The atmosphere is setup beautifully here by an old man telling a campfire story to a bunch of kids. The demise of the good ship Seagrass is pretty chilling and even though there's not a lot of gore, it is disturbingly violent. The one-night stand between Jamie Lee Curtis and Tom Atkins characters feels a little icky at first, but they develop a chemistry very quickly that really gives the movie a center. This is handy because even though Adrienne Barbeau is good and I've always liked her strong and spunky character work, her role as Stevie Wayne is not interesting enough to build around. She's like a play-by-play broadcaster, calling the action but too isolated in her radio station/lighthouse to be an active part of the horror that drifts in from the ocean.

The fog itself and the ghosts within it are cool creations. I watched the credits scroll at the end of the movie and saw that a couple of the supernatural sailors were played by Tommy Lee Wallace and Rob Bottin, two prominent figures in John Carpenter's rise to fame as a director. And speaking of Carpenter, he plays a janitor in the very beginning of the movie. It's a speaking cameo, no less.

John Carpenter is one of my favorite directors and I always find a lot to like, but a few things to roll my eyes about in his films. I consider "The Thing" and "Halloween" to be flawless, and while "The Fog" is just as deadly serious as those two films, it just doesn't have the same impact. Still, it's got a creepy look and feel that are absent from most of today's Horror films.