I hate zombies. Even more than I hate vampires. They’re a stupid, derivative and over-used monster that has come to prominence because it’s been embraced by people who watch cheesy 70s Euro-horror films ironically and film-nerds who remember reading an essay once about how the zombies in Dawn of the Dead “were a metaphor for consumerism, maaaan…”
That being said, there are a small number of zombie films I enjoy. Shaun of the Dead, Return of the Living Dead, Brain Dead and this Australian film. Of course, the three things those films have in common is that they treat the subject matter with all the reverence it deserves. That is to say, none.

Undead is another one of those horror films that’s a bit short on plot, but makes up for it in other ways. Most of the characters are one-note, but drawn well and fairly archetypal (power tripping authority figure, bitchy beauty queen, useless boyfriend, terrified rookie). On the surface level, it’s just the story of a woman trying to get out of her stifling small town to start a new life, and the zombie apocalypse that gets in her way. But it’s the complications to that basic plot that make the film interesting, combined with a certain black humor and zeal for the self-consciously “awesome” in a way that Chris Sims would approve of the word. See, it’s not just enough that, following a meteor shower, townspeople start turning into flesh-eating zombies. No, then the caustic rains start to fall. Followed by the alien abductions. And the giant thorny wall that materializes around the town, cutting off all contact with the outside world. And then our farm girl turned reluctant beauty queen turns to a hillbilly gun-nut who knows gun-fu to mentor her in the ways of the zombie fighter.
It’s all just over the top enough to work.

Zombies have become the convenient cypher for horror fiction and films in recent years, a catch-all metaphor for whatever social movement or concern at hand, and this film is no exception. Their use here is actually a bit heavy-handed in that regard, especially when coupled with the giant wall around the town. Our heroine wants nothing more than to escape her old life, but she’s literally trapped, and all the townspeople who were holding her back now literally want a piece of her. And, as she’s reminded by her bitchy beauty-queen rival, taking care of the town’s needs is her responsibility, a point driven home in the now apparently mandatory ironic ending.

But aside from all that, there’s another element of the film that I enjoy, and one well worth mentioning, though it borders on the spoilerish. The zombie massacre, where our heroes rack up an impressive number of zombie killings, is a staple of modern zombie films. It’s expected by the audience. The neat trick pulled here is the dawning awareness in both the characters and the audience that indiscriminately killing zombies is exactly the wrong tactic to take in the long run. It’s the sort of response that people who don’t know what they’re doing and don’t know the nature of the situation they’ve found themselves in would take, because it’s the sort of thing they think they’re supposed to do. It’s the sort of thing that people who watch zombie movies would do, and it only ends up making things worse.

This is truly one of my favorite, under-appreciated horror films. It works beautifully, with an exceptional cast, and a surprisingly subtle, for the subject matter, metaphor at it’s heart. It blends wonderfully different strands of horror themes; ambiguity, the supernatural, isolation, a Cassandra-like hero.

The film opens with disquieting imagery, possibly the most disturbing piece of steak I’ve ever seen, and Captain Boyd, recently promoted hero of the Mexican-American war physically sickened by the sight of his fellow officers eating meat. We soon find out that his revulsion is related to his promotion. Far from being a hero, he pretended to be dead, and the blood of his fellow soldiers dripped into his mouth as their bodies were piled on top of him. When he emerged from the pile, after a sudden burst of strength, he just happened to capture the Spanish commanders. Since exposing him as a coward would be bad for morale, his commanding officer punishes him instead by sending him to a remote fort in the Sierra Nevada mountains, staffed with a skeleton crew for the winter. Shortly a half-starved man arrives at the camp, telling the soldiers the story of his escape from a lost wagon train that has turned to cannibalism and murder to survive. The soldiers go to investigate, only to discover that the strange man was not entirely telling them the truth. From that point on, the story largely becomes a battle of wits and determination between Boyd and the cannibal, with the Native American legend of the Wendigo hovering over them, as it seems that eating human flesh really does make people stronger.

It’s the battle between Boyd and the cannibal that really drives the action. Boyd feels shamed for his cowardice in the war, and the cannibal is a charismatic figure who seems to offer a practical method of dealing with shame by joining with him in a sort of sect, and it is only by resisting the cannibal through an assertion of morality that Boyd is able to ultimately triumph. What’s intriguing about this is, by this point in the film, it’s clear that Boyd and the cannibal are not actually talking about eating people anymore; they’re actually talking about the concept of “Manifest Destiny” and American imperialism. It’s not that far off, as far as metaphors go, as the proposed “victims” of the cannibal’s plots are chiefly planned to be those who are heading over the mountains to California out of a desire to join in the Gold Rush. He plans to live off those whose goal is unfettered capitalism and commodity exploitation. The tone is darkly comic through much of this, very black-humored, and the ultimate resolution is both fitting and somewhat cynical in its acknowledgement that, however the drama between Boyd and his adversary works out, there will always be more men willing to live off their fellows to come along.

