A Film Canon

In literally his most atmospheric effort, Carpenter finds the objective correlative of suspense in the supernatural fog that takes over a small coastal Californian town. By centering audience identification on Stevie (Adrienne Barbeau), a radio presented turned meteorologist - and her extraordinary studio, in the precipitous lighthouse responsible for the fog in the first place - Carpenter draws a poetic connection between water vapour and radio waves. Combined with one of his most iconic synth scores, this transforms the town into a nascent digiscape, waiting to be activated by the fluorescent fog front, which gradually takes over and transforms local infrastructure, culminating with the power station. At the same time, this topography of maritime static opens up an uncanny interface between European and American history, attributed both to a ship of Californian lepers that sank in the nineteenth-century, and some more distant, unformulated source of Spanish doubloons. As the opening quotation from Poe might suggest, it gestures towards a time when American Gothic was inextricable from a collective memory and awareness of uncannily transplanted Englishness - and, appropriately, Carpenter imbues the more discursive parts of the film with a distinctly English flavor. Shot through with Gothic Christianity, these play like a slicker Universal, or less camp Hammer tableau, and open up a quasi-Victorian incredulity at the approaching spectacle of an electrified fluidity. It's a quiet, modest horror film that doesn't need a dramatic or bloody denouement to justify its suspense, nor any real spectacle beyond the fog, whose embodiments never quite emerge or become autonomous from it, suffused with the unsettling slowness of Romero's zombies.