There’s a remarkable timeliness to many John Carpenter films, especially those he made during the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. Assault on Precinct 13 captured the era’s economic malaise and social uproar. Halloween created a blueprint for the modern slasher flick while cutting deep into latent suburban paranoia. Escape from New York felt like a much-needed cynical antidote to the Reagan administration, and The Thing quite literally warped the idea of the leading man and the masculine collective. And then there’s 1980’s The Fog, which is structured not like a troubling reflection of modern turmoil, but as a traditional ghost story.
If you dig a little deeper into its themes, however, you’ll find that The Fog isn’t an outlier in Carpenter’s filmography. It fits rather neatly into his wider output, diving into the fact that American soil is layered with blood and that any shameful historical cover-ups will inevitably (and likely violently) be torn aside.