It’s been noted before that 1981 was a good year for werewolf movies. True, you had Wolfen, The Howling and An American Werewolf In London, and while Wolfen and Howling are entertaining, and better than average, An American Werewolf is the one worth remembering.

Which isn’t to say that Joe Dante’s stab at a werewolf picture is without merit. It’s clever enough, with plenty of in-jokes sprinkled throughout. And the werewolf effects are actually quite good for the period. And, let’s face it: the film spawned six sequels. So either it was a very cheap name to license for derivative knock-offs, or something about the film resonated with the general public. Or possibly both. It’s actually, when all is said and done, a pretty good monster movie at the end of the day. It just suffered through the misfortune of being released very closely to one of the best monster movies, and one with a similar theme at that.

The meat of The Howling is strong as well. Karen White, a news reporter has been contacted by a serial killer, and with police protection she goes to meet with him. It is presumed that he nearly rapes her before being killed by the police, but she can’t actually remember what happened, and his body has vanished from the morgue. A helpful celebrity psychologist (played by Patrick Macnee, classing up the joint immensely) encourages Karen and her husband Bill to spend some time at “The Retreat”, a private colony he runs in northern California for his patients. Once there, Karen is further traumatized by strange howling noises in the woods, and Bill is seduced and turned into a werewolf by, well, a woman who dresses like this to go to a barbeque:

Which really doesn’t say much for Bill.
Eventually, Karen and a friend from work end up killing or burning to death most of the werewolves, but not before Karen is bitten. To warn the nation of the dangerous werewolf menace hiding amongst them, she turns into a wolf on live television and gets shot to death.

That whole “werewolf as sex” thing come to the fore here. Count the number of times a character says “repression” if you doubt me. A significant amount of time is spent at the start of the film showing the audience a pornographic movie clip. And Karen’s husband gets bitten by a werewolf because he goes catting around while his wife recovers from being assaulted. And, of course, there’s the notorious sex scene where Bill and the druid priestess wannabe actually turn into wolves while having sex. So, again, there’s some strong and engaging material here, slightly hurt by a subtly misogynistic tone weaved through it. It was a just a case of, in hindsight, bad timing.

I’m always slightly hesitant about watching supernaturally themed European horror films. While Italy, and to a lesser extent France and Spain, tend to excel in creating stylistic and visually arresting thrillers, their monster movies tend to lack something. Or, rather, they tend to go a bit overboard with the gore and don’t feel the need to interrupt the gore with a story. Or characters.

And this Dario Argento/Lamberto Bava collaboration is pretty strongly in that category. Plot is almost nonexistent. Characters have no real personality and are largely interchangeable. We’re given no real reason to root for our final couple other than that she’s less of a bitch than her friend and he’s not as much of a creep as his friend. And these are the heroes, mind you, and we spend less time with them than we do with a quartet of coke-snorting “punk rockers” who appear in a particularly inane subplot. As for the story, well…it’s your basic zombie movie, only the zombies are demons, and the action is confined, or so we’re led to believe to the interior of a movie house showing a Satanic film. So it’s cabin-spam, with demon/zombie killers, and ciphers for characters.
It’s the sort of thing I would have loved when I was a teenager, in other words, but don’t really have much patience for now.

And it’s a shame, because there are some nice touches that hint at a better film. The “film within a film” gimmick that presages the possession could have been explored more. Voyeurism is a popular theme in horror films, as it indicts the film’s audiences in with whatever bad act the characters are creating, and the audience watching people watch a film that causes demons to attack is a nice opening for some metatextual commentary on horror films and horror audiences. But it’s not explored. Just as how, exactly, the world falls to zombie/demon chaos when we’re pretty clearly led to believe that the possession is limited to the theater is dealt with in a manner that feels like a post-production pick-up shot so that the audience doesn’t ask questions about a massive plot-hole.

