Foggiest Notions

"Fog" (an "American Haiku") by Robert Frost, published in Chicago Poems 1916

The fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.


Just in time for Halloween, New York-headquartered Rialto Pictures ("the gold standard of reissue distributors," in the words of Los Angeles Times critic Kenneth Turan) is re-releasing director John Carpenter's - no, not the original "Halloween" - but 1980's "The Fog." In its first ever major restoration, Carpenter's twist on the classic ghost story will be presented in 4K resolution, which boasts a super-pixelated, richly detailed image.

Rialto Pictures has also restored Carpenter's "Escape from New York" and director Sam Raimi's "Evil Dead 2." But getting back to "The Fog," Rialto's director of sales, Eric Di Bernardo, said, "It is Carpenter's most visually alluring film and we think it's been worth the wait."

Getting the meteorological clarification out of the way, fog is nothing more than an aerosol made up of tiny water droplets visibly suspended in air at or near the Earth's surface; in other words, a kind of low-lying cloud resembling stratus clouds. Despite its uncomplicated nature, fog has had an affect on such human activities as travel, shipping, even warfare.

In late August of 1776, mere weeks after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, British forces had George Washington and the Continental Army - outnumbered, ill-equipped, poorly trained, and hungry - treed in the Battle of Long Island. There would be no retreat across the East River, as it was thick with English warships. It appeared as if the Revolution would be over only weeks in.

August 28 was an unseasonably rainy day, which turned out to be a blessing in disguise. The next morning, fog was so thick that a person could "scarcely discern a man from six yards' distance." While the fog concealed Washington's army from British eyes, New York enjoyed perfectly clear conditions. The fog provided Washington with just enough time and cover to sneak all 9000 of his command safely across the water into Manhattan. The general himself was the last man to step on the last boat.

Fog has naturally been the source of folklore since prehistory. According to a Northeast tall tale, a Maine fisherman, kept off the water by a fog bank rolling in from the Bay of Fundy, decided to shingle his roof. It took him all day to shingle what he thought was a mighty long house, until he discovered that he had shingled right past the roof and out onto the thick fog.

Fog moves over Fundy Bay near the parish of Alma, New Brunswick.

Fog has always provided a visually alluring atmosphere in cinema. No matter the special effects involved - from simply dropping dry ice into hot water to complex fog machines to computer-generated imagery - a background of fog has made Sherlock Holmes' cases more mysterious, film noir more foreboding, lost worlds more primeval, and werewolves more terrifying.

Forget elementary deduction, Holmes (Basil Rathbone) and
Dr. Watson (Nigel Bruce) use gunfire in the fog surrounding
Baskerville Hall in 1939's "The Hound of the Baskervilles."

"The Fog" was the first movie to feature fog as virtually a main character. That's not to say fog hasn't been a major player in a number of motion pictures.

One of the greatest motion pictures of all time, 1942's "Casablanca" was a romantic drama set against wartime intrigue in Morocco, controlled at the time by the Vichy, the nominal government of France in collaboration with the Nazis. Humphrey Bogart starred as Rick, a world-weary American expatriate who operates a popular nightclub, where he encounters his old flame Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman), now married to a fugitive Czech Resistance leader, Laszlo, played by Paul Henreid.

The film concludes at a fog-enshrouded airport, where Rick has arranged an escape flight for Laszlo and Ilsa to Lisbon. The mist seems to isolate the figures against the landscape of history.

Front and foremost, Claude Rains, as Louis, the delightfully
corrupt Vichy prefect of police, asserts his authority at the airport,
in front of Paul Henreid, Humphrey Bogart, and Ingrid Bergman.

Ilsa wants to stay with Rick, but he asserts that if she isn't on the plane with Laszlo "you'll regret it. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But soon and for the rest of your life." The final scene in the mist is rife with more quotable dialogue: "We'll always have Paris," "I'm no good at being noble, but it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world," "Round up the usual suspects," "Louie, I think is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."

"We'll always have Paris," Rick assures Ilsa, making "Casablanca"
the most quotable picture in a century of cinema.

"The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms" (1953) was one of the best Atomic Age monster movies, based on a Ray Bradbury short story and featuring stop-motion animation special effects by the incomparable Ray Harryhausen. A fictional dinosaur (dubbed a Rhedosaurus), stirred from its deep-freeze hibernation by an atomic bomb test in the Arctic Circle, wreaks havoc in the North Atlantic and along the eastern coast of North America on its way to New York City.

The original 1951 artwork in the Saturday Evening Post
for "The Fog Horn" by Ray Bradbury

In Ray Bradbury's 1951 short story "The Fog Horn," the plaintive sound from a remote lighthouse's fog horn attracts a sea monster, who mistakes the resonating call for the wailing of a possible mate. When the lighthouse seemingly ignores the advances of the amorous beast, it destroys the structure in a rage of unrequited love. The gist of the story was recreated in a scene in the film "The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms" when the dinosaur destroys a fog-engulfed lighthouse in Maine (pictured below).

For the 1954 MGM musical "Brigadoon," based on a 1947 Lerner and Loewe Broadway musical, Vincente Minnelli directed Gene Kelly, Van Johnson, and Cyd Charisse in a modern fairy tale about two American game hunters in Scotland who get lost in the woods and come upon Brigadoon, a village that rises out of the mists every hundred years for only one day. In Gene Kelly's case, the town magically reappears when he returns to Scotland in search of the village girl (Charisse) he fell in love with the first time around. The local schoolmaster (British actor Barry Jones) welcomes him back with, "I told ye, if you love someone deeply enough, anything is possible...even miracles."

