There Are Worse Things I Could Do

Stevie Wayne’s World

There Are Worse
Things I Could Do
by Adrienne Barbeau
Carroll & Graff
ISBN: 9780786716371

My first big memory of actress Adrienne Barbeau was when I was absolutely terrified, alone in the dark on my own as a young teenager, while I watched the late night, debut TV screening in the UK of John Carpenter’s The Fog (reviewed by me here). It was an absolutely wonderful experience and Barbeau in particular, with her sexy voice as she played DJ Stevie Wayne, broadcasting from her lighthouse at Spivey Point (I think it was Spivey Point, right?) certainly stuck in my mind. I didn’t put two and two together until later that it was Barbeau who had impressed me so much a few years earlier as the busty, vengeful 'Maggie' when I’d gone to see the AA rated screening of Carpenter’s Escape From New York at my local cinema. She was always an actress I looked out for but she wasn’t often in the kind of films I would go and see, to be honest so, when the earlier ‘made for TV’ movie Someone’s Watching Me also came on television at some point, I saw that one too... not realising at the time that Carpenter had also directed it. The only other thing I consciously remember seeing her in again was in her segment of George A. Romero and Dario Argento’s Two Evil Eyes.

So I was delighted when, sometime last year, I found out that she’d written and published an autobiography back in 2006. I managed to get a second hand copy of the then out of print tome fairly cheaply on Abe Books and was delighted to find that it looked like it had a) never been read and b) had a personalised inscription from Adrienne to someone who, putting two and two together from the message, must have worked with her on one of her film or theatre productions.

So I finally got around to reading it and, I have to say, it’s a really entertaining read. It’s not an incredibly detailed account of her specific film and TV work but it does reveal a lot about her and a lot about the different jobs she took, some of them acting and... some not... to finally get to the actress she’s known as today. She’s also not shy about naming companions and lovers and, telling a few intimate things about herself and her struggles as she stormed through life with one of the best, positive mental attitudes you could ask for in anyone. And, yeah, you’ll get to hear all about people like Burt Reynolds, way before she worked with them on a movie. I don’t think I’ve ever seen The Cannonball Run but I suspect I should ‘put it on the list’, so to speak... and she’s very complimentary and was somewhat star struck by Roger Moore on that movie, it seems to me. Which is no bad thing.

Now, I can’t say I’d seen a lot of the things she talks about... I’ve never seen an episode of Maude, for example (in fact, never even heard of it until I commenced reading this) but I did twig, before I started it, that the title of the book was named after the song from Grease. Yep, turns out she was the original Rizzo on stage. I think I saw Grease in London with Richard Gere at some point but this is going back quite a while before it was a movie, so this was all interesting stuff.

The book is more or less chronological but it does group by themes and contrasting stories too... you’ll find out about her two waitressing jobs where she inadvertently was working for what she politely refers to as ‘The Syndicate’ nights, while taking acting lessons and going to auditions by day, the chain of events that got her some big breaks, some lightly supernatural stuff and the power of positive thinking. You’ll also find the story behind her marriages and her children, the famous Cody Carpenter and the process of having her twins in her fifties. There’s even a great story about her learning to do a snake dance for the show Carnivale (which also sounds like something I should make a point of catching up with) and, one or two absolute film disaster areas where she’s good enough to not name the actual films by title but, you know, amazing and frankly horrifying tales of film set perils.

And it’s all contrasted and punctuated by various diary inserts. She’s been keeping a journal religiously from a young age wherein, as she says, you won’t find information about her film and theatre experiences but, you will find a lot about what was going on about her various lovers at the different times in which she recorded her observations. There are also some interesting points made which reflect ‘things to come’... so to speak and these were obviously sifted out with a deft eye to accommodate the themes and stories as she tells them.