Ghost stories, particularly the subset focusing on haunted houses, often feel like a distinctly feminine approach to horror. Which is not to say that they are effeminate, not at all, but that the genre seems to particularly focus on female protagonists. A haunted house is essentially an attack on a realm traditionally ruled by women, and hauntings, real or imagined, are frequently used as signs of some failure on a woman’s part to live up to an expected standard as wife, mother or care-taker. Richard Matheson’s novel, and his screenplay adapting it, seem like a response to that type of ghost story. Because Matheson takes that core concept of a psychic essence living on in a building, and makes it into a story of sexual repression and impotency rather than one of domestic shortcomings.

Matheson sets up this situation by introducing us to a skeptical physicist who has spent years trying to prove that “hauntings” are not evidence of life after death, bribed by a dying rich man to find some definitive answer. He is tasked with taking a small team of psychics into the “Belasco House”, a building in which such sexually and criminally depraved acts occurred that it has been tainted with evil. Evil so strong that of the two previous attempts to investigate the hauntings, only one person escaped sane and alive. Into this environment steps the skeptical, rationalist doctor, his wife, the sole survivor of the previous expedition, a psychic who refuses to use his abilities (played by Roddy McDowall, in one of those curious casting decisions where it’s not quite clear whether casting McDowall is meant to be an indication that his character is gay or not), and a mental psychic who believes her abilities are the powers of God made manifest. Almost immediately the groups finds itself at odds, with the doctor refusing to believe in a supernatural explanation for the haunting, even in the face of physical evidence, and the female psychic who believes that Belasco’s previously unknown son is trying to make contact with her. Relations between the group degenerate, as an occult force possesses the doctor’s wife and tries to get her to seduce McDowall and Belasco’s “son” tries to get the good Christian girl to “sleep” with him. When the doctor builds a device intended to destroy residual electromagnetic energy, thus disrupting the deus ex machina fields that make it appear that the house is haunted, the conflict between the doctor and the psychic becomes physical, and in short order she finds herself crushed beneath a large crucifix and he is impaled by a chandelier.

At this point, the theme of the film starts to become clearer. Everything to do with the haunting has had to do with sex, specifically the sex drives of the investigators. One psychic is sexually repressed, so the house attempts to seduce her with a lost soul needing comfort. The doctor already devotes more time to his work than his wife, and so the house attacks him by revving his wife’s sexual appetite. Belasco, we’ve been told, was a man of tremendous and disgusting sexual appetites, but…the big reveal, the source of the haunting, as discovered by McDowall, is that Belasco was a man of such tremendous inadequacy that he actually cut off his own legs and had them mechanically elongated in order to appear taller. The implication here, the subtext, is that if Belasco was that much of a fraud and failure, he must have been impotent as well. Just as McDowall was, in a sense, when he refused to use his psychic abilities. Just as the Doctor was when he ignored his wife’s needs. And when his machines failed. Hell House is essentially haunted because men can’t get it up.
Like I said, it’s Matheson trying to butch up the genre. It’s an interesting idea he’s going for, but in execution it comes off so misogynist as to be almost comical. Even if the bickering between the believer and the skeptic is resolved with the both of them being destroyed by symbols of their faith is a nice dramatic touch.

What eventually saves Hell House from itself is the superb use of atmosphere. Haunted house movies are tricky. If you go overboard with physical or visual effects to represent the supernatural presence, you turn your film into just another monster movie (or worse). If you keep your film purely psychological, you’ve got a movie about people going insane over nothing happening whatsoever. Hell House actually strikes a good balance, with one spectacular scene of overt menace, and then quieter, more restrained physical effects, with the rest of the haunting effects communicated by the actors and very carefully chosen and filmed close ups. With this approach, the essentially intangible nature of the haunting is made clear, but the audience is still given something to see and react to themselves.

Before he decided that there was more money to be made as a low rent L. Ron Hubbard, Whitley Strieber wrote a couple of enjoyable, pulpy horror novels. While The Hunger is probably better known because of a) vampires and b) lesbians, and the obligatory merging of those two ideas, I think the film and novel of Wolfen are more interesting. The ground is less well trod than sexy female vampires and the themes resonate a little more broadly.

It’s a shame that it’s necessary to spoil the plot here, but after nearly thirty years it’s fair game, because the build-up and mystery over what, exactly, has been killing people in New York, and why, is handled very nicely. An international developer, his wife and their bodyguard are brutally murdered in Battery Park, the corpses dismembered and apparently partially eaten. Suspicion falls on unnamed terrorist groups, largely at the suggestion of a representative of a private security firm which hunts down terrorists on behalf of wealthy clients. While officially authorities investigate communist groups looking for a scapegoat for the killings, the coroner’s office is unable to find any traces of a weapon on the bodies and, further complicating matters, finds animal hairs that link the deaths to the deaths of street people in an area of urban blight that the dead industrialist is planning to gentrify.

