The Fog

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 Jamie's mother Janet Leigh.

Trivia

• The assistant to Father Malone shown in the beginning, known as Bennett, is played by an uncredited John Carpenter.
• Characters Nick Castle, Dan O'Bannon, Tommy Wallace are all named after John Carpenter's real-life collaborators from previous films.
• The band mentioned on the radio near the beginning is "The Coupe DeVilles", which features director John Carpenter. (Their only "notable" song ever recorded was Big Trouble in Little China from the film of the same name, directed by Carpenter.)
• Adrienne Barbeau's last line, "...look for the fog...", echoes the last line from The Thing From Another World (1951), "Watch the skies." John Carpenter later remade that film as The Thing.
• The coroner is listed in the credits as "Dr. Phibes", an in-joke reference to the Darwin Joston character, Dr. Anton Phibes.
• After a rough cut editing the movie appeared to be much too short for a theatrical release (about 80 minutes). John Carpenter subsequently added the prolog with the Old Captain telling Ghost stories to fascinated children by a campfire.
• Although this was essentially a low budget independent film, John Carpenter chose to shoot the movie in anamorphic widescreen Panavision. This decision gave the film a grander feel for the viewer so it did not seem like a low budget horror film.
• John Carpenter admitted that his inspiration for the story was the British film The Trollenberg Terror (1958) which dealt with monsters hiding in the clouds as well as a visit to Stonehenge with his co-writer/producer, Debra Hill.
• Blake, the lead ghost, was played by makeup specialist Rob Bottin. When Bottin ask for the job, John Carpenter asked him to "stand up". Bottin then expected Carpenter to say, "...and get out!" When Carpenter saw that Bottin was a very large man, which was needed for the Blake character, he was hired.
• Interestingly enough Adrienne Barbeau and Jamie Lee Curtis, the leads, do not appear together in any scenes.
• Furthermore Jamie Lee Curtis and her mother Janet Leigh do not appear together until the final scene.
• It is not related to the 1975 James Herbert novel of the same name.