The Fog

I know, this list is turning into a Carpenter-a-thon, but I can’t help he has a slew of kickass films under his belt. This one stars Jamie Lee Curtis once again and here’s the gist of things…100 years ago, a town is to be established as a leper colony for a rich dude and his leper buddies buuuut folks conspire against them, they get lost in a fog and end up crashing on some rocks and they all die and stuff aaand a town ends up being built there with leper guy’s gold from the sunken ship.  But now the town is getting ready to celebrate its 100th bday and the ghost lepers are ready to come exact some revenge! In rolls the killer fog, in come the ghostzombielepers and BOOM people start dyin’.  I really love the way Carpenter creates suspense and atmosphere in his early films, i find it to be borderline brilliant and so much more effective than the  in your face style of film-making that people tend to use today. I love his use of shadows so much! Gah! Anyway. So Carpenter is a master of creating suspense without really showing all that much..I suppose partly thanks to the lack of cgi back then, and this is no different. You don’t need to see more of the glowy-eyed piratezombies than he shows you (HELLO shitty 2005 remake), and the fog itself is relatively cool looking, and everything just works really well.  It’s not really bloody, and it’s certainly not a slasher-type film, but it is great, old school type brooding and spooky horror flick that I recommend highly.