The Fog is worth your time if you like dread more than jump scares: John Carpenter's 1980 ghost story is a slow burn that rewards patience more than most horror films from that decade ever bothered to. That's my honest read on it, and the film I think belongs right next to it on the same evening: The Woman in Black.
Both films lean on the same trick, and it's a trick I don't think gets talked about enough. Fog isn't just weather in either of them, it's the thing that actually carries the ghost. Take it away and you've got a much duller film underneath. Put the two together on one night and you've got a proper theme, not just two horror films that happened to be free on the same shelf.
The Fog movie review
The Fog movie review, then, the short version: it's a slow burn built almost entirely on dread rather than jump scares, and it rewards patience more than a lot of horror films from the same decade ever bothered to.
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The setup is simple enough to explain in one breath. A small coastal town is getting ready to celebrate its hundredth birthday, and a strange glowing fog rolls in off the sea carrying something that very much remembers what the town's founders did a century before. Jamie Lee Curtis is in it. So is Adrienne Barbeau, playing a late-night radio DJ whose voice becomes the only warning anyone in the town actually gets, broadcasting from a lighthouse on the edge of town while the fog closes in around her, watching it move street by street from her window. Hal Holbrook plays a priest carrying a guilt that turns out to be the whole reason any of this is happening in the first place, tucked away in a journal he'd rather nobody ever read.
What people tend to praise about it, and what I think holds up best, is how little the film actually shows you. Carpenter built a career on restraint, and The Fog might be the purest version of it: a wall of glowing mist, a few silhouettes, a foghorn, and your own imagination doing the rest of the work. It isn't a film that leans on gore or a body count to unsettle you. It leans on the much older fact that fog takes away your ability to see what's coming, and dresses that fear up in a very simple, very effective visual. The radio broadcast running underneath most of the film does a lot of the heavy lifting too, turning Barbeau's voice into a kind of countdown clock the whole town, and the whole audience, is listening to at the same time.
If you want a proper copy for the night rather than whatever cut turns up on a streaming search, The Fog (1980) — Limited Steelbook 4K UHD + Blu-ray is the one I'd go looking for.
Why I'm pairing it with The Woman in Black
The Woman in Black works the same trick from a completely different angle. Susan Hill's novel puts a young solicitor, Arthur Kipps, in a remote house on a causeway that only exists when the tide is out, and cuts him off from the mainland every time the mist rolls in over the marsh. The fog here isn't announcing a ghost the way it does in Antonio Bay. It's doing something quieter, and I think nastier: it's taking away the one thing that would let you leave.
Where The Fog gives you a whole town under siege, The Woman in Black gives you one man, alone, watching a causeway disappear a little more each time the weather turns against him, with a village behind him that already knows exactly what's out there and has decided not to mention it. The story has been told a few different ways over the years, first as Hill's novel, then as a stage play that's run for decades, then as a film. Whichever version you go looking for, the mist over the marsh is doing the same job it always has. It's the wall between what Kipps can prove and what he's starting to believe, and it's the reason nobody can reach him when he needs them to.
If you'd rather start with the story in its original form, The Woman in Black: A Ghost Story is where it began, and it's the version I'd read first if I were building up to any adaptation of it.
What the fog is actually doing in both stories
Line the two films up and they're doing the same emotional work through opposite means. The fog in Antonio Bay is active. It arrives on a schedule, it has a target, and it wants something back for what was taken from it a hundred years earlier. The mist over Eel Marsh is passive. It doesn't want anything at all. It just sits there, closes the road, and lets whatever is already haunting that house get on with its work undisturbed.
One is a ghost story about revenge turning up on your doorstep at a set hour. The other is a ghost story about being left alone with something for far too long, with nobody coming to check on you until the tide allows it. Put the two side by side and between them they cover most of what makes a fog-bound haunting frightening in the first place: the thing that's coming for you, and the thing you're already trapped with.
It's also worth saying that fog does something very practical for a horror film before it does anything symbolic. It limits what the camera, and you, can see at any one moment, which means every shape at the edge of the frame might be nothing, or might be exactly the thing the story warned you about. It creates false pockets of safety, a doorway that looks clear one second and doesn't the next, and it forces characters to make decisions with less information than they'd like. Both of these films understand that a monster you can see clearly stops being frightening quite quickly. A shape moving through mist never quite resolves, which is exactly the point.
Setting up your own fogbound double bill
Since both films depend on you not being able to see clearly, the room you watch them in should probably match. Lights off, or as close to it as you can manage without walking into the coffee table, which I have done, and would rather not discuss further. Something warm to hand, because I refuse to be tense and cold at the same time, that feels like poor planning on my part. Start with The Fog if you want the tension to peak later in the evening, since it takes its time getting going, or start with The Woman in Black if you'd rather ease into the quieter, sadder one before the film with an actual body count.
The order genuinely doesn't matter that much. What matters more is not checking your phone during either of them, because fog films are built on details you only catch once, and a missed shot means a rewind, and a rewind means the mood you spent twenty minutes building is gone. Pull the curtains properly if you've got any streetlight coming in, because nothing kills a fogbound ghost story faster than being able to see your own street perfectly clearly the second you glance up. That's the theory, anyway. I'm going to try and follow my own advice for once this year.
I still haven't managed to put both of these on back to back myself, which is exactly why I'm building the excuse to do it properly before the nights get much longer and the fog outside my own window starts doing this for free. If you get there before I do, I want to know which one won. Team glowing fog and a debt from a hundred years back, or team quiet causeway and a house that won't let anyone leave. Either way, keep the lights low and don't answer the door.
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