I’m unsure just how many movie soundtracks feature among the hallowed works reviewers have paid tribute to on this site. It’s of no matter here: John Carpenter’s score to his ooky late night minor classic ‘The Fog’ possesses a desolate grandeur that would leave Gyorgy Ligeti wide-eyed in mute wonder. An incredibly memorable work of understated, crepsular minimalism, its repetitive motifs gently worm their way to the back of the brain in a way that few pieces since Eno’s late ’70s zenith have managed to. Remarkably, the entire soundtrack was rewritten and recorded, with movie REWRITTEN AND RE-SHOT ENTIRELY in a single month of frenzied panic: Carpenter, returning from a vacation in Tahiti was horrified at his “heavy-handed and obvious” treatment of the tale: six lepers are granted permission to build a colony in a nineteenth century American settlement, but are killed by the cowardly founding fathers who divert their ship onto deadly rocks before using the unfortunate mens’ gold to finance the building of a town, Antonio Bay (charming!). On the eve of the hundreth year of the town’s existence, the six men return from the dark deep to claim an equal number of resident’s lives, but their cruel revenge can only be taken during the ‘witching hour’ between midnight and one. 

What Carpenter aimed for in his Herculean resurrection of ‘The Fog’ was “a lightness of tone, a softer, understated fear” which captured the menace of an ever-nearing terror that only we, the audience could see coming. Dusting off those magnificent ARP synths which provided ‘Halloween’ with its steely strings and ‘Assault On Precinct 13’ with that much sampled Teutonic bassline, he created a pared-down, mist-enshrouded collection of tones that together form as great a work as anything by Bernard Herrmann or Ennio Morricone. The reissued CD opens, like its host movie with actor John Houseman’s campfire tale of the leperous six led by the enigmatic Blake. Hammer Horror synthesized pipe organs then blast in before the thunderous intro subsides into the famous lead lines of ‘Theme