Now, maybe this was an early sign that Strieber was going to go a little woo happy in later years, but it’s at this point in the film that Albert Finney as the rationalist, curmudgeonly, implied to be trigger happy-if not outright corrupt-cop decides that, on the basis of this evidence, that the most likely suspect in the killings is: a Native American shape-shifter. It’s an interesting red herring, as there have been some curious quick shots of Indians being spiritual within an urban environment and hating on The Man. But when all your evidence is pointing to “animal” and the skeptical character is leaning towards a supernatural explanation for events, something has maybe gone off the rails a little bit. And I think it really does come down to the aforesaid woo-ish tendencies of Strieber. Because, you see, this whole Native American/shape-shifter thing comes down to the fact that our red brothers are more in touch with the natural world, maaan, dig it. It’s that weirdly paternalistic attitude about “wise, noble savages” that so many Americans are inflicted with used as a plot element in a horror film. Even though the film gives itself an out, that Finney is just being messed with and the Indians are feeding him a load of bull because he’s a borderline fascist, we’re still left with the suggestion that all Native Americans have super mystical senses.

Eventually, the truth comes out, that the real threat is wolves. Not just any wolves, super-intelligent wolves that have lived hidden in American cities for centuries, picking off people who won’t be missed (thinning the herd, as it were), and only now making their presence felt because Euro-trash real estate developers are tearing down the slums and urban squalor that the live and hunt in. And this actually rings true to me. People have a weird relationship to the natural world. They want to appreciate it at a distance, they feel guilty for destroying it, but all the same they don’t want it intruding on their world. I live in Southern California. I know people who freak out at even the barest suggestion that maybe there are coyotes or mountain lions living in the hills behind their houses, even though statistics and the exercise of common sense means they are all almost never going to have an encounter with one or the other. We feel guilty over destroying the land that these animals used, but we don’t want them around all the same. So, actually, maybe that Native American connection wasn’t quite so ham-fisted after all.

One of the dangers with attempting to mix science and the supernatural in your horror movie is that, unless you very carefully blend the two realms together, you risk creating something that’s an incoherent mess and fails to satisfy fans of either approach. And such is the case with this film, where John Carpenter wants to present an “ancient astronauts” theory of theology with a filmic approach to the subject of quantum mechanics, and ended up making a movie where Satan is a bottle of green goo in a church basement.

Carpenter’s real intent is pretty broadly telegraphed. “Martin Quartermass” is a rather poor pseudonym to adopt if you don’t want people to figure out the inspiration for your movie. And, in fact, a tremendous amount of exposition here takes the form of translated latin documents and scientists making astonishing claims about the impossibility of the discoveries they’re making. The gist of it is, seven million years ago, Satan, in the form of a viscous green liquid came to Earth in an attempt to free his “father”, the Anti-God, from an extra-dimensional prison. He was trapped, and some time later an alien, by the name of Jesus, came to warn the Earth about what Satan really was, but he was killed because no one wanted to hear it. The Catholic Church then covered all this up so well that even they forgot the truth. And in the midst of all this people in the future are beaming a video into people’s dreams via tachyon emissions to try and warn them about the very stupid thing they’re doing fussing around with Satan In A Jar.
At this point, even Von Daniken thinks the film is straining suspension of disbelief just a tad.

To be fair to Carpenter, as over the top as all that is, by itself it would have been a perfectly acceptable plot for a film. Where things really go off the rack is in the semi-supernatural elements that are introduced. The film’s rationale is that these are just the byproducts of the super-advanced quantum effects of having Satan in a jar in your basement, but I apparently missed the day in physics class where we discussed how a plus spin state results in a rain of worms. If you want me to accept a purely supernatural explanation for strange phenomena, I can. I’m fully willing to take demon possession and zombies and satanic mind-control in my stride if you want me to believe that it’s magic. (Even if your film’s use of homeless people as minions of evil is an odd choice that suggests a strange political statement that’s never adequately articulated.) I can do it. But asking me to accept that homeless people turn into homicidal killing machines because a math equation is being written down a hundred yards away…no, sorry, can’t do that.

