Our actions reveal what our speech by itself cannot.
The Fog is one of John Carpenter’s greatest accomplishments. Its story is elegant in its simplicity, its visuals sumptuously forlorn, and its score seeps spectral sequences of tones which linger in the viewer’s mind long after its final frame. Unlike many horror films, The Fog (1980) is notable for relying on silence, natural sound, and music to carry its forward motion, like the tide sweeping forgotten items out to sea.
Not only forgotten items, though, but forgotten histories as well. Vengeance and the corruption of memory are the primary motifs explored by The Fog, though it does not highlight its themes the way a Mike Flanagan or an Ari Aster film might. But more on that later.
The film begins with an epigraph from Edgar Allan Poe: “Is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream?” This gives way to an old man telling a group of children stories around a campfire on a beach. As it approaches midnight he tells one last story: the tale of the Elizabeth Dane, a ship that wrecked in a dense fog a hundred years before. The Elizabeth Dane mistook a campfire on the shore for a safe passage away from rocks. Her crew, the community’s fishermen promise, will rise from their watery graves when the fog returns to search for the campfire that led them to their deaths.
It is a story everyone in the community of Antonio Bay knows, and yet no one knows. For there is the story the community has enshrined, one of a tragic mistake and its transformation, but beneath and camouflaged within that is another story of greed, murder, and deception. The falsified story underwrites the life of the community in the present, but how long can deceit sustain such a life?
The true story comes to light with Father Malone, who, the film insinuates, is an alcoholic. Malone is lost in some sort of malaise, avoiding the problems of cash flow and maintenance of his church, but it seems as though these matters are only symptomatic of a more fundamental problem, an alienation of which Malone himself is only perhaps dimly aware. His shadow is projected against one of the walls of his study, suggesting he is a shadow of his former self.
After midnight is struck, a brick suddenly dislodges from the wall and falls to his desk, revealing a journal. Malone discovers it belonged to his grandfather, himself a priest at the time of Antonio Bay’s founding. It has been sealed up in a hiding place within the church’s edifice, symbolically and literally concealing a secret within the church’s—and the community’s— beginning. That it still exists at all shows that there was an at least subconscious desire for those secrets to be discovered.
Father Malone is the film’s moral center, the one who, through the discovery of the secret of Antonio Bay’s founding, awakens to reality.
The church’s architecture deforms itself to uncover what has been hidden. It had to in order to rectify an original deformation, one hidden in plain sight. The journal discloses his grandfather’s part in a conspiracy. The church is tarnished by this founding priest’s willingness to partner in murder and theft rather than condemning it. The wreck of the Elizabeth Dane returns with the tide, but transformed. For while the event has been mythologized as a minor tragedy and subsequent catalyst for the town’s founding, in reality, Father Malone learns, it was a deliberate act.
The Elizabeth Dane was carrying a group of lepers, led by a benefactor named William Blake, who had arranged with the town’s founders to establish a new colony on a nearby island. The six conspirators sought both to quarantine the community from the lepers’ uncleanness and to supply the capital it needed for its foundation. The prospect of a leper colony so near to Antonio Bay repulsed them. But this panicked urge to banish the unclean only revealed the uncleanness at the heart of Antonio Bay’s founders. The death signified in the lepers’ flesh was an inconvenient analogue of the living death that enslaves humankind, and in their haste to exterminate the bearers of leprosy the conspirators demonstrated their bondage to leprosy’s antitype.
Their readiness to rationalize murdering Blake’s group demonstrated their truest devotions and most powerful drives. After all, we act out of not what we claim is most important to us, but out of that which most claims and grounds us. Our actions reveal what our speech by itself cannot. The fact that a priest condoned and played a part in this crime is a terrible indictment upon him and his vocation. To think that the construction of the church can cleanse him and his fellow conspirators of guilt or sanctify their wrongdoing demonstrates their gross mischaracterization of the God they ostensibly serve.
