THE FOG drifted into 1980, settling at 34th place for the year, its 89 minutes of chilled thrills carving another win for director John Carpenter, who co-wrote the script with producer partner Debra Hill, and also composed the score. In her first feature film, Adrienne Barbeau (then Carpenter’s wife) heads the cast. Back from the Carpenter/Hill blowout smash Halloween, 21-year-old Jamie Lee Curtis is once again among the imperiled. In this vengeful ghosts rampage she’s joined her mom, Janet Leigh. That big-league veteran, along with Hal Holbrook and John Houseman (opener cameo) lend some old pro gravitas to the spookiness.

“There’s something in the fog!”

A small California coastal town (‘Antonio Bay’) is poised for the centennial celebration of its founding. The locals will be rudely surprised to feel the long reach of a curse, festered from the wrecking of a sailing ship a century before and the disappearance of its cargo of loot. The ‘boys are back in town’, vengeful spirits wafted in from the ocean’s graveyard to reclaim their stash from luckless landlubbers. They do so by way of a variety of sharp old-school implements and the complicit weather phenomena that not just clouds visibility but knocks out electric power and communications. Among those caught in the malevolent vapor are a night-shift disc jockey (Barbeau), a local fisherman (Tom Adkins) and a younger hitchhiker (Curtis) that he’s picked up, the mayor (Leigh) and a priest (Holbrook) who drinks too much. Casualties mount, and you can’t kill something that’s already dead.

The script isn’t any more convincing than most B-flick ghost tales, but Carpenter’s direction is keen at setting up tension and delivering expected jolts. Fittingly, The Fog is big on atmosphere, provided by Dean Cundey’s excellent wide-screen cinematography of the locations along the northern California coast around Point Reyes (Adrienne’s lighthouse vantage point and eventual siege) and in small towns in Marin County. Leigh, 52 and fetching, is on hand for a bit of prestige; Holbrook and Houseman (spieling the backstory to kids at a campfire) carry off the charade without breaking a sweat. Curtis doesn’t have much to do, her free-breeze hitchhiker is shallowly presented, and audiences shrugged off the 23-year age dif of a hay roll with Adkins, 44). Carpenter gifted her the part (she’s 2nd billed) as a favor, since she wasn’t getting decent work after Halloween. This, and two other horror stabs that year (Prom Night and Terror Train) boosted her status. Though her DJ voice is nothing if not alluring, Barbeau, 34, isn’t presented as a sex bomb tease but as a straight dramatic character and she comes off quite well, easily the best performance in the group.

Besides bringing Curtis aboard, Carpenter gave small roles to Nancy Loomis and Darwin Jostin, recognizable to fans of the director’s urban siege classic Assault On Precinct 13 (Loomis had also been dispatched in Halloween). With James Canning, Charles Cyphers (another alumnus of Assault On Precinct 13 and Halloween) and George Buck Flower.

Conclusion to long-lost sea chanty “What Do We Do With A Drunken Priest?”

After the trim $1,100,000 production tab, some $3,000,000 was spent on advertising, the blitz rollout succeeding with a gross of $21,400,000. Alas, like too many movies, this pretty good one was not allowed to rest unmolested. A remake appeared in 2005, only to be boiled by scathing reviews, dissipating into the vast emptiness of The Irrelevance Zone. Stick with the original.

Carpenter, with Adrienne, Jamie and Janet. Is this what you call “stacking the deck”?