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Indeed, The Fog is all about imagination. It’s all about storytelling. Carpenter, a rather minimalist, formally restrained filmmaker even when employing the grand guignol excesses of The Thing, knows when to let pure story do the work, and The Fog is a story about stories...

Aside from any personal ties, what really stands out to me about The Fog is Carpenter’s ability to make Antonio Bay feel like the only place in the world, something achieved via his groundbreaking use of 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen and striking, fog-cloaked cinematography, which lends the film an otherworldly feel.

You can make of the movie’s politics what you will. The fog is a useful, all-purpose metaphor, not least for the falsehoods that seep into and cloud human minds; the radio is a competing system that serves as a source of clarity — at least in this film.

As with many of John Carpenter's films, The Fog was considered a critical letdown when it premiered in 1980, though it made over 20-times its budget at the box office, and, as with many of Carpenter's films, its stature has grown as the years pass. Like its spectral monsters, it refuses to be forgotten. It feels like a film afflicted with hypoplasia, incomplete and with certain parts malformed or underdeveloped, but whose soul shimmers in every incandescent image.

The Fog has the simple problem of feeling inconsequential, as there's never really anything at stake. Carpenter's classic films have a ruthlessly contained precision, but much of The Fog's running time is frittered away on various small-town subplots that are only marginally concerned with the menace of the approaching murderous apparitions.

[T]hough Carpenter’s 1980 film The Fog was tepidly received, his solution was calculated and elegant, giving audiences the Halloween-style impalements they might have expected, while also couching the film in old-fashioned horror atmosphere. Carpenter made it clear that he wasn’t skinny-dipping in the same lake as his slasher contemporaries; Halloween brought classic genre style into a new era, and The Fog goes even further in that direction.

For the first time, he’s [Carpenter] trying to generate some emotion between his characters, instead of concentrating exclusively on the emotion generated between the screen and the audience. But with the increased complexity has come a weakened grip on the strategies of suspense that have been Carpenter’s forte. It’s a failure, but it’s a failure in the right direction.

Carpenter mostly tries to create an unsettling mood by having lights inexplicably come on and small objects move on their own. At times, the movie feels like one of the early Close Encounters alien visits stretched to feature length. But removed from its context as the highly anticipated follow-up to a horror classic, The Fog lingers as a crafty and loving assemblage of pulp gimmicks, played out in a location that rivals Hitchcock locales for pure eye-vacation appeal.

Carpenter’s use of silence is every bit as impressive as his direction of character movement. The slowness with which his characters walk through his frames (across a beach, down stairwells) evokes an existential relationship between nature and man but, more importantly, one between a spiteful past and a misbegotten present.

Carpenter's confidence is outrageous; the range of his models even more so (from Poe to RKO); and the achievement is all his own, despite ragged moments and occasional hesitations.

Unlike "Halloween," which was a model of straight-forward terror and carefully controlled suspense, "The Fog" is constructed of random diversions. There are too many story lines, which necessitate so much cross-cutting that no one sequence can ever build to a decent climax.

But because "The Fog" has a historical plot, because its events are inspired by the past, it should make more sense. A sentient fog may be photogenic (and this is a good-looking movie), but can we identify with it? Is it the kind of villain we love to hate? Not really. "The Fog" is encouraging, all the same, because it contains another demonstration of Carpenter's considerable directing talents. He picked the wrong story, I think, but he directs it with a flourish.