The movie revolves around Antonio Bay, a coastal town in California that is preparing to celebrate its centenary. Now, its extraordinary activity begins, with the gold that the city was built a hundred years ago was said to have been taken from leprosy patients long ago. These patients are sunk by ships and it is now time for revenge, as the glowing fog from the sea begins to get bigger and thicker everywhere.
Carpenter has always been a master of scaring us with what we're not seeing as opposed to delivering an onslaught of carnage to assault our senses and The Fog shows that you can scare the hell out of people without showing them a lot.
During this period, Carpenter and his fine collaborator the late Debra Hill were so good at crafting suspenseful, slow burn horror stories with multiple storylines.
Released four years after the Bicentennial, 'The Fog' might be a jaundiced corrective to the often uncritical self-congratulation of America's birthday celebration, with the ghosts as manfestations of manifest destiny's bloody heritage.
... makes the most of the dramatic possibilities inherent in an isolated coastal town, as well as the scare potential of darkness, fog, and silent strangers bearing longshoremen's hooks.
Though the plot is implausible and the unfolding story hardly makes any sense, Carpenter stylishly presents an eerie atmosphere for the zombie invasion.
The Fog is right in line with the types of film Carpenter made before his professional fall from grace: It's unpretentious genre fun, stylishly assembled and populated with colorful characters.