And... yeah... nothing much more to say about Adrienne Barbeau’s magnificent tome, There Are Worse Things I Could Do, other than I’m glad I read it and she has a nice work ethic, which is to be admired. She writes about things with good grace and a lot of humour. I also suspect she’s a really good person to have around a film set because, as you’ll see if you read this one, she seems pretty calm and tolerant in situations where others might not be so generous with their support and presence. I believe there are still, as I review this, a few reasonable priced copies available on a few of the obvious online marketplaces (the hardbacks tend to go for cheaper than the paperbacks, for some reason but, that’s okay for me, at any rate... at my age I much prefer hardbacks of these things anyway). So, yeah, a definite recommendation for me and if you want to see what else she’s been doing, check out her website https://abarbeau.com

1200th Post - 40 Coolest Horror Movies

 
My 1200th Post
40 of the Coolest Horror Films

If you’re reading this now you might realise that there has been a week of inactivity on this blog and, at the very least, this combined Halloween/1200th Post celebration is more than just a little late going up. 

Sorry folks but, what happened is that, two days before this post was due to be published, I got taken ill and it was all very... painful and worrying. It knocked me out of my day job and I have been unable to get out from under it for a while so... yeah... I apologise for being away from the blog all week. The output may be a little sporadic getting back into the swing of things here (assuming I don't relapse again this weekend) but I will do my best to get back to updating three times a week as soon as I’m able. So, if you’re going to read the following post, maybe read it in the context of it still being Halloween. 

Really sorry I missed it guys and gals.

Okay... I really didn’t know what to do to mark the occasion of my 1200th post but, luckily, the timing of it was serendipitous in that I realised it would be going up on Halloween. So I figured I’d do a Top Ten favourite horror movies list. Of course, it’s almost impossible to stop at ten and so, here I now have this monster mutated into a Top 40 coolest list.

As you can imagine, I had a lot more favourite horror movies filled with groovy ghoulies and sexy slitherers but... I had to cut things down somewhere. Didn’t want to end up with a top 200 or I’d still be writing this now. Be warned though... it adheres to my rigid standards of horror movies not being part of the genre unless they feature either a mutated, alien, constructed or supernatural presence. Man as monster driven films really aren’t part of the genre... so you won’t find any classic gialli such as Deep Red or The Bird With The Crystal Plumage here. Neither will you find slashers or serial killer movies such as Psycho, Silence Of The Lambs or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. As far as I’m concerned, those are thrillers... nothing more or less.

I now offer you the usual disclaimer about the list not being definitive and, truth be told, it would probably change every year if I decided to ever contemplate such things on an annual basis. Even now I’m regretting not putting one of the Spanish Blind Dead movies on here. Or one of Naschy’s Wolfman movies. Or the unimaginably cool language based zombie virus movie Pontypool. There’s nothing too obscure here... you’ve more than likely seen the majority of them... but if there are any on this list you haven’t looked at, maybe you could give them some consideration at some point. Enjoy.

40. Zombi (aka Zombi 2 aka Zombie Flesh Eaters) 1979
Lucio Fulci’s zombie classic is quite graphic and, although I don’t enjoy this nearly as much as some of his giallo movies, this features the classic scene of a topless lady being chased underwater by a zombie who then fights and bites a shark. Seriously... how can this movie not be in anyone’s horror list with a cool scene like that in it? You can sift through the earth and find my review of this one here.

39. The Exorcist 1973
William Friedkin’s adaptation of Blatty’s best selling book is actually a pretty good horror movie with some really great sound design... sometimes using that old but effective technique of pitching a slow building cacophony and then bringing in a sudden, crashing silence. Still very effective.

38. The Omen 1976
Richard Donner’s franchise opener about a demonic, adopted baby is still the best in the series with some wonderful performances and, more importantly, Jerry Goldsmith’s wonderful score, for which he won his only oscar. My review of the five Omen movies to date can be found here.

37. Cat People 1942
Val Lewton produced this classic ‘is she or isn’t she’ horror directed by Jacques Tourneur. One of the scariest jump scares in cinema is created when the roar of a 'big cat' turns into the sound of air breaks on a bus screeching to a halt, thus giving future jump scares in horror movies the nickname ‘bus’. An expression which I believe is still in use today, to some extent.

36. Drag Me To Hell 2009
This Sam Raimi movie is pretty much an update of M. R. James ghost story Casting The Runes, which was turned into a TV production some years before (and reviewed by me here), not to mention also being the basis for another entry in this list. It’s basically the same ‘pass the curse on or you’ll be gobbled up by a demon at the end of the week’ plot but it’s so well done here and served with a large dose of black humour. Definitely worth a look. You can drag up my very old and short review of this film here.