Though other characters are introduced in the first third of The Fog, Father Malone is the film’s moral center, the one who, through the discovery of the secret of Antonio Bay’s founding, awakens to reality. He is gripped by a renewed sense of duty through the apocalyptic intervention of the truth becoming unconcealed. It is right to characterize it as apocalyptic, as that word most properly denotes an unveiling, a revelation. It connotes less the end of the world and more the end of a world insofar as that world was built upon distortion and lies. Such a world unravels in the event of apocalypse as the one to whom the truth is revealed sees through falsehoods that had given it structure and an artificial destiny.
The picturesque facade of Antonio Bay is but a dream within a dream, one that most of its residents are content to remain within. Its founding sin rises out of the past the night Father Malone is given the journal, at the hour the conspirators planned the deaths of Blake and his men. “Midnight ’til one belongs to the dead,” the elder Malone writes. “Good Lord deliver us.” Pay phones begin ringing throughout Antonio Bay, TVs turn on, car alarms go off, objects begin to move and rattle and glass shatters between midnight and one o’clock. Three fishermen on a trawler, the Sea Grass, are drinking and killing time when the revenants of the Elizabeth Dane return in an eerie fog and kill them. The night’s peace is disrupted by these demonstrations that something unnervingly Other lurks beneath the facade of that peace. But everyone goes back to sleep. Life resumes exactly as before.
The truth can set us free if we will receive it. The problem is that we frequently prefer the narcolepsy of falsehood, the dream within the dream. In spite of learning the truth of the Elizabeth Dane’s wreck from Father Malone, Kathy Williams, the organizer of the centennial celebration of the town’s founding, asks him if he will still pronounce a benediction at the centennial. “Antonio Bay has a curse on it,” he answers sternly. “Do we take that as a ‘no’?” her assistant asks, dismissing his censure. “Our celebration tonight is a travesty,” he continues, undaunted. “We’re honoring murderers.” “I think you’re taking all of this much too seriously,” Kathy says, trying to ideologically sedate him. As so often is the case, an inconvenient past can be ignored when its mythicized double is more useful for the present.
Ghosts are always, always signifiers of something that has gone wrong: a secret that has not been brought to light, an injustice that has not been righted.
The atrocity woven into Antonio Bay’s origin mirrors the violent history of the United States. Criticisms of something like the 1619 Project can be apt on specific historical grounds and it nevertheless be indisputably true that the history of this country is soaked with the blood of human beings deemed unworthy of the ambitions it assumed for itself. It may not be true that this country was founded for the purpose of subjugating and exterminating, but it is beyond dispute that these things took place in the prosecution of its self-appointed myth of manifest destiny.
Though falsehood can give rise to concrete situations that are real, the Real always pushes back against its counterfeits and against the veneer with which we cover over the cracks in such myths. The journal belonging to Father Malone’s grandfather illustrates how that which is repressed always returns. The truth that would rupture the artificial serenity we enjoy doesn’t stay buried. Manufactured tranquility is always more precarious than it appears to be, depending as it does upon its denizens staying ideologically asleep.
But again, The Fog doesn’t reduce the wreck of the Elizabeth Dane to a cipher for the United States’ wars against and relocation of Native Americans. Does it illuminate that history through its narrative mirror? It certainly can, if we will see it, but it’s to the film’s credit that it doesn’t do so through hamfisted allegory. In pursuing one thing it invites hermeneutical reflection upon many other things in which we recognize similarity. This order and concentration is vital. The artlessness of much contemporary “elevated horror” lies precisely in trivializing both the objects of horror within the story and the real-world analogues to which that horror can apply.
In such cinema the frightening thing on-screen fades in significance as what the story is “really” about comes to the forefront—and what it’s “really” about, it seems, is trauma and grief. This crowds out the frightening things you were fooled into thinking were important. It’s an underhanded bait-and-switch strategy that communicates 1) that what you were excited to see is actually trivial and 2) that what you really ought to be concentrating on is your pain because anything else is just a distraction from that. Moreover, it communicates that ignoring those frightening things to focus on your pain is transformative in a good way, rather than a means to further curving in on yourself.
The Fog does nothing of this sort. The film presents its premise, then depicts its characters confronting the antagonists, and in so doing confronting the historical wrong by which they became sympathetic antagonists. All of these components are interwoven: there is no prioritization given to that nebulously defined phenomenon—trauma—over the conflicts the film has assured us are significant.
