A Cloud of Mediocrity
When John Carpenter made The Fog in 1980, it wasn’t exactly The Exorcist, but it was at least spooky. You had atmosphere, a radio DJ narrating doom, and fog that felt alive. The 2005 remake, on the other hand, is like being trapped in an air-conditioned room with a broken smoke machine. Directed by Rupert Wainwright—whose previous big claim to fame was helming Stigmata and some music videos—this film manages to strip Carpenter’s ghost story of every ounce of suspense, dread, and yes, even fog. If Carpenter’s original was a chilling maritime campfire story, Wainwright’s version feels more like a middle school science demonstration: “Look, kids, vapor!”
Tom Welling: Superman Without Super Acting
The film stars Tom Welling, best known at the time for playing Clark Kent in Smallville. Unfortunately, his charisma levels here are so low, he makes the fog bank look like the most dynamic character on screen. Welling plays Nick Castle, a fisherman who reacts to vengeful spirits with the same facial expression one might use while waiting for a bus in the rain. If the audience expected him to leap into heroic action, they were instead treated to a man who looks perpetually confused, like he wandered onto the set and was too polite to leave.
Selma Blair’s Radio Silence
Selma Blair, an actress capable of doing so much better (Cruel Intentions, Hellboy), is wasted as Stevie Wayne, the local radio DJ. In Carpenter’s original, Stevie’s radio booth served as an eerie Greek chorus, amplifying the paranoia. In this remake, Blair is reduced to sighing, pouting, and giving weather updates that feel less ominous and more like filler between car insurance ads. Her character is supposed to be the voice of dread echoing through the town. Instead, she sounds like someone reluctantly covering a graveyard shift at a community college radio station.
Maggie Grace: Internet Sleuth of the Sea
Maggie Grace plays Elizabeth Williams, who spends most of the film Googling ancient curses while staring at her malfunctioning laptop. If you’ve ever wanted to watch someone do bad research on a haunted Dell Inspiron, this movie delivers. Grace has all the screen presence of an unplugged lamp, and her “chemistry” with Welling is so forced you’d swear they filmed their scenes on different continents and pasted them together later. Her subplot, involving reincarnation and William Blake’s vengeful spirit, is supposed to tie the whole film together. Instead, it feels like an essay hastily tacked onto a term paper to meet the word count.
Ghost Pirates, Now With Less Scary and More Shiny
The antagonists of the film, ghostly mariners from the burned ship Elizabeth Dane, should be terrifying. Instead, they look like rejects from a Nine Inch Nails music video circa 1999. The fog itself, supposedly the star of the show, has been turned into a bland CGI cloud that moves like it’s late for a weather channel forecast. Carpenter’s fog felt invasive, creeping into every crack and corner. Wainwright’s fog feels like a poorly rendered screensaver. When the ghosts appear, they don’t menace—they shimmer, like someone left a Halloween decoration out in the sun too long.
Horror Without Horror
The biggest sin of The Fog remake isn’t just that it’s bad—it’s that it’s boring. Horror films can be trashy, clumsy, or nonsensical and still succeed if they’re at least entertaining. But here, the scares are telegraphed, the deaths are uninspired, and the pacing drags like a ghost with a bad back. One character literally dies by being vaguely “engulfed by mist,” which is about as frightening as getting caught in a dry ice display at a high school dance. The kills lack creativity, the tension is nonexistent, and the whole enterprise is so sanitized it could double as a fog machine safety tutorial.
The Plot: Ghosts With a Grievance Committee
The story involves the descendants of the island’s founding fathers discovering that their ancestors were murderous thieves who torched a leper ship for profit. It’s a promising setup: betrayal, curses, rotting corpses seeking vengeance. Yet in execution, it feels like the film is less about supernatural revenge and more about civic accountability. The ghosts aren’t so much horrifying wraiths as they are disgruntled auditors from beyond the grave, checking in on overdue payments. By the time the big reveal happens—that Elizabeth is the reincarnation of Blake’s murdered wife—the audience is already too fogged out to care.
Style Over Substance, Except There’s No Style
Wainwright tries to bring in glossy MTV-era visuals: blue-green filters, shiny reflections, and slow-motion fog sweeps. But horror isn’t about style alone—it’s about mood. And this film’s mood is equivalent to being stuck in line at the DMV while someone sprays a Glade “Ocean Breeze” air freshener nearby. The cinematography never captures dread; it only captures how attractive everyone looks while standing around in low lighting. In short, it’s not a horror movie—it’s an Abercrombie ad with spectral cosplay.
Carpenter and Hill: Producers in Name Only
Adding insult to injury, John Carpenter and Debra Hill, who co-wrote the original, are credited as producers. That credit is the cinematic equivalent of a hostage note—something that was clearly signed under duress. Watching the 2005 Fog, you can almost picture Carpenter cashing the check with one hand while clutching a stiff drink with the other, muttering, “At least they didn’t remake Halloween again.” Oh wait.
Critical and Commercial Wipeout
Upon release, The Fog was obliterated by critics. It has one of the most brutal Rotten Tomatoes scores of any mainstream horror release of the 2000s, and rightly so. Audiences, suckered in by the promise of ghostly revenge and moody atmospherics, walked out with nothing but a headache from squinting through all the fake mist. The movie grossed $46.2 million—not enough to be considered a success, but far too much considering the quality. Each ticket sold feels like evidence in a class-action lawsuit for fraud.
Final Verdict: Atmospheric Trash
The Fog remake is cinematic seaweed: slimy, pointless, and destined to wash up unwanted. It takes a perfectly serviceable ghost story and drowns it in bad CGI, flat performances, and lifeless scares. Tom Welling is dull, Selma Blair is squandered, Maggie Grace is Google-trapped, and the fog itself is about as threatening as a malfunctioning humidifier.
If you want atmospheric horror, watch Carpenter’s original. If you want to punish yourself, watch the remake. And if you want to simulate the Fog (2005) experience without wasting two hours, just stand in your shower with a smoke machine and have a friend mumble bad dialogue at you. At least then you’ll be in on the joke.
