In Halloween, the babysitters suffering Michael Myers’s wrath are pointedly splintered apart, scattered across a small town which Carpenter films with a sense of isolation and under-population that’s reminiscent of Edward Hopper’s paintings. The horror film doesn’t chiefly mine a fear of death, as critics often claim, but rather a more specific fear of dying alone. Here, Carpenter expands on the most evocative and under-acknowledged element of Halloween and horror films at large: their aura of loneliness and regret. With The Fog, Carpenter deepened his technical virtuosity to the point of obliterating a notion of individual set pieces, favoring instead an enveloping tone and mood. Halloween’s accomplished lateral tracking shots allow even lay audiences to become vicarious co-directors alongside Carpenter, inviting them to openly savor the film’s craftsmanship in a fashion that’s somewhat reminiscent of late-period Orson Welles productions, or of Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas. Indeed, The Fog isn’t as splashy as Halloween, which delivers its scares with an escalating sense of menace that’s astonishing yet mechanical. The Fog was Carpenter’s theatrical follow-up to Halloween, a film which continues to be a phenomenon as an unfortunate result, the former has often fallen through the cultural cracks to be regarded as something like a middle-tier project in the auteur’s filmography. Such a story fails to elucidate why the fog returns to Antonio Bay, filled with the ghosts of the trawler’s inhabitants, who are bent on exacting revenge. Machen is soothing them with a supernatural tale that’s leeched of political reverberations.

Machen tells rapt schoolchildren a story of how a trawler was engulfed in fog 100 years ago to the night, crashing into the shores of Antonio Bay after following a light source that was merely campfire. Presiding over an iconic-looking campfire, Mr. Yet this symbolism is complicated by the man’s subsequent actions. Machen (John Houseman), is telling us to wake up. The Fog opens on a close-up of a stopwatch being suddenly and decisively shut, as if its owner, Mr.

Like most ghost stories, the film is obsessed by the lies of society, and shows how such illusions can be swallowed up by the sins of the past. But The Fog concerns a more insidious and subtle kind of fissure in reality: the myth of the formation of the United States. John Carpenter’s The Fog opens with a quotation from a famous Edgar Allan Poe poem: “Is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream?” A profound expression of Poe’s depression and alienation, the poem might on the surface seem better suited to Carpenter’s more ostentatiously reality-bending In the Mouth of Madness, where a man becomes quite literally lost in a horror writer’s work.

The fog movie