35. Phantasm 1979
Don Coscarelli’s very weird but ultimately satisfying seventies movie has given us a couple of horror movie icons. One is The Tall Man, played in the Phantasm films by Angus Scrimm. The other one being the flying steel balls which use retractable razor blades to affix themselves to a victims head before a little drill comes out to mush up your brains.

34.  Gojira (aka Godzilla) 1954
Given his character arc over the years in Japan, it’s almost hard to remember when Godzilla was Tokyo’s nemesis, rather than its protector. This movie is actually still quite sobering in places and stars my favourite actor Takashi Shimura in a role (which he also reprised in the first sequel). Watch the Japanese original and not the butchered, rescored, dubbed, ‘with added Raymond Burr’ US version of the movie.

33. As Above So Below 2014
Absolutely beautiful, handheld, first person camera style horror movie set in the tunnels beneath Paris which lead into hell. The main characters are, unusually for this kind of movie, quite well drawn and I would love to see a sequel to this movie. Lovely sound design moments in here too and, coupled with some genuinely terrifying sequences, these elements all make this a winner for me. You can wander around in my review of this here.

32. Dracula Ad 1972 1972
One of my favourite Hammer movies... this one has a small role for the wonderful Caroline Munro and, furthermore, it has Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee battling in contemporary London. It’s groovy and, although not that many people rate this entry in the Hammer Dracula series, for me it’s definitely the best of the lot.

31. The Girl With All The Gifts 2016
This recent British movie, based on a well loved novel, is so wonderful and it feels like what would had happened if anyone had ever asked John Wyndham to write a zombie movie. Truly great performances and a great plot set up make this one of the greatest zombie ‘road movies’ ever made. A true classic of the sub-genre. My recent review of this is here.

30. Le Viol du Vampire 1968
Jean Rollin’s first feature is as surreal and erotic as most of his vampire movies. Some beautiful imagery and with such a confused, inscrutable plot (if there really is one) that it caused outrage, death threats and objects to be hurled at the screen on it premiere. It’s a movie that lives up to that violent reaction of a recommendation.

29. Vampyros Lesbos 1971
Jess Franco’s lesbian remake of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, in all but name, is erotic and also has a lot going for it in terms of shot design and music. It also has the wonderful Soledad Miranda playing the film’s main antagonist. My review of this one is here.

28. The Descent 2005
A group of lady spelunkers meet a terrifying fate in an unknown cave system filled with hungry, humanoid creatures. The timing and jump scares in this are all pitch perfect. The original, 'sequel proof' UK ending is much more convincing than the US recut version... which allowed for that unsatisfying sequel to be made after all.

27. Kwaidan 1964
Beautifully shot, colourful and engrossing Japanese portmanteau film of ghost stories. Has a beautiful Toru Takemitsu score which, criminally, is still not commercially released on CD, as far as I’m aware. The UK Masters Of Cinema version is even longer and more complete than the already gorgeous, previously released Criterion version.

26. Kuroneko 1968
This film directed by Kaneto Shindo, who gave us the wonderful Onibaba, teaches us an important lesson and that lesson is... if you are going to get interested in a couple of ladies, make sure they were not previously raped to death and are now supernatural entities who can turn into cat demons at will. This is always a good thing to remember while out shopping.

25. The Earth Dies Screaming 1964
Quite short but quite wonderful low budget sci-fi horror involving the few humans left alive in the world and the invading aliens who they are trying to hide from. Some truly gob smackingly scary and suspenseful scenes in this. It's all so very English and "let's all have a cup o' tea" in it's attitude too... which is kinda cosy.

24. Paranormal Activity 2, 3, 4, and 6 (2010, 2011, 2012 & 2015)
Yeah, this is a bit of a cheat entry because I’ve included four in one. However, I like this series and, although I haven’t included the first here because it doesn’t quite scare like the majority of the others, that's also quite a good movie. Unfortunately, the real clunker in the series is the fifth one, subtitled The Marked Ones. Sad that this series seems to have stopped with the fantastic sixth movie. My review of the entire series can be found here, here, here, here, here and here.