The best way to approach the film is to take it with tongue firmly in cheek. The film can’t be taken seriously past a certain point, so to enjoy it, you need to have fun with it. Yes, it has Victor Wong in an amazingly subdued performance and Donald Pleasence in an over the top one. But it also has Jameson Parker in a lead role that’s gayer than a gay thing that’s very gay. It’s gayer than Freddie Mercury in drag duetting with Liza Minelli. I mean, just look at the gay…tucked in polo shirt with khakis, a man bag, a magnificent porno stache…and he flirts with women by doing card tricks, when he isn’t playing shirtless solitaire. He’s the A Gay of every Log Cabiners dreams. He’s not crying at the end of the film because his “girlfriend” dived into a mirror so that Satan and Anti-God would be trapped forever. He’s crying because now he has to find a new beard.

Over at The ISB Chris has declared it Dracula Week. I can only assume that this is because Chris feels like he needs an excuse to discuss scenes of vampires being kicked in the face by Batman. Because Dracula is, outside of Stoker’s novel, kind of lame. There is, however, one cinematic moment in which the Count very nearly redeems himself. And that’s the time he got taken down, along with all the other monsters that Universal Pictures made movies about, by a group of pre-adolescent boys in The Monster Squad, a feat only slightly less embarrassing for vampires as a whole than that time that the Count got beheaded by an effete British lawyer and his drinking buddies.

Monster Squad is of that last generation of children’s films where children are allowed to act like children do when adults aren’t around, before the genre became horribly sanitized for fear of offending adult sensibilities. The kids in this film curse, smoke and take naked photos of the girl next door. They also, curiously, show an anachronistic fascination with movie monsters of the 1930s and 40s. Even at the time of release, this seemed a bit odd to me. I was only marginally older than these kids were supposed to be, and boys my age who were interested in horror, to a one, thought that vampires and mummies and the like were horribly childish and lame. No, it was the slasher villain-heroes who fascinated them, figures like Freddy Kreuger and Jason Voorhees. I’d be surprised if more than one in a hundred even knew what a Gill Man was supposed to be. (As for myself, my loyalties to werewolves as the supreme avatars of horror films were formed even then, making me the exception that proved the rule.) If anything, the fascination with old school monsters, despite a mocking discussion of a “Groundhog Day” series of slasher films two characters indulge in, strikes me as screenwriters Frank Dekker and Shane Black talking about boys when they were that age, and moving them forward in time to a contemporary setting. The late 60s/early 70s feels like a more natural point for a group of proto-geeks to be masters of black and white horror film trivia.

Still, there is plenty that the film gets right about kids. As I said, the behavior rings true, as does the frustration with adults, who veer between patronizing and self-involved neglect in their treatment of children. The squabbling nature, casual cruelty and one upmanship of adolescent boys, particularly friends, is also captured accurately. Part of that, though, is the period in which it was made. The legacy of The Goonies hangs heavy over this film, with the Frankenstein Monster taking Sloth’s role as the retarded child-like adult who bonds with the children. Even Scary German Guy’s role as the only adult who believes the children about the monsters planning to take over the world, because he himself is an outsider as well, feels like it’s lifted from other films of the era. The odd emphasis that is placed on indicating to the audience that Scary German Guy is a holocaust survivor, and the he believes the children because “he knows about monsters” is an uncomfortably shocking reminder of real world horrors into what is otherwise a fairly straight-forward “scary but not too scary” movie for kids too young to buy a ticket to an R rated movie.

But enough of quibbles. At the end of the day, while the film is fun, it’s nowhere near good enough to worry about such matters. At it’s heart, this is about why kids love monsters and being scared. Because it’s fun, primarily. Because it’s a way to annoy your parents is another. Because it’s a way for kids who are slightly out of step with their school or peers to find something to be good at is in there as well. None of that is explicit or presented in a moralistic fashion, though, it’s just threaded through the film. It’s recognizable at a level that connects with the audience without being overt, which is a good tack to take, since the primary audience would be children, who aren’t the most analytical viewers but can still sense when they’re being talked down to.

There’s a bit of nerd pandering going on as well. Again, outside of any questions of quality, seeing five monster movie icons gathered together is pretty damn cool. True, they get their asses handed to them by a bunch of pre-teen boys, but that’s the kind of wish fulfillment that good kid’s movies try to provide anyway. Why else would the token fat kid get to give some comeuppance to a pair of bullies if there wasn’t some fantasy element at play? And the monsters even, mostly, ring true. The Wolfman is tortured by his dual nature. Dracula is crafty and menacing, but ultimately undone by his own arrogance and failure to understand that he doesn’t fit into the modern world. Frankenstein’s Monster is misunderstood…and Gill Man and the Mummy don’t really do much but add atmosphere to a couple of scenes. But, really, a Mummy is just a very particular zombie and Gill Man, while I’m sure he has fans, is too specific to one film franchise to really merit much consideration. Again, not important, it was just intended to be monster equivalent of a team-up.
And in any case, the only thing most men of my generation care about is that this is the film that established, once and for all, that lycanthropes have testicles.

