John Carpenter is one of those directors who prove a basic rule about the horror film - a love of storytelling counts for more than gore. Or indeed budget, or big name stars. Carpenter's classics are, by modern standards, restrained and rather low-key in many ways. He takes time with his characters and settings, making sure we get into the zone. And yet he never wastes time, because we are always finding out about the people, the setup, the basic idea that will give us the shocking moments, and that satisfying feeling that we've been entertained by one of the good guys.
Halloween is good viewing for the last night in October, obviously. If you've not seen it the plot sounds like a massive cliché nowadays. A teenager agrees to babysit on the very night the town maniac, Michael Myers, returns to the scene of his childhood killings. What surprises now, I think, is how little actual killing there is. The plot builds and builds so that when we finally see what Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) is up against, we care and share her terror.
And of course we admire her courage and resourcefulness, because she is the quintessential Final Girl, the one who survives against the odds. She gets a bit of help from Donald Pleasance, who turns in a fine performance as a psychiatrist on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Michael Myers is the boogeyman because we never see his face, never hear him speak, never understand his motives. Faceless, irrational violence - pure evil, according to the almost-mad doctor. Horror that is both realistic thanks to dozens of neat, everyday touches, but still Gothic in its intensity.
Then there's The Fog. Carpenter handled this small-town ghost story so carefully that preview audiences felt it was not horrific enough, so he added scenes of the put-upon DJ Stevie Wayne hacking away the rotting face of a ghost-leper as they struggled on top of an old lighthouse. As one does. The Fog is one of my all-time favourites because it's a lovely homage to the tradition, complete with a pre-titles story from Mr Machen (John Houseman).
'11:55, almost midnight. Enough time for one more story. One more story before 12:00, just to keep us warm. In five minutes, it will be the 21st of April. One hundred years ago on the 21st of April, out in the waters around Spivey Point, a small clipper ship drew toward land. Suddenly, out of the night, the fog rolled in. For a moment, they could see nothing, not a foot in front of them. Then, they saw a light. By God, it was a fire burning on the shore, strong enough to penetrate the swirling mist. They steered a course toward the light. But it was a campfire, like this one. The ship crashed against the rocks, the hull sheared in two, masts snapped like a twig. The wreckage sank, with all the men aboard. At the bottom of the sea, lay the Elizabeth Dane, with her crew, their lungs filled with salt water, their eyes open, staring to the darkness. And above, as suddenly as it come, the fog lifted, receded back across the ocean and never came again. But it is told by the fishermen, and their fathers and grandfathers, that when the fog returns to Antonio Bay, the men at the bottom of the sea, out in the water by Spivey Point will rise up and search for the campfire that led them to their dark, icy death.'
The kids listening, wide-eyed, to the old salt telling his tale on the beach recalls the golden age of the supernatural, and the ingredients Carpenter uses keep harking back to the classics. A boozy clergyman, an old journal, a knock at the door in the night, driftwood, hidden gold, and of course the glowing, unnatural fog of the title. It's all here, but with enough late Seventies bells and whistles to make it new. Car horns blare suddenly, supermarket shelves rattle, and a cassette player snarls out a threat.
Even with a mediocre cast The Fog would be a fine movie. With Jamie Lee Curtis, Janet Leigh, Adrienne Barbeau, and many more it really shines. It has faults but they are trivial, things you just don't care about because the story carries you along. A recent remake made the basic error of trying to explain too much and stumbled. Like many great ghost stories, The Fog works because we want to believe it from the start. The legacy of some cruel shipwreck lurks in everyone's past, and we know there's something in the fog, There always is.
Finally, a brief word about Debra Hill, John Carpenter's wife at the time, who is often overlooked. She was producer and co-writer on both films and also collaborated with him on several more films, including Halloween sequels and Escape from New York. She was still in her twenties when she produced two of the best horror films in history and deserves to be better known. Haddonfield in Halloween was named after her home town. Hill blazed a trail in the industry by taking on jobs usually done by men and doing them better. She died in 2005, at the age of 54.
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