Cyd Charisse, Barry Jones, Gene Kelly, and the mists of "Brigadoon"

Skull Island became the name of the fictitious haven of the gigantic ape King Kong, prehistoric creatures among other beasties, and a tribe of primitives. Actually, in the 1933 original "King Kong," the island isn't named, but there is a distinctively shaped rocky knoll on the island called "Skull Mountain." In the sequel, "Son of Kong," released a mere nine months later, the piece of land is referred to as Kong's Island.

In the remakes and reboots, Skull Island is inevitably depicted as being completely enveloped in fog. In 1976's "King Kong," which substituted the Empire State Building with the World Trade Center for Kong's final ascent, a greedy oil executive is convinced the permanent fog bank hiding an undiscovered island in the Indian Ocean is produced by untapped deposits of crude oil; this was a reference to the U.S. energy crisis of the 1970s.

Jennifer Lange (in her film debut), Ed Lauter, Charles Grodin,
Jeff Bridges, René Auberjonois, and Julius Harris penetrate the
fog surrounding Skull Island in 1976's "King Kong."

In 2017's "Kong: Skull Island," John Goodman, Tom Hiddleston,
Brie Larson, and John C. Reilly wander amidst the mist-veiled
remains of Kong's ancestors.

In the foggy environs of a fictitious town supposedly abandoned for 30 years, Rose Da Silva (Australian-born Radha Mitchell) searches for her missing adopted daughter only to encounter inhuman monsters and a supernatural cult called the Brethren from another dimension in the 2006 psychological horror film "Silent Hill."

Doomed motorcycle cop Cybil Bennett (Laurie Holden) finds herself
trapped in the mists of Silent Hill. The cursed fog hung around for an
even more confusing sequel, 2012's "Silent Hill: Revelation."

In 1980, Stephen King published the novella The Mist, set in the real town of Bridgton, Maine, where a violent thunderstorm precipitates the arrival of a thick, unnatural fog, reducing visibility to near zero and concealing a variety of bizarre, vicious creatures that might have crept off the pages of a tale by H.P. Lovecraft. A slightly edited version of the novella was published in the 1985 anthology Skeleton Crew. King may have wanted to call his tale The Fog, but that title was already taken.

A fog such as this in Bangor, Maine, might have inspired that town's
most famous resident, Stephen King, to write The Mist.

Writer-director Frank Darabont, who had already proved himself an exceptionally talented adapter of Stephen King with 1994's "The Shawshank Redemption" and 1999's 'The Green Mile," scripted and directed "The Mist" in 2007. With King's OK, Darabont gave the story a darker, nihilistic ending.

Laurie Holden (of "Silent Hill"), Thomas Jane, and Nathan Gamble
(with Jeffrey DeMunn and Frances Sternhagen in the background)
react in horror to what lurks in "The Mist."

Frank Darabont, who developed, executive produced, and directed the first season-into-the-second of the hit AMC series "The Walking Dead," was not involved with the 2017 Spike series "The Mist" (pictured below). The series, which replaced Bridgton with the fictional Bridgeville, Maine, was created and scripted by Denmark-born producer Christian Torpe and was canceled by Spike after 10 episodes. Critic Ben Travers had described the characters as "pretty awful," leaving viewers "rooting for the mist instead of those running from it."

Speaking of Danish filmmakers, in 2009, Copenhagen-born Nicolas Winding Refn co-wrote and directed "Valhalla Rising," a surrealistic historical fancy, set in 11th century Scottish Highlands, about a captive Norse warrior named One-Eye who is forced by a Norwegian chieftain to fight opponents to the death. He, along with the boy who fed him when he was in chains, escapes and falls in with a band of Christian Crusaders who hope to guide their ship to the new Holy Land.

It is soon after setting sail from Scotland that the voyagers encounter a thick, literally hellish fog with a reddish tinge. Hopelessly adrift in the North Atlantic for several days with dwindling supplies, the pilgrims endure a seeming journey into the heart of darkness before ending up not in a new Holy Land but in an unknown North America, where they experience strange visions and, one by one, are assaulted by an unseen enemy.


Epilogue

A character in Frank Darabont's "The Mist" exclaims "There's something in the mist!" directly echoing an advertising catchphrase for John Carpenter's "The Fog" in 1980.

The idea for "The Fog" came from a visit to Stonehenge by John Carpenter and his frequent collaborator, writer-producer Debra Hill. They spotted a fog bank sitting on the River Avon in the distance. prompting Carpenter to remark. "What if there was something in the fog?"

"The Fog" (pictured below) evocatively tapped into the spirit of the creeping, mist-shrouded tales by early 20th-century horror author H.P. Lovecraft and of the subliminal atmospheric terror of 1940's producer Val Lewton's "Cat People" and "I Walked with a Zombie." Budgeted at $1.1 million, "The Fog" grossed over $21 million at the box office.

John Carpenter and Debra Hill co-produced the 2005 remake of "The Fog" (pictured above), scripted by Cooper Layne (best known for "The Core," starring Aaron Eckhart and Hilary Swank) and directed by Rupert Wainwright (best known for "Stigmata," with Patricia Arquette and Gabriel Byrne). Panned by critics, "The Fog" was regarded as one of the worst movies of the 2000s. In hindsight, John Carpenter described his involvement as producer as: "I come in and say hello to everybody. Go home."