23. Night of the Demon/Curse of the Demon 1957
I can never remember which of these two titles of this movie represents the slightly shorter, truncated American cut of this but it’s a great film and worth watching in its full version. The second on this list to be directed by Jacques Tourneur, this is also another adaptation of the M. R. James story Casting The Runes. My review of this movie is here.

22. Rabid 1977
Early Cronenberg classic which stars porn star Marilyn Chambers as she is taken over by a sex virus which turns everybody into mad, bloodthirsty creatures as the film heads towards its downbeat conclusion.

21. Nosferatu, A Symphony Of Horror 1922
This famous, unauthorised German adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula was, if memory serves, the first and probably only German Expressionist film to use actual location photography rather than just elaborately constructed sets. Still a bit of a classic and still worth a watch every few years. Fans of this one would also do well to check out a neat movie called Shadow Of The Vampire, about the  ‘fictional’ shooting of this movie.

20. Inferno 1980
The second of Dario Argento’s Three Mothers Trilogy, this shares a similarly saturated, Bavaesque colour palette as his earlier hit Suspiria. It is the epitome of an Argento film to the point where it’s almost a cliché in that it has... bad acting, a not so great script, wonderful music (by the late, great Keith Emmerson) and some astonishingly beautiful visuals. It’s also worth it for the 'third mother' sequence in the lecture theatre near the start of the movie...which has an absolutely enthralling, captivating and spooky atmosphere to it.

19. The Thing From Another World & John Carpenter’s The Thing 1951 and 1982
Okay, so out of the two of these, I still prefer the original Christian Nyby film, produced by Howard Hawks... but both his and Carpenter’s films are still out and out classics of the genre and, as it happens, are very different to each other in some ways. Both important films.

18. Quatermass And The Pit 1967
The scariest of the Quatermass productions, at least in terms of movies (the fourth serial is quite unsettling too). This one hooks up a truly great science fiction premise and also manages to tie it into supernatural shenanigans in a credible way. Probably the greatest Hammer movie ever made. You can unearth my review of this one here.

17. King Kong 1933
What a wonderful movie the original King Kong is. So much expression in Willis O Brien’s monster model that you will always feel sorry for him. A lost scene which was truly terrifying to the very first audiences was excised after previews and has, sadly, never turned up since. Apart from kick starting giant monster movies, this film is also very important because Max Steiner showed that a 'talking picture' could also have a non-diegetic musical score to enhance the film to its advantage. If it wasn’t for this movie they might never had figured that out... and John Williams would be out of a job. John Williams did, however, pay homage to this score musically in his score for the second Jurassic Park movie, The Lost World.

16. Rec and REC 2 2007 and 2009
The first two of the four REC films are found footage movies and are... truly pant wetting. Although the storyline doesn’t quite include zombies, the antagonists in this movie are, for all intents and purposes, the living dead and they’re not slow about going in for the kill either. Most zombie movies are just body count movies... these Spanish ones are intense, frightening affairs. The real deal. My review of the second movie is here.

15. It Follows 2014
Another variation on the pass a curse on legacy... this fairly recent addition to the genre is stylishly made, genuinely unsettling and has a truly cool, retro 1970/80s style electronic score similar to what you might find in a John Carpenter movie. I can’t believe there hasn’t been at least two sequels to this thing already. You can follow my original thoughts on this one here.

14. The Blair Witch Project 1999
This movie re-popularised the found footage horror movie and is pretty scary. It’s just as famous for its early viral internet marketing campaign, which was a bit of a ground breaker at the time. Love the ending to this movie. The recent sequel was reviewed by me here.

13. Dawn of the Dead 1978
Zombie King George Romero’s sequel, around a decade later, to his break out hit Night Of The Living Dead. The first movie spawned what we think of today as the modern zombie movie. This one does it all again but in colour and with the main protagonists holed up in a shopping mall. It has a few different cuts and all of them are worth watching to get a different vibe off them. It also has, in some versions, a biker gang versus zombie custard pie fight so... what’s not to love here?

