I was excited to see The Fog explicitly tackle folkloric themes in the very first scene of the film. Especially because I was watching the film with an eye toward how it would eventually be remade, I was thinking about how the prevalence of horror remakes can actually add to the way the genre can function as folklore— remakes, after all, by their very nature remix, slightly alter, and serving up a familiar tale to a new generation, deriving their pleasure from how they do or don’t hit those familiar beats we want to see in our urban legends.
Speaking of familiar beats, I also very much enjoyed the way The Fog pays homage to Alfred Hitchcock, just like Halloween did. Halloween featured a doctor named Sam Loomis, which was the name of Marion Crane’s boyfriend in Psycho. Also, not coincidentally, Marion Crane was played by Janet Leigh, whose daughter Jamie Lee Curtis is the teen scream queen star of Halloween.
For The Fog, his next film after Halloween, Carpenter brought back Jamie Lee Curtis and then one-upped himself: he got her mother. Janet Leigh plays Kathy, a town matriarch who is helping oversee the town’s celebration to mark the 100th anniversary of their founding. She spends the movie putting plans in place and running events so that she ensures the tale of the town’s founding is passed on and re-told to the next generation. It’s a brilliantly fitting role for an actress whose presence in the movie reminds us of her own legacy as a horror film actress, and calls attention to the fact that her daughter is taking up the mantle. They spend the movie just missing sharing a scene together, until the very end. There’s one shot in particular that had me laughing — Jamie Lee Curtis’s trucker boyfriend talks with Janet Leigh’s character, who then walks off screen; the camera then pans over as the trucker walks back to Jamie Lee Curtis, who had been apparently sitting just out of frame the entire time, not interacting with her mother.
The film references Hitchcock in more ways than just by having Janet Leigh in the cast, however. At one point, a character references another having “just come back from Bodega Bay,” and Carpenter’s overall homage with this film comes into sharper focus: Bodega Bay is, of course, the coastal town where The Birds took place. Like Hitchcock’s birds, Carpenter’s fog is a malevolent natural phenomenon, a harbinger of chaos, the introduction of evil into an otherwise idyllic location. Like Bodega Bay besieged by The Birds and unsure if the entire world is overrun by evil creatures, the fog seems to cut Antonio Bay off from the rest of humanity. And like Hitchcock in many of his films, Carpenter creates suspense by focusing the film on what you don’t see — his fog is a literal erasure of the real malevolent force here, the ghosts of the drowned lepers.
Because it turns out, the “Elizabeth Dane” wasn’t just run aground by a wayward campfire glimpsed through some sinister fog. The campfire was intentionally set to mislead the ship — really, a floating leper colony. The four founding fathers wanted to steal the lepers’ gold in order to found the village, and so they sentenced them all to a watery grave. The folktale, then, covers up a much more evil truth: the residents of Antonio Bay are prosperous because their forefathers murdered the original inhabitants of the land, stealing their wealth and preventing them from having a permanent home in the bay.
And so, like I wrote about in The Hills Have Eyes, it is possible for us to read into this foggy situation a metaphor for American life at large. The whole of America is prosperous because we stole this land from its original inhabitants, in most cases murdering them in untold numbers. Like the citizens of Antonio Bay, we too worship our founding fathers as flawless fighters for freedom, when in fact many of them owned slaves and committed other unspeakable crimes. The American bicentennial, celebrated wildly around the USA, took place just a few years before the release of The Fog; so it would seem that the moral of Carpenter’s explicitly folkloric ghost story is that we shouldn’t worship our forefathers, because we very well may be enjoying our lives now because they murdered innocent people to get us here.
And then the remake doesn’t bother with pretty much any of that.
First, the re-emergence of the fog and the murders of the townspeople are presented as far more random in the 2005 remake. Yes, the town is unveiling a new statue dedicated to the founding fathers of Antonio Island — more on that change in a minute — but the film does away with the mythic significance of taking place on the 100th anniversary of the founding of the town. Instead, Nick’s boat — Nick is a fisherman instead of a trucker in this version — accidentally disturbs a bag full of artifacts from the Elizabeth Dane on the ocean floor. The artifacts begin to wash up on shore, bringing with them fog-shrouded spirits that begin to kill.
This change from location-based psychological horror to artifact-based spiritual haunting is significant, and in my opinion, it robs the movie of pretty much all of its folkloric meaning. In addition, the film adds a new wrinkle that wasn’t present in the first. Jamie Lee Curtis’s character was a hitchhiker in the original film, a character who just happened to be passing through Antonio Bay when she got caught up in the invasion of the fog. She’s just one of several characters whose involvement we follow. In the remake, however, the film is told mostly from the perspective of Maggie Grace’s equivalent character, who is a resident of the town returning home for the first time in a while. We come to find out that she is the reincarnation of one of the people who was killed when the Elizabeth Dane sank. In fact, we learn that she used to to be the eponymous Elizabeth Dane herself, the pretty wife of the main leper who made the deal with the evil founding fathers that led to the whole floating leper colony being burned alive.
