The Fog is a 1980 horror movie directed by John Carpenter, who also wrote the screenplay and composed the music of the film. It stars Adrienne Barbeau, Jamie Lee Curtis, Tom Atkins and Janet Leigh. It was distributed by AVCO Embassy Pictures. The movie is a ghost story involving mysterious events, including gruesome murders, which accompany a strange, glowing fog that spreads over land and sea.
Writer and director, John Carpenter, was not happy with the first cut of the film and subsequently added several new scenes and re-shot others. Approximately one-third of the finished film is comprised of re-shoot footage. The film received mixed reviews when it was released, but was a commercial success. A remake was released in 2005, based on the original’s concept.
Plot
Set in a Northern California fishing town called Antonio Bay (real location Inverness, California, Point Reyes lighthouse, and the Episcopal Church of the Ascension in Sierra Madre, California). The town is about to celebrate its centennial when mysterious events, including the gruesome murders of three local fishermen, accompany a strange, glowing fog that spreads over land and sea. The local priest, Father Malone, discovers the diary of his grandfather (who was also the town’s priest), which contains a dark secret unknown to the town’s current inhabitants.
The diary reveals that, in 1880, six of the founders of Antonio Bay (including Malone’s grandfather) deliberately sunk and plundered the Elizabeth Dane, a clipper ship owned by Blake, a wealthy man with leprosy who wanted to establish a colony near Antonio Bay. The six conspirators lit a fire on the beach near treacherous rocks, and the crew of the clipper, deceived by the false beacon, crashed onto them. Everyone aboard the ship perished. The six conspirators were motivated both by greed and disgust at the notion of having a leper colony nearby. Antonio Bay and its church were then founded with the gold plundered from the ship.
The mysterious fog contains the vengeful ghosts of Blake and the clipper’s crew, who have come back on the hundredth anniversary of the shipwreck and the founding of the town to take the lives of six people (symbolic substitutes for the six conspirators).
The Fog is a 2005 horror film directed by Rupert Wainwright. It is a remake of John Carpenter’s film of the same name (1980), but with more of a “teen horror film” angle. The original music score is composed by Graeme Revell.
