Starting the film this way firmly situates the story in the realm of the folktale. The sinister fog, we assume based on the title of the movie we’re watching, is indeed about to return to the waters near Spivey Point, and we imagine that we are about to witness the next chapter in this local legend.

Storytelling is a motif throughout the film. Adrienne Barbeau plays a radio DJ who narrates the film in voiceover for both the audience and the characters within the film, at one point calling out street names over the radio as she describes the encroachment of the fog on the town, which she can see from her radio station in the lighthouse, so that characters in cars can outrun it. (It’s reminiscent of the segment in Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds where a radio announcer describes for listeners the invasion of New York City that he can see from atop the Broadcasting Building). Another storytelling device comes from the journal that the priest discovers inside the wall of the church; while the fog invades in present day, the priest reads various characters excerpts of one of the founding fathers’ recollections of how they murdered the leper colony.

Campfire stories are meant to tingle the spines of youngsters, giving them something to ponder as they crawl into their sleeping bags at night. Or, as the mariner says, “One more story to keep us warm.” Urban legends told around campfires also serve in many cases to deliver lessons to their young audiences. Think, for example, of the story of two young teenagers parked out at Makeout Point who hear on the radio that a hook-handed man has escaped from a local asylum, only to discover the man’s severed hook dangling from the door-handle when the girl gets spooked and makes the boy drive her home. It’s safer for teenagers not to bother making out in cars in secluded areas, isn’t it! Or, remember the girl who stops for gas on her drive home and is then followed all the way to her house by a man who keeps flashing his high beams; when she finally confronts him, he explains that there’s a killer in her back seat who kept rising up to slit her throat, and the high beams made him crouch back down. Wouldn’t it be better if girls didn’t drive alone?

Horror movies can serve many of the same functions as folktales and urban legends. Like I wrote about in my review of The Hills Have Eyes, the genre is full of repeated elements and remixed narratives, just like urban legends passed down from generation to generation can change slightly over time. Horror movies can serve as cautionary tales, as well — just think of that seminal slasher film cliché, which Carpenter himself helped set in stone with Halloween: don’t sneak off and have sex, or you will die.

So, I was excited to see The Fog explicitly tackle folkloric themes in the very first scene of the film. Especially because I was watching the film with an eye toward how it would eventually be remade, I was thinking about how the prevalence of horror remakes can actually add to the way the genre can function as folklore— remakes, after all, by their very nature remix, slightly alter, and serving up a familiar tale to a new generation, deriving their pleasure from how they do or don’t hit those familiar beats we want to see in our urban legends.

Speaking of familiar beats, I also very much enjoyed the way The Fog pays homage to Alfred Hitchcock, just like Halloween did. Halloween featured a doctor named Sam Loomis, which was the name of Marion Crane’s boyfriend in Psycho. Also, not coincidentally, Marion Crane was played by Janet Leigh, whose daughter Jamie Lee Curtis is the teen scream queen star of Halloween.

For The Fog, his next film after Halloween, Carpenter brought back Jamie Lee Curtis and then one-upped himself: he got her mother. Janet Leigh plays Kathy, a town matriarch who is helping oversee the town’s celebration to mark the 100th anniversary of their founding. She spends the movie putting plans in place and running events so that she ensures the tale of the town’s founding is passed on and re-told to the next generation. It’s a brilliantly fitting role for an actress whose presence in the movie reminds us of her own legacy as a horror film actress, and calls attention to the fact that her daughter is taking up the mantle. They spend the movie just missing sharing a scene together, until the very end. There’s one shot in particular that had me laughing — Jamie Lee Curtis’s trucker boyfriend talks with Janet Leigh’s character, who then walks off screen; the camera then pans over as the trucker walks back to Jamie Lee Curtis, who had been apparently sitting just out of frame the entire time, not interacting with her mother.