The Fog (1980)

John Carpenter's The Fog arrives from 1980, a year when a coastal town could still be menaced by the vengeful dead without anyone feeling obliged to explain what it all meant. Antonio Bay prepares its centennial while a glowing fog rolls in bearing the revenants of a clipper crew deliberately wrecked a century earlier so the founders could pocket their gold and avoid a leper colony. The cast is uniformly white, led by Adrienne Barbeau behind a radio microphone, with Jamie Lee Curtis and Janet Leigh along for the ride. Nobody in the production appears to have given the matter a thought, and the film is content to let the demographic chips fall where they may.

The buried crime at the town's founding gives the picture a faint whiff of class resentment. Prosperity purchased with plundered gold, a mayor who shrugs off the centennial's dark origins, a priest offering his ancestor's stolen cross in atonement. This is greed as ghost-story morality, not a systemic indictment, and Carpenter never pauses to lecture us about it. Barbeau's Stevie Wayne is resourceful and commanding, though her competence reads as standard genre casting instead of any articulated thesis about the place of women in broadcasting. The film has no interest in the body, the climate, the mind's varied wiring, or the reinterpretation of real history. It wants to scare us, and it mostly does.

Carpenter conjures atmosphere the way a sommelier decants a difficult vintage: patiently, with dread, and without a single sermon. The guilt here is implicit, never preached. For a film preoccupied with a town that prospered from murder, it is remarkably uninterested in making anyone feel bad about it. We can respect that.