In John Carpenter's Fog, what you can't see won't hurt ya - it'll murderize ya.
On February 1st 1980, actress Adrienne Barbeau (Swamp Thing, Escape From New York) and director John Carpenter were newly weds when The Fog (1980) rolled in American theaters. Barbeau's 70's porn-sheik good looks and big brown eyes brought the Van Morrison outta red-blooded men across the country while Carpenter's sparse, gruesome directorial talents earned the The Fog itself a cool $21 million dollars[0].
These earnings came at a Recession choked point in American culture when the over-marketed Saturn 3, the truly wretched Kirk Douglas/Harvey Keitel sci-fi vehicle released the same month, earned $10 million [0] the same amount as it's production budget and barely breaking even.
| It is an act of courage to make a film. It is very hard and very destructive. |
| - John Carpenter. |
Made for a Hollywood shoe-string, even in 1980, at $1 million bucks, The Fog was the suspenseful tale of a small New England town's horrible secret. A secret that stalked the city cloaked in the dense eastern seaboard fog. Carpenter's painstakingly detailed approach to creating an atmosphere of paranoid immediacy works in The Fog - although admittedly not as well as it does for The Thing, In The Mouth Of Madness and of course the original Halloween. Hal Holbrook (Creep Show) and the deliciously adorable Jamie Lee Curtis (True Lies) co-star in a what has often been called a horror classic.
In 2005, The Fog was re-made as a disastrous teen horror movie by Rupert Wainright on an $18 million dollar budget and earning $46 million. Wainright, commercially successful with the nearly universally hated re-make, is currently attempting to redeem himself with Waco dealing with infamous siege in 1993. According to IMDB Waco stars Giovanni Ribisi as David Koresh, with Adrien Brody and Kurt Russell, with a TBA release date in 2011.
Notes:
[0] = These 1980 box office numbers courtesy of Wikipedia.
References:
Wikipedia, The Fog (1980)
Wikipedia, Adrienne Barbeau
IMDB, John Carpenter
Sleaze Blender, Directors: John Carpenter
Den Of Din, Interview With John Carpenter
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