‘The Fog’ and the Vengeful Ghosts of American History
John Carpenter had already moved on to his next directing gig, the television movie Someone’s Watching Me, before Halloween became a box office success, let alone a phenomenon. Based on the early box office and the first round of reviews, everyone involved assumed that the film simply hadn’t won over audiences, and they pronounced it a failure. It caught on via word of mouth. More people turned out the next weekend, and then even more the next. By that time, Carpenter was already immersed in his next project. It’s funny to think about that. Halloween changed the course of his entire career and yet, in some ways, he was the last to know. No movie in his filmography, however, was more directly influenced by the success of Halloween than The Fog. Everyone expected it to be a repeat success, because it was an indie horror film, made with many of the same people. Of course they expected lightning was going to strike twice.
But The Fog and Halloween are very different horror films about very different things. There are similarities, of course. Halloween has the feel of a ghost story, and is about a small town with a haunted past, but it is not an outright ghost story. Whatever else he might be, Michael Myers is a flesh and blood killer. That is not something he has in common with the ghosts haunting the seaside community of Antonio Bay. The Fog is the distilled essence of a ghost story. Centered on the sins of the past returning to terrorize a town on its hundredth anniversary, it is a film about the telling of stories.
Everyone spins a tale at some point. We open with a version of the tragedy in the town’s history that leaves out the shameful details of the murders committed by Antonio Bay’s founding fathers, and town residents share details of strange occurrences, both past and present, with great enthusiasm. Our heroine Stevie Wayne only exists in the narrative as a storyteller. She owns the lighthouse and runs a radio station out of it and the only character she ever interacts with on screen is her son. She spends the third act telling the audience this story as it unfolds, warning whoever will listen about the dangers lurking in this mysterious fog bank, like the classic Orson Welles radio broadcast of War of the Worlds.
The most important of all ghost stories told in The Fog, however, is the one uncovered by Father Malone, after he finds his grandfather’s journal. Inside of it, the Father confronts the ultimate confession, which is the sin of not only his family’s legacy, but the town’s as well. The gold used to finance the town was from a neighboring leper colony, who had been more than happy to share their wealth, but knowing that they could never have a successful town with a leper colony nearby, Antonio Bay’s founding fathers killed them by creating a false fire and luring those men, aboard their ship, to shipwreck. It is brilliantly juxtaposed with the entire town’s celebration of its hundred year history, with the locals none the wiser as to how their town was founded, or the people that were murdered to make it possible.
This is the ugly truth of most developed land in America: the ground you’re standing on is almost always someone else’s grave. It’s hard to sugarcoat that ours is a legacy of blood. Carpenter puts a fine point on that, too, as even the story told within the film has real-life inspiration. The wreck of the Elizabeth Dane in The Fog is largely based on the 1850 wreck of the Baltimore clipper ship, the Frolic.
Malone’s story is a tragic contrast to any other told throughout the film: nobody listens. He’s reading from the journal, he has the truth in front of him, nobody doubts that he’s recounting what really happened. But nobody cares. They think he’s “taking this much too seriously” to learn that their community was built on a slaughter of innocents. Because that’s how it goes. The single greatest lesson of The Fog is that there is a limit, for most people, where the story stops being fun, where they stop seeing it from a distance. Everybody wants to hear a spooky story sometimes. But they don’t want to hear it about themselves. Even though the film is set in April, it always brings to mind Independence Day. Nobody wants to hear about how we got here, especially during a time of celebration.
The difference here, of course, is that this is a history nobody knew about until this moment. It was buried at sea. The Fog proves that you cannot bury the past, you cannot build on top of a foundation of blood without it coming back to haunt you. What separates this from the other classic ghost films is that these ghosts are out for blood.
This is a far cry from Robert Wise’s The Haunting or even The Amityville Horror. These spirits aren’t knocking on walls, levitating books or furniture, they’re not delivering any kind of warning from the other side. These are red-eyed, shadowy specters. Among the simplest designs in horror history, but also among the most effective. They only want revenge, and they’ve earned it. It’s rare to see a paranormal film where the ghosts actually take matters into their own hands and kill people. The Fog may very well be the best to ever do it.
This is where the film was most influenced by the success of Halloween, as well. An early cut of The Fog featured hardly any body count and was much more focused on atmosphere, but the investors felt it needed more punch and so Carpenter embarked on reshoots to make the ghosts more dangerous. Even still, although the body count is higher than Halloween, it is still much more of a ghost movie than anything approaching a slasher film. Both films are intensely atmospheric. The Fog simply shifts its focus to a small fishing community where the atmosphere is inherently different.
Carpenter has often famously stated that there are two kinds of horror, one where the horror comes from without, from some kind of oppressive alien force, and one where the horror comes from within, about facing the evil inside the human heart. The Fog starts as one and becomes the other, that’s where the real brilliance of the movie lies. The ghosts are almost abstract in their simplicity, they’re vague forms. Utterly unknowable. As the film goes on, we learn more about who they are, what they are, and what was done to them.
In then end, just when we think the evil is vanquished, it comes back for one last scare. This epilogue could be seen as a cheap jump scare, but that’s selling it so short. First of all, it’s not any kind of jump scare because the ghosts are just standing there, waiting, as though they never even left. To dismiss it as a simple final gag is selling it short and forgetting what the entire film is about. The Fog ends with a simple and blunt message that what’s done can never be undone. Evil can’t be defeated when we’re responsible for it. The ghosts of the past cannot be sated, because what’s happened has happened and can never be taken back. That is ultimately the grim reality of history.
Are there actions we could take toward making amends for the past? Absolutely. But we can never take back the things that have been done, or wash away the blood that has been spilled. The vengeance of a buried and forgotten past can never be satisfied, and so the ghosts linger on, ever-present and ever-hungry, waiting for those moments when their pain is reflected most vividly to scream across a century to make their return, coming and going in a rolling fog.