12. Ringu 1998
Based on the novel of the same name, Hideo Nakata’s adaptation is another updated ‘pass the curse’ movie for the video age. Ironically, in the recent franchise crossing sequel Sadako Vs Kayako (reviewed by me here), the technology used to pass the curse in the original is now outdated enough that the characters have to find an old videotape machine in a junk shop. How quickly times change.

11. The Conjuring 2013
Based on the true life adventures of Ed and Lorraine Warren, this first entry in the franchise is an instant classic. Everybody in this movie is completely likeable and that makes the demonic horror element of the story all the more effective. The sequel, set locally to me in Enfield in the UK (which I reviewed here), was also great but not quite up there with this one. You can conjure up my review of this one here.

10. A L I E N 1979
Ridley Scott and Dan O Bannon’s scary sci-fi tale borrows liberally from a few sources and is notable for giving Swiss artist H. R. Giger international exposure and fame. Absolutely beautiful acting and an effective, if misused by the director, Jerry Goldsmith score make this one that everybody should see (and hear).

9. Suspiria 1977
The first of Dario Argento’s Three Mothers Trilogy is like a hypnagogic fairy tale with a saturated colour palette that, if I remember correctly, utilised the last technicolour camera left in Italy. An absolute classic and progressive rock group Goblin’s cool score is the icing on an already very rich cake. Upcoming remake not required.

8. The Shining 1980
Kubrick’s horror masterpiece is actually a little more enthralling than maestro Stephen King’s original novel... which was already pretty good. Imagery such as the twin girls, the carpet pattern of the Overlook Hotel and the elevator doors opening to release a hallway full of blood has become iconic and much referenced in the decades since the release of this one.

7. Son Of Frankenstein 1939
The third of the original seven Universal Frankenstein monster movies and the last to feature Boris Karloff playing the role of the monster, although he would return to the series later in a different role.
As far as I’m concerned this is the closest an American horror picture of that period got to showing German Expressionism on film, with its twisted sets looking like something found in the classic GE movie, The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari.

6. Werewolf Of London 1935
Universal’s first attempt at a wolfman movie, with Henry Hull as the titular creature, was a failure with audiences and it wasn't for another six years until they had another, more successful attempt with Lon Chaney Jr in The Wolfman (reviewed here). This movie, as far as I’m concerned, trumps any werewolf movies that came after it with its classic yet unreleased score, Star Trek rock formations (doubling for Tibet and decades before the crew of the Enterprise were filming in that location), Warner Oland and the hilarious 'two old ladies in the pub' scene. Absolutely brilliant stuff.

5. Creature From The Black Lagoon 1954
Such a good movie. I was lucky enough to catch a showing of this in 3D as a kid in the 1970s in a cinema in Soho and it’s been with me ever since. A film which never fails to weave a hypnotic spell and still has a lot of staying power to this day. My review of this walks among us here.

4. Invasion of the Bodysnatchers 1956 and 1978
I love all the Invasion Of The Bodysnatchers movies we’ve had over the years but these two are absolute masterpieces. I enjoy the first one a little more and it has some great lines in it like “A moment's sleep and the girl I loved was an inhuman enemy bent on my destruction.” The seventies version is chilly and creepy in a different way, with a more naturalistic acting style plugged into the time period and a much more downbeat ending to it... something which the director of the first version wasn’t allowed to get away with after test screenings before new bookend scenes were shot. Slyly, the ending of the first movie starring the original actor, does find itself into a scene very early on in the 1978 version.

3. The Bride Of Frankenstein 1935
Two things elevate this movie above anything else. Firstly there’s the amazing actress Elsa Lanchester, playing a dual role here as both Mary Shelley in a prologue and, later, the creature’s bride herself. The other stand out is Franz Waxman’s gorgeous score which was so well thought of that it was constantly being tracked into Universal’s serials such as Flash Gordon’s Trip To Mars, Flash Gordon Conquers The Universe and The Phantom Creeps.