Given the dearth of werewolf films, almost all of them are worth seeking out for those of us who are fed up with vampires and zombies and masked slashers. So it’s an even bigger thrill than just finding a werewolf movie when you can find a werewolf movie that’s actually good.

Neil Marshall’s debut film uses the tried and true “monster picks off group one by one” formula to good effect here, mixing it with the slightly less common “soldiers fight unearthly enemy” trope. You also get a strong dose of the “spam in a cabin” theme, as the soldiers choose to hide from the beasts stalking them in what, in hindsight, was a really poor choice, strategy-wise. And it’s this mixing of familiar plots that makes the film work as well as it does. Horror does very well when it’s a synthesis of what has come before, especially when that synthesis is mixed with a new idea or a new approach. True, Marshall is probably leaning more towards reworking what other people have done before, but he still gives the whole enterprise the feel of something new and fresh, so that the end result doesn’t feel like you’re just watching Alien with werewolves in a farm house.

Marshall’s script does a quick job of establishing baseline personalities for the characters, which honestly is all that’s needed, because as the nature of these things go, there’s no point in becoming too attached to anyone. That the cast is good helps make these simplistic characterizations more palatable, particularly Sean Pertwee and Liam Cunningham, who both make two potentially cliche-prone characters feel more rounded. The plot is fairly basic as well, moving briskly from point to point, establishing the threat before hunkering down in the final half for the cabin-based attrition to come. What Marshall doesn’t avoid, however, is a strong work-around for a couple of rather predictable and over fore-shadowed heel turns that make the dwindling of the cast feel even more rote than is neccessary.

John Carpenter’s follow-up to the seminal Halloween is, frequently, negatively compared to his other films. It’s probably true that, in the grand scheme of things, it’s not the classic work of cinema that some of his other creations are. On the other hand, it’s a well-crafted horror film that has, over the years, garnered a strong reputation as a more mature story than many of Carpenter’s other films.

From the beginning, Carpenter and co-writer Debra Hill, create a sense of unreality for the film. Even more than the usual distancing effects of cinema, The Fog calls into question the nature of “reality” on a movie screen. The first image we see is a quote from a poem by Edgar Allan Poe: “is all that we see or seem/but a dream within a dream?” From there, we move to a scene of an old man telling a campfire ghost story to a group of children. It could easily be argued that from this that what we are about to witness is, within the screen, “just a story.” I find this line of thought very interesting, because most horror films rely on a plausible reality for their effectiveness as an entry point for the audience. A way for them to identify with the characters and suspend their disbelief. But potentially adding that extra layer of artifice blocks the audience from identification, leaving them more adrift and unsettled.

The method in which the film is shot adds to this disquieting effect. Large expanses of empty spaces preoccupy this film. Vast oceans. Deserted streets. Empty churches. There are great swathes of nothingness in this film, with human figures lone and isolated in these landscapes. When the fog rolls into these spaces, they are filled with a thick and palpable sense of dread and foreboding. The use of fog as a carrier for evil also works wonderfully here. Anyone who has driven or walked alone through a thick fog knows how disquieting it is. Carpenter replicates that unease and compounds it, because the audience knows that, this time, there really is something that means to do people harm in it.

That use of unease and uncertainty created by the fog is compounded by the nature of what is in it. We’re already operating under the rules of a campfire tale, so even the frayed logic of the supernatural is at question here. All we can truly guess about the nature of what is in the fog is that it is motivated by a desire for revenge. The question of whether the creatures in the fog are zombies or ghosts or demons or something else entirely is never resolved, never exactly addressed, and ultimately unimportant. They are, simply, a menace. A misguided and eternal grudge from beyond the grave. Even by the logic of a horror story, their motive and nature is unclear. We are led to believe that they want the gold that was stolen by the townpeople’s ancestors. We are also led to believe that they seek to kill the descendants of the conspirators who killed them a hundred years ago. Both theories prove to be, at best, incomplete, as they menace those not connected to the conspiracy and are not satisfied with having their property returned. They simply are, and there is no reasoning or promise of respite for them.