Antonio Bay Spookshow Spectacular

John Carpenter’s third movie is the spooky and intense ghost story The Fog which is falls squarely in the middle of the cult director’s classic period of output. As is expected for a Carpenter movie it’s a siege story (you’ve got to feel sorry for the poor residents of Antonio Bay), it features an ambiguous, indefinable menace that is not of this world and has an anti-social character as the main hero (stand up the feisty Adrienne Barbeau escaping New York in her isolated Lighthouse radio station).

While the ensemble characters necessitate an unfocused, scattershot script structure without much attention to character the film is a prime example of how to build atmosphere and suspense from something as little as a twisting door handle and a fog machine. Carpenter uses his bag of tricks to devastating effect from his nihilistic, electronic score, the glorious cinemascope vision of Dean Cundy’s photography, some well placed scary jumps and a classic, downer ending.

This is what they mean when stating that something has style over substance, but in The Fog’s case, it’s a compliment in the best possible way.