A “terrible” early cut of his chilling ghost story The Fog convinced John Carpenter to reshoot a large portion of it, which ended up saving the movie. John Carpenter movies tended to underperform critically and commercially upon initial release, only to be recognized as classics years later. One notable exception to this rule was Halloween, the movie that made Carpenter’s career and launched a major franchise. Carpenter aimed to do something very different for his next movie, with The Fog being an M.R. James-style ghost story.
It reteamed Carpenter with Jamie Lee Curtis, and while not the runaway success of Halloween, The Fog grossed a respectable $21 million on a budget of $1.1 million (via Box Office Mojo). The film is a slow-burn chiller with great scenes of tension and jumpscares, but compared to the gruesome slashers of the early 1980s, the violence is real tame. The filmmaker initially felt he was headed for disaster after viewing a Fog rough cut, stating (via John Carpenter: Prince of Darkness), “It was terrible. I had a movie that didn’t work, and I knew it in my heart“.
John Carpenter ResH๏τ A Third Of The Fog After Viewing A “Terrible” Rough Cut
Carpenter had to clear up The Fog a month before release
The director and his producer, Debra Hill decided The Fog needed a lot of work before release. It was too slow, some of the scares didn’t work and Carpenter’s own music score fell flat. With only a month to go before the release date, the director informed the production company he intended to reshoot a large chunk, in addition to re-editing and re-scoring The Fog. According to Carpenter’s own estimates, about a third of the final edit consists of reshoots, including the eerie prologue; he also deleted scenes he felt dragged the pace down.
This Jamie Lee Curtis horror movie is far from flawless, and the movie bears some scars from its drastic last-minute reworking. Regardless, Carpenter’s fix-it job resulted in a тιԍнтer, scarier experience, with The Fog receiving good reviews and becoming another hit. In the aftermath, Carpenter considered making his little ghostly horror a real trial by fire; whereas Halloween had been a smooth production where everything clicked together, The Fog was a production where he had to roll up his sleeves and do some serious cosmetic work to salvage it.
Everything John Carpenter Added To The Fog
Most of The Fog’s creepiest scenes were late additions
The Fog opens with an old fisherman named Mr Machen (John Houseman) telling a campfire story to a bunch of children on a beach. This chilling tale of betrayal and murder provides critical backstory too, and while it is hard to think of the film opening any other way, the entire scene was a new addition. Carpenter felt he needed to frame The Fog as a ghost story, hence the new prologue. The director also felt the movie lacked bite, so he added inserts of the ghosts brutally stabbing a fishing crew to death during their first attack.
Carpenter sH๏τ new scenes with Curtis and co-star Tom Atkins, after finding a jump scare where the two find a ᴅᴇᴀᴅ body lacking. In a new sequence, Atkins’ character tells a spooky tale about an abandoned ship to a creeped-out Curtis, and as it ends, the body suddenly falls out of a locker onto her. Curtis later being attacked by a ᴅᴇᴀᴅ body in a morgue was also inserted to up the suspense quota. One of the biggest late-arriving scenes comes at the very end, where Adrienne Barbeau’s DJ Stevie Wayne is attacked by ghosts in her lighthouse radio station.
It would be interesting to actually watch the “terrible” original edit of The Fog that caused Carpenter such headaches, just to understand how far he went to rework it.
In The Fog’s original cut, Stevie had no encounters with the ghosts at all, but Carpenter felt the ending needed something extra. This includes the addition of the “worm face ghost” Stevie hits with a hook. Thanks to the various additions and deletions and Carpenter’s atmospheric new score, The Fog was saved. While Carpenter would employ reshoots on some of his later work – including The Thing – he would never go to such lengths to patch up a film again.
It would be interesting to actually watch the “terrible” original edit of The Fog that caused Carpenter such headaches, just to understand how far he went to rework it. That original cut is probably lost to time now, but who knows? Like the fog itself, maybe that footage could return someday.
Source: Box Office Mojo, John Carpenter: Prince of Darkness by Gilles Boulenger