Yep. Because why not?
The fog in the 1980 film kills several people who are not part of the four founding families — something that Roger Ebert mentioned in his review as a deficit, believing that it made the ghosts’ motivations murky to go after people who aren’t the ones whose families killed the lepers. I would argue that he misunderstood the film a bit, and that seeking revenge on people who weren’t directly responsible is sort of the whole point — we have all benefitted from the sins of the past, and the film indicts us for it. Whether or not our direct ancestors were the ones who murdered Native Americans by the scores, and whether or not our great-great-great-grandfathers owned slaves, American society was built on the backs of enslaved people, on land that was stolen from its original inhabitants.
In hanging the action of the film entirely on the descendants of the four people who conspired to murder the lepers, the rest of the town is let off the hook. And in changing the location from a bay to an island — from a town physically connected to the rest of America, to a self-contained society away from the rest of American culture — the film lets the rest of the country off the hook, too. These are just vengeful ghosts who are attached to the objects that have washed up on shore, and when they arrive back on the mainland, they remember they should probably get down to having a little revenge. They’re not amorphous indictments of the whole of American society. And the film suffers for it.
Plus, it’s just bad. The CGI especially is terrible. Carpenter’s practical effects in the original were a little cheesy, yes, but effective all the same. In that photo above at the end of the section about the first film, you can tell that there are real, actual, physical beings standing among the fog. Compare that to the still from the remake at the left. The computer-generated skeleton specters — and I mean this literally — just don’t have the same weight.
This film does not understand subtlety or suspense like Carpenter does in the original. It’s so much creepier that we never really see the effects of leprosy on the 100-year-old sailors. They’re shrouded in shadow or fog. When the priest reads from the founding father’s journal, he says, “Met with Blake this evening for the first time. He stood in the shadows to prevent me from getting a clear look at his face. What a vile disease this is.” We are left to imagine what the disease has done to Blake’s face, and anything we can think of is creepier than the umpteenth flashback to the leper ship, filled with CGI-d lepers’ faces like this:
Both films end with the radio DJ character (played in the remake by Selma Blair) giving similar, yet crucially different monologues about the fog. A closer look at the differences between the two speeches illustrates the different aims that the films have.
Here’s what Adrienne Barbeau says in the original, moments after the fog has retreated, the night everything happened (while looking out over a gorgeous shot of the fog-free ocean):
“I don’t know what happened to Antonio Bay tonight. Something came out of the fog. And tried to destroy us. In one moment, it vanished. But if this has been anything but a nightmare, and if we don’t wake up to find ourselves safe in our beds, it could come again… To the ships at sea who can hear my voice, look across the water into the darkness. Look for the fog.”
And here’s the speech as delivered by the character in the remake, the next morning, her son sitting next to her:
“I don’t think any of us can say exactly what happened last night. But, if this has been anything more than just a nightmare, then… why? Did it come back for revenge? Or justice? Or maybe to claim something lost long, long ago? Maybe we’ll never know. But one thing’s for sure. Something did come back from the sea. Sooner or later, everything does.”
…What? It’s as though she listened to the original monologue once and then tried to deliver what she could remember, without thinking about what those words mean. No one can say what happened last night? You were there! Remake-DJ got to go join in the action! You’ve already slept and woken up; you know it wasn’t a nightmare! In the original, delivered in media res, the DJ wasn’t present when the priest and the others defeated the lepers; she literally doesn’t know what they were. She’s not sure what came out of the fog, because she hasn’t yet met up with the rest of the town. But she knows it is her duty to spread the word, to continue telling the story of what happened there as best she can. She wants to warn anyone who can hear her voice — anyone listening across the water, but also the viewers here at home — that the fog could come back, just as the sins of our forefathers could come back to haunt us today. She hasn’t worked out the details yet, but it’s the storytelling that’s important.
The remake ends on a line that has cropped up several times in the film, attempting to give it some sort of meaning: “Sooner or later, everything [comes back from the sea].” But it’s ultimately empty, a catchphrase that winds up being about haunted, sinister artifacts washing up on shore rather than past events rippling forward in time to affect the present.
Instead, I much prefer the ending of the original. “Look for the fog.” “It could come back.”
Given Hollywood’s fondness for remakes, especially horror remakes, there’s a very good chance The Fog could indeed come back. So let’s hope The Fog (2030) is at least better than the 2005 attempt.