Contemporary critics may complain that The Fog doesn’t develop its theme of repressed history and revenge in a more explicitly political vein, but it seems to me that this is the mistake of failing to distinguish the fact that all art has a political valence from the insistence that all art be explicitly political in its form and its goals. The Fog is content to smother the viewer in an atmosphere of dread, trusting we will recognize in it a surplus that speaks to the real world in which we are situated.
[Hauntology] riffs on the similarity between “ontology” and “haunting” to expose how absence can be as powerful as straightforward presence.
The film recognizes that history isn’t simply what took place in the past. History is the ongoing reception of what took place as mediated through discourse: it’s how we interpret the past and live within that interpretation. Acknowledging this is not to commit the sins of “elevated horror”; it’s simply an acknowledgment that ghosts are always, always signifiers of something that has gone wrong: a secret that has not been brought to light, an injustice that has not been righted. The ghost is a witness to an imperfect past, and the fear they convey is owed not only to their being-dead-and-yet-not, but to the re-emergence of the past we want to leave forgotten.
The Fog is an exercise in what Jacques Derrida styled “hauntology.” The word riffs on the similarity between “ontology” and “haunting” to expose how absence can be as powerful as straightforward presence. The figure of the ghost is Derrida’s case in point, as the ghost is dead and yet, in its activity, is clearly something more than dead. The one the ghost represents is gone, in some sense, and yet they are here, where they shouldn’t be.
Or should they? Because the ghost is a testament to an unrectified or even suppressed past, it may be that the present is what should not be. Hauntology often trades in “lost futures,” those visions of what is now our present that never came to be and yet haunt us in our disappointment. Though they never were, we sense and are burdened by their loss.
Hauntology is also at home, however, with the past that never really was and the past that will not die. Both are depicted in The Fog: the myth of Antonio Bay’s noble founding is venerated in spite of having never taken place, and the murdered and defrauded victims who contest that myth. In even the most prosaic account of history, that which is absent exerts itself and influences us, the living, but hauntology conceptualizes the tensions between the living and the not-quite-living which we routinely overlook and yet perceive, however faintly.
The titular fog itself is such a hauntological marker. Fog, it is suggested in the film, is unusual in Antonio Bay: “as suddenly as it had come,” the old man from the beginning says, “the fog lifted, and never came again.” Its uncanny emergence heralds the return of the supposedly dead past that refuses to be forgotten, that now demands its reckoning. That fog that appeared the night of the Elizabeth Dane’s wreck “seemed” to aid and abet the conspirators, Father Malone’s grandfather observes in his journal. And yet the fog now accompanies Blake’s mission of vengeance.
The fog is the excess that spills out of the wound of the past, and it is an excess that characterizes the revenants’ desire as well. The fog is not concerned with justice; it seeks only to destroy and attaches itself adventitiously to others’ murderous intent, whether that be Antonio Bay’s founders or their victims. Neither are Blake and his men concerned with justice, properly speaking: an imbalance is confronted in their coming, yes, but they do not seek particular targets who will correspond to each of the original conspirators. Their victims are simply at the wrong place at the wrong time.
The journal is also a hauntological artifact; through it the past imposes itself upon its mythologized counterfeit. However, it is one that interprets the strange events that begin taking place. Furthermore, it impels Father Malone towards repentance and sacrifice. It is a literal relic of Antonio Bay’s foundational sin that unexpectedly launches the very possibility of taking ownership of that sin. Father Malone finds his vocation renewed through its intervention such that at the film’s climax he offers himself to Blake so that the others who have fled to the church from the fog may live.
Answering the demands of those who were denied justice in the past will often require a sort of death in order to atone for that wrong. But it is one that is willingly accepted to rectify that wrong. More often than not it is symbolic rather than literal: a humbling, a returning of what was wrongfully taken, whatever the case may be. But whichever it is, symbolic or literal, to act in this way is to follow the pattern of Jesus’s life. Father Malone accepts this and reverses the course initiated by his grandfather. Where one priest failed in his duty to represent his people to God and God to his people, this one embodies the way of Jesus Christ who, as the Last Adam, the true Israelite, and the perfect priest, absorbs and undoes the damage wrought by his predecessors.
