The Fog

The Fog. A solid, powerful story…slowly developing and photographed with a unique sense for tension. THAT is `The Fog’. This story will leave a big impression on you and it’s easily John Carpenter’s best and most effective horror film. His most underrated as well, since people always refer to `Halloween’ and `The Thing’ when listing his best accomplishments as a director. Personally, I think The Fog is much more haunting and fascinating than these two, and it’s one of the very few films that still scares me after all these years. Uniquely set in a small coast-town called Antonio Bay, where the inhabitants are preparing the celebrations for the town’s hundredth anniversary. Only, they do not know that the genesis of their town went together with a devilish conspiracy, resulting in the unfortunate death of many seamen. These doomed victims rise again now, suddenly appearing from mysterious fogbanks that come from the ocean. If you’re – like me – a sucker for ghostly myths set in abandoned surrounding, The Fog will be one of your most satisfying purchases ever. Carpenter brilliantly builds up an unbearable tension through simple methods, like long shots of an isolated countryside and a chilling musical score (not as famous as his `Halloween’ score but equally effective). The bloodshed and images of cold-hearted monsters are kept to a minimum in order to leave it up to your own imagination. And for once, this actually works! The detailed sequences in which the town gets surrounded by an inescapable fog is more than horrific enough. Forget about all the overblown, big-budgeted and so-called `horrifying’ films… This little, overlooked production scares the hell out of people since more than 20 years already. And it’ll keep on doing so for yet another very long time!