2. The Fog 1980
John Carpenter’s absolutely cool supernatural slasher about a team of marauding leper pirates coming back to wreak havoc on the town that done them wrong 100 years before. Features an outstanding performance by Adrienne Barbeau as the local DJ who has her radio station in a lighthouse. Also features Janet Leigh and her daughter, Jamie Lee Curtis, working together in the same film. Watch this alone at night with the lights off and the sound up to take in Carpenter’s masterpiece of a horror score that haunts the corners of your ears as you watch. My review is lurking here.

1. The Haunting 1963
The original, 1963 Robert Wise adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s novel, The Haunting Of Hill House, is just amazing and, even though I’ve seen it dozens of times, it still has the power to provoke an atmosphere of lurking dread. Nothing much happens visible to the camera but, when it isn’t happening in abundance, you certainly feel it. A true gem of a movie and still the greatest horror movie ever made.

So there you go. Those are my picks. I’m sure I’ll be regretting the missing stuff almost as soon as I publish this post. If you’ve not seen them and you have a love of the genre, then they are truly worth giving a watch at some point. Enjoy the darkness.

The Fog

Wag The Fog

The Fog
1980 USA 
Directed by John Carpenter
Optimum UK Blu Ray Zone B

“I don't know what happened to Antonio Bay tonight. 
Something came out of the fog and tried to destroy us. 
In one moment, it vanished. But if this has been anything
 but a nightmare, and if we don't wake up to find ourselves
 safe in our beds, it could come again. To the ships at sea
 who can hear my voice, look across the water, into the
 darkness. Look for the fog.” 
Stevie Wayne, KAB Radio, Antonio Bay

I really love John Carpenter’s The Fog. It’s not just one of my all time favourite horror movies, it’s also... asides from a few things I’ll point out here... an almost perfect movie in its own right and one which I put on nowadays if I just want to watch a nice, relaxing movie full of beauty and colour. I think one of the reasons I still carry this movie around inside of me may be partially because of the circumstances in which I first came to see it.

It must have been the early to mid 1980s when it was first shown on TV in the UK. I would have been maybe 16 or 17 years old and, although I was already a fan of the director’s science fiction movies Dark Star, and the then recent cinema release of Escape From New York, I’d not seen Carpenter’s “horror movies” before (although I was no stranger to the Horror genre, having watched various Universal and Hammer classics from around 4 to 6 years of age). For some reason, my parents were out of the house. I think they must have been at some kind of party and they were due back around the small hours. The Fog was showing fairly late at night (it may have even been a midnight showing for the BBC... can’t quite remember) and I was all alone in a dark house, sitting down by myself to watch this movie...

And it was brilliant... nail-bitingly suspenseful and I instantly knew three things once I’d got done watching it...

1) I was in love with Adrienne Barbeau and wanted to be her boyfriend/sex slave, 2) I wanted to see more of this director’s movies and 3) I needed to buy a long playing record of the music, if I could get my hands on such a thing. Alas, I only was ever able to tick off the second and third things on that task list over the years but still have high hopes for Adrienne Barbeau if the lady ever visits the UK.

The Fog is all about a cursed town, Antonio Bay, celebrating its one hundredth anniversary.  It’s also about a gang of supernatural pirates/lepers visiting their revenge, 100 years on, to the six original conspirators who built the town using their money before sending them to their death because they didn’t want a leper colony setting up near them. And by revenge, I mean the spectral pirates want their gold back and they want to violently kill the conspirators’ living descendents.

Now, before I go any further, it has to be said that in some ways the plot of this movie is full of more holes than the leaky driftwood from the ghost pirates ship which washes ashore and does strange, supernatural things. The opening set up of a montage of mysterious occurrences happening around Antonio Bay as the credits roll is almost straight out of the early parts of Spielberg’s Close Encounters Of The Third Kind... with various inanimate objects suddenly coming to life on their own and frightening people. It’s probably not a sequence which would play well in front of a modern cinema audience, I suspect, but it was an effective way to set up the idea that crazy happenings are afoot. However, other than a stone block in a church knocked loose and giving the character of Father Malone (played by Hal Holbrook) an explanation, by way of a written historical account, for the killings which are about to start happening throughout the course of the movie, the majority of this opening montage seems to have absolutely nothing to do with any logical ties to the actual idea that the ghosts of a colony of leper ridden pirates is coming to take revenge, 100 years on from their death.

