The Fog movie review & film summary (1980)

It's easy to see, though, why this project must have been appealing to Carpenter, a talented 31-year-old film maker who built a cult audience with the low-budget genre films "Dark Star" and "Assault on Precinct 13" before breaking through to enormous ratings with the made-for-TV "Elvis." Carpenter's "Halloween" was one of the major box office successes of 1979 (Variety calls it the most profitable independent film ever made) and it demonstrated his favorite approach: He likes films that manipulate audiences, films designed, quite simply, to cause emotions - and his favorite response is shock.

"The Fog" basically has the same structure as "Halloween." It gives us a small American town. It introduces a few of its inhabitants, especially isolated women. It establishes a threat. And then the rest of the movie is devoted to scenes in which the threat either does or does not destroy its intended victims.

Very simple. The threat need not even be believable; "Halloween's" psychotic killer, wrapped in sheets and apparently invulnerable, just kept on coming while a platoon of baby-sitters bit the dust.

But "Halloween's" killer was a person, and had at least a bit of personal background (we saw a traumatic scene from his childhood and heard a psychiatrist describe him as evil incarnate).

The narrative background in "The Fog" is presented stylishly - John Houseman of "The Paper Chase" tells a ghost story around a campfire on the beach, little kids listen with their mouths hanging open, we learn that shipwrecked sailors were murdered near this town a century ago, and that they vowed to return 100 years later. And, of course, tonight's the night.