As simple and as well-executed as The Fog is, however, it’s not without some odd moments that have baffled viewers, parts that do not neatly fit this narrative logic. Why does a plank from the Elizabeth Dane wash ashore, and why does the ship’s name transform into the phrase, “Six must die”? Why does Blake’s voice play through the radio when the plank is placed upon it? Why does the body of the fisherman recovered from the Seagrass temporarily reanimate and threateningly approach Jamie Lee Curtis’s character? And why does it inscribe the number three on the floor? One could answer, “Because it provides a clue the characters need for the sake of the plot,” and they would not be wrong. But why does it almost make sense here?
The final horror of The Fog is the living death that wants to consume all of us, that tells us that our desire for revenge is justified.
It seems to me that hauntology supplies an answer, one that can be true even if Carpenter did not consciously intend it. The relics and artifacts of the past speak and they will say what they most need to say regardless of our readiness for or interest in it. The plank is treated as an interesting find and absentmindedly placed on the radio when Blake seems to take advantage of the amplification and transmission available there. Whatever else he may be now, Blake was a man and his betrayal hurt him deeply and bewildered him and he must speak. “Something like an albatross around the neck,” he intones over the radio. “No. More like a millstone… Damn them all!”
Similarly, the man recovered from the Seagrass longs to be known. He is a human being: how could he not? He was taken by pure happenstance, made to pay for other men’s sins. He is a victim the same as Blake and his men, silenced without a witness to the wrong of his death. His scrawling of the number three seems less ominous to me and more of a warning, as if to say, “The things that did this to me seek three more. Be watchful.” But of course it’s difficult to see through to such a meaning when the author is a corpse that has somehow collapsed behind you.
Along these lines of both inconsistency and of being known, there is the film’s ending. The journal reveals there is a large cross made from the gold stolen from Blake and his men—another indicator both of that priest’s woebegotten values and of his awareness of his need for atonement. Father Malone takes it directly to Blake as he offers himself on behalf of the others. In an arresting image, Blake’s undead hands grip the now glowing cross as Father Malone stands frozen in both terror and resolve. And then the revenants and the cross are gone.
Later, after the others have returned to their homes, Father Malone wonders aloud why that encounter ended as it did. “Why not six, Blake?” he asks. “Why not me?” And in that moment the fog creeps into his church once more, and Blake returns to dispatch him. Again, it’s simple enough and absolutely true that the revenants return for him at the very end so as to provide one final scare. But what is also true is that this moment demonstrates the malignant absurdity of the desire for revenge.
Plainly the revenants considered the return of their gold an important component of their mission. But they are not satisfied with its restoration. The passage of time between their disappearance and reappearance in the church is suggestive of a time of deliberation, and their return to the church shows that revenge compels them. They will settle for nothing less than death visited upon others—exactly six, no less. And unfortunately, they are more like their own murderers than they likely care to recognize, as they visit that death upon people with no substantive connection to the wrong perpetrated upon them.
It is in this insatiable desire that the viewer sees that whatever they were in life, and however they were wronged by unscrupulous men in that life, they have become something ghastly and other. They are not the men they once were: they are shadows and wraiths, twisted upon themselves, unable to live with anything less than scales perfectly balanced by murder. These shadows answer another, earlier on. Father Malone became most fully himself in his readiness to lay down his life, while Blake and his men became inhuman wraiths due to their ravenous hunger for revenge. That revenge now defines them more than any other factor from their former lives.
The final horror of The Fog is the living death that wants to consume all of us, that tells us that our desire for revenge is justified, that it demands satisfaction, that we cannot be apart from it. History will continue churning and grinding away at human life, but will that be what is most formative for us? Many of us will be wronged in this vale of tears, but will we believe that vengeance is the only thing that can complete us? If it is, and if we will believe that, then though we are biologically alive we are already in the grip of death. Genuine, substantive life lies in self-emptying, in the renunciation of prestige and of false histories. Taking up our cross can wake us out of the dream within a dream that is no life at all.
