Fog / Frankenstein / Family

As we approach the molten core of Halloween season, we're thinking about John Carpenter, Frankenstein, and haunted houses/families. Light spoilers below . . .

From the Grave.

Three ideas from horror cinema's past.

John Carpenter and Debra Hill followed up Halloween—their perfect, genre-steering slasher—with The Fog, a looser, weirder movie—a movie that, like Halloween, is simple and ambitious at the same time.

1. Impure Atmosphere. Carpenter always wields mood with precision, which is why Michael Myers’s course through Haddonfield feels like a broad phenomenon, like a spell upon the town, even if Michael is just one man. In The Fog he takes on an actually broad phenomenon—a supernatural, ghost-conveying fog rolling off the ocean onto the town of Antonio Bay. The Fog is one of the great vibes films, and one way it generates its sense of the pervasive uncanny is, in the opening stretches of the movie, by skipping around town charting strange occurrences: a brick falls off the wall at the old church, a fuel nozzle flies off a gas pump, a car lift rises of its own accord, shelves shake at a grocery, a chair moves along the floor, and car windows suddenly blow out. Here the horror is all around. The Fog is a film about atmosphere—in both senses.
2. (Super)natural disaster. Fittingly for atmospheric horror, The Fog is interested in the experience of the town—the whole town. It follows a constellation of characters across Antonio Bay, and it finds ways to connect them. They are, of course, all experiencing a related event in the same geographic area. Carpenter also uses the radio to link them together sonically and experientially. They’re all listening to Stevie Wayne on KAB, and they’re following local events (like a missing trawler) through her radio announcements. There are lots of phone calls in The Fog, including to the radio station. There’s even a scene where Stevie Wayne hears the killing of the local weatherman over the phone. The film takes aim, too, at the civic center of the community, following the mayor and the sheriff as they play their roles in a communal celebration of the town’s 100-year anniversary. The result of this choreography of community is that, when the fog rolls in, there’s a distinct sense of the natural disaster to it. If we were to squint our eyes and take in this community reaction to increasingly bizarre and dangerous events, we might see wildfire smoke instead of fog.
3. Fog Cutters. It’s often best not to see a villain. There’s a lot to be said about masks, but a key to their power is of course the simple fact that they obscure, that they anonymize. Val Lewton powered a brilliant career through keeping his horrors obscured, in the shadows, and off-screen. Here, the fog is itself a floating screen for the ghosts within. At the film’s end, we get a fleeting look at the grisly ghosts of Blake and his crew, but otherwise they are ever-shrouded in fog and shadow. A power of locating horror in and within weather is that the horror’s hiding place moves with it. It’s not just vengeful ghosts coming in off the ocean, it’s what's hiding them too.

Right Behind You.

A thought on horror's present.

4. The serenity of influence. If there’s any anxiety of influence evident in Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, it’s the anxiety of having not enough time, in 149 minutes, to draw upon the director’s array of influences as fully as he might like. The Mary Shelley novel is of course the starting point, but so too are James Whale’s Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein. An early screening of footage from the film was set to the music of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and it seems to be an influence as well: the rich, gorgeous, gothic production design and costuming, all in a prestige mode, and the addition of tragic, romantic plot threads, do recall the Coppola. Del Toro's channeling the past, but he’s not interested in an ultra-faithful retelling of Frankenstein. Nor is he interested in some sharp commentary on the book, its adaptations, or the gothic tradition. He has lots of ideas, and they serve to expand and develop a master amalgamated Frankenstein that exists in del Toro’s mind. His Frankenstein operates as a kind of fan fiction (non-derogatory). Del Toro’s Frankenstein is also Shelley’s, also Whale’s—also, in its way, Coppola’s.

Living Deliciously.

A recommendation.

5. I don't have fiends, I got family. I’m a little over halfway through Rivers Solomon’s Model Home, a distressing whirlpool of a read. Contemporary horror loves metaphor, but few creators wield it like Solomon—who knows that metaphor can be as unstable and slippery as memory, as difficult to grapple with as whatever weighty theme it might represent. This is the kind of book where a recollected conversation names something you’ve half-thought to yourself, but never quite seen in writing. Dense, heady, and scary stuff.

Dead of Night publishes every Tuesday. Right now, masked ICE agents continue disappearing valued members of our communities because they had the bad luck to be born in less advantaged places without the right personal documents. The moment to resist fascism is now.