Wake of the Elizabeth Dane

The Fog (1980)
directed by John Carpenter
rating: 5 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from the vaults

Two stories are told by the fishermen of Antonio Bay. In the first, a ghost ship appears one night at sea. A man from the township finds a gold Spanish coin. The man keeps the coin, but his pockets are empty when he returns home.

The second concerns a campfire. The old sailor scares local children with a tale of a boat lost in fog, then run aground, with every hand dead, by a fire on Spivey Point that the crew mistakes for a signal. Both stories are true, but they are incomplete. Each omits the intentional complicity of its protagonists.

Instead of lighting the campfire to murder a leper colony, the beachcombers are innocent stargazers. The gold coin was found by Nick Castle's father, who was old enough to know the ghost stories of Whitley Reef, to surmise the moods of the California coastline, if not the buried plot's dread details. But the innocent and guilty alike pay penance. That makes The Fog a story of the sea, one as dolorous and salt-soaked as the most beautiful winter gale.