And that’s the one thing about this movie which is something you have to forgive it for... a lot of the scares don’t make that much sense. The pirates are using the glowing fog of the film’s title to move around in but... the fog isn’t present in the first round of supernatural happenings at the start of the movie. Now I’m told a lot of the scenes were shot and then added in a matter of a few weeks or so leading up to the release of the film after negative feedback on the initial cut and I suspect that some of those extra scenes might have been put in to spice up the thrills without actually making a whole lot of sense, if you see what I mean.

For example, Jamie Lee Curtis, fresh from her success in John Carpenter’s earlier film phenomenon Halloween (not a film I particularly like that much, for some reason) here plays a drifter named Elisabeth who hooks up with Tom Aitken’s character Nick... who’s a local fisherman. This is good plotting in terms of Aitken’s profession because it means these two characters can give a window into some of the strange things happening and provide the jump scares when provided. After they discover the corpse of one of Aitken’s deceased friends, completely dry but with lungs filled with water (the pirates got him in an earlier scene of suspenseful scariness) we are later witness to a scene in the morgue where Jamie is frightened by the reanimated corpse of the guy trying to end her life with a scalpel. I’m pretty sure this was an insert sequence and, I have to say, it seems to have nothing to do with the rest of the story. It does, however, feature a key Carpenter signature in that the scary thing is happening in the background of the shot, quite visibly but slightly out of focus, while the main character is oblivious and in sharp focus in the foreground of the shot... which is the kind of thing which “gets an audience going”, it seems to me.

A similar non-sequitur of an idea occurs in the presence of our other main lead actress, Adrienne Barbeau, here playing disc jockey Stevie Wayne, who broadcasts her nightly programme to Antonio Bay from a secluded lighthouse. Her son finds a piece of driftwood bearing the name of the ship which was originally the vessel belonging to the pirates (we get a glimpse of the ship in an earlier scene when three fishermen are slaughtered in their boat by the fog bound pirates). At one point some sea water starts oozing from the driftwood and into Stevie’s tape deck before inhabiting the demo tapes she is listening to with a creepy voice and then catching fire. After she’s put the thing out with an extinguisher there’s no real sign that anything just occurred but, more worryingly from my point of view, no real reason for this ghostly apparition to be happening in front of her in the first place anyway.

It matters not though because this film manages to scare up the chills and when the town is attacked properly by The Fog and the spectral pirates lurking inside, you won’t really be contemplating stuff like this if it’s a first time watch for you.

Apart from having an amazingly sexy and relaxed voice (“Ahoy, mateys.”), Stevie’s character is also a brilliant one in that she serves a purpose. She has hardly any scenes with anyone else apart from as a voice on the radio or telephone to them (barring one brief scene with her son) and she’s kind of a key role in the film because she works out that the fog is dangerous and, from her lighthouse, she can see just which parts of town it’s attacking from. The climax of the movie becomes essentially a three hander cutting between Stevie Wayne who is being attacked by pirates in her lighthouse, Elizabeth and Nick who are trying to rescue Stevie’s son from the warning she is screaming over the airwaves and the duo of Mrs. Williams (played by Janet Leigh) and her assistant (played by Nancy Loomis, as she was known in the days Carpenter was using her as an actress).

Just before Stevie retreats to the slanted, slippery roof of her lighthouse to ward off attacks from two pirates, who are presumably there because they either listen to the radio and know she’s got them pegged or... you know... for no good reason actually pertaining to the plot, Stevie gets everyone to converge at a certain place in town, the church of Father Malone (the descendant of the sixth conspirator) and we are treated to a Night Of The Living Dead style lock-down and siege sequence (almost certainly inspired by one of Carpenter’s favourite John Ford westerns) which includes on screen scenes featuring real life mother and daughter Janet Leigh and Jamie Lee Curtis (daughter of Leigh and Tony Curtis, naturally). Of course, if the pirates manage to kill Stevie in addition to Father Malone then they end up with a body count of seven, which makes no sense whatsoever to the plot about six conspirators but, you know, who am I to judge?

