The Fog

John Carpenter's continual rhyme on Hitchcock's The Birds invents its own Bodega Bay, under the opening credits a spectral tremor weaves through it. "This town sits around for one hundred years and nothing happens, and then, one night, the whole place falls apart." With the centennial of the coastal hamlet comes the revelation of the sins of founding fathers, the glowing fog rolling in embodies ancestral guilt plus vengeful ghouls wielding swords and hooks. The trucker (Tom Atkins) and the hitchhiking sketch artist (Jamie Lee Curtis), the priest (Hal Holbrook) with soggy journal and gold cross and the celebration organizer (Janet Leigh) whose ceremonious smile gives way to terror. Surveying from the lighthouse is the witching-hour deejay (Adrienne Barbeau), steel-minded and velvet-voiced. (A single line sums up her backstory as she contemplates the oceanic void: "It sure beats Chicago.") Lang's Moonfleet is the abstruse foundation, technique refined beyond even Halloween does it justice. Barbeau's son spots a plank of greenish driftwood by the shore, she brings it to her studio where it bleeds seawater over the equipment, a demonic message emanates from the short-circuiting radio. At the morgue a mutilated cadaver twitches under its sheet, then reaches for a scalpel in the back of the frame while Curtis shivers in the foreground. Poe's "A Dream Within a Dream" quoted at the beginning for the meditation on storytelling, from John Houseman's magisterial rendering of an old salt's campfire tale (Panavision screen split between rapt audience and ticking stopwatch) to Atkins' remembrance of a vanishing doubloon to the broadcaster's words facing rotting flesh at the top of the tower. "Look across the water into the darkness" is the final advice, though Carpenter knows the deepest darkness creeps from within. Cinematography by Dean Cundey. With James Canning, Charles Cyphers, Nancy Loomis, and Ty Mitchell.