John Carpenter's The Fog may not have aged as well as some of his other horror classics, but it still generally overcomes most of its issues.

| Original Score: 7/10 | Feb 20, 2025

It’s a quintessential campfire ghost story brought to life by a master of his craft, and it deserves a place on the pantheon of the esteemed moviemaker’s many filmic triumphs.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 13, 2024

The Fog is a neat twist on the classic ghost story. Carpenter achieves a palpable sense of dread and atmosphere and his score remains a signature piece of the experience he sets out to provide. The characters are unfortunately the weakest element here.

| Original Score: 3.75/5 | Sep 15, 2022

The Fog sets out to be nothing more than a straight-forward chiller with the emphasis on the shocks rather than the characters or the story and on that level succeeds perfectly.

| Jul 26, 2022

Carpenter, a rather minimalist, formally restrained filmmaker even when employing the grand guignol excesses of The Thing, knows when to let pure story do the work, and The Fog is a story about stories.

| Oct 24, 2021

It's unpretentious genre fun, stylishly assembled and populated with colorful characters.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 20, 2021

...a sporadically arresting yet lamentably uninvolving horror effort from Carpenter.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Aug 1, 2020

It's like sitting around a campfire, and a cold hand drops on your shoulder from out of nowhere.

| Feb 16, 2020

Unlike Halloween, which was a model of straight-forward terror and carefully controlled suspense, The Fog is constructed of random diversions.

| Jan 30, 2020

The Fog has so many things right about it in the early going that when it comes apart, the whole thing seems that much worse.

| Jan 30, 2020

Carpenter also relies heavily on cheap scare tactics (supernatural mists and people jumping out of the dark) rather than subtle suspense, but some sequences do turn the tension dial up quite high.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 30, 2020

A doozy of a chiller -- an intricate tale of intrigue and terror stirred by a century-old shipwreck.

| Jan 30, 2020

It's a failure, but it's a failure in the right direction.

| Jan 29, 2020

The evidence for John Carpenter's artistry is right there on the screen. Most moviegoers will be too scared to notice.

| Jan 29, 2020

Ghoulish, tense and utterly fantastical, John Carpenter's tale of shipwrecked spectres squelching their way through a fluorescent fog to wreak vengeance on a seaside town is a classic campfire yarn.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 29, 2020

A movie that provides all the cheap thrills any scary movie aficionado would want, without blatant sexism.

| Aug 15, 2019

The story, rhythm, horror, irony, good cinematography, and effective actors make the movie fulfill its expectations. [Full Review in Spanish]

| Aug 13, 2019

The Fog feels like a ghost story being told around a fire. The kind where you lean in slightly, put your chin on your hands and find yourself lost in the tale.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Aug 2, 2019

The Fog is an...atmospheric chiller, in which a luminous fog rolls into a Californian seaside town, bringing the ghosts of vengeful sailors, killed in a shipwreck a century before.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 2, 2018

Let's just hope that your theater and your town don't have any dark secrets that may be carried in along with The Fog.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 29, 2018