What I can judge is that this film is both absolutely scary and taut with suspense sequences put together by a director who is an absolute master of his craft and shows just exactly why he is with this movie. The Fog is also really beautiful to look at with some phenomenally clean framing and some beautiful colours thrown together within the cinematography. And on top of that it’s got a great double ending with one of my favourite pieces of postmodern horror homage of all time. It’s the second from last scene, coming right before the inevitable twist ending that involves a few more pirates. Stevie is back on the microphone in her lighthouse as soon as the attacks have stopped... warning people about The Fog in exactly the same tone and with the same sense of the dramatic as the original “one character broadcasting to the outside world”  ending of the original The Thing From Another World, which Carpenter would soon remake himself as The Thing. I’ve printed Adrien Barbeau’s end monologue from The Fog right at the start of this review to set the mood. Here’s what Douglas Spencer’s Scotty character had to say as a wrap up in The Thing From Another World...

“And now before giving you the details of the battle, I bring you a warning: Everyone of you listening to my voice, tell the world, tell this to everybody wherever they are. Watch the skies. Everywhere. Keep looking. Keep watching the skies.”

The delivery’s a bit similar too and this pleases me a lot. It’s good to hear a piece of dialogue in a film like The Fog and hear it hold up on its own plus know exactly the kind of tone the director was going for. In both movies, that kind of downbeat warning of possible future doom in the face of victory gives them both a haunting edge which has a lot of appeal for even the most jaded horror movie fan.

And the final cherry on the cake is the fantastic musical score on this one... one of many written and partially performed by John Carpenter himself. If you are one of those people who think synthesiser soundtracks don’t work in the movies then watch this and think again. The haunting three note theme* which opens the movie and plays out during the quieter moments of the film is quite a hook... but when you add in the intense high pitched alarm sounds and the whooshing textures which are presumably musical reminders of the presence of the fog, youre ears are in for one hell of a ride with a score that goes from mellow, relaxing cues to out and out “get me the f*** out of here at just the right moments. I always used to take a copy of this score with me if I went to a holiday on the coast... still do in fact. It’s a perfect score to play when you’ve got a dark night and can gaze out at the sea with a glass of whisky in your hand (or a nice cuppy tea). When I first used to take it along on my holidays it was a recording of my old Colosseum vinyl album onto a magnetic cassette in my old Sony Walkman. Then, as the years flew by, my soundtrack to The Fog got converted to a CD walkman, a mini disc player and, nowadays, after there have been a fair few expanded editions of this excellent score, it’s always to be found somewhere on my iPod classic for emergency coastal visits. I wouldn’t want to be without it because it captivates the atmosphere very quickly.

A quick note about the UK Optimum Blu Ray release of this one. Frankly, I wish I’d have bought the US Blu Ray which would have matched my previous American edition DVD with absolutely loads of extras and a much better transfer of it than can be found on the UK one. The UK one seems way too luminous and colourful than it should be in certain areas and there’s an unforgivable sound error at a key point which renders the scary jump moment, and the musical stinger used to punctuate it, almost useless. Stick with the DVD if you are buying a UK edition until they decide to bring out a better one for our Blu Ray market. Or better yet, just grab a multi-region/multi zone player and grab a copy from the US... that would solve the problem.

So there you have it. One of my favourite horror movies which, even with the slight plot holes that seem almost solely to be there to serve the scary bits, is an absolute masterpiece mixing solid acting, impeccable direction, timing and editing, jump scares pitched against the slowly creeping dread kind of horror and, when all is said and done, an absolutely terrific score... one of the greatest in cinema history in my opinion (and I don’t think it’s ever been a bad seller in any of its many incarnations either). If you are a fan of films in general then you might want to put on The Fog one dark night so you can see how expertly Carpenter makes you forget the logistics of the plot and controls your emotional stakes in the characters (I’m told the remake is ghastly so maybe don’t bother with that one). If you are a fan of horror movies and you’ve never seen this absolute classic... what the heck are you waiting for? It needs to be the very next movie you see... you won’t be watching it just once.

*with thanks to @katrinjenny of twitter for reminding me that the score is partially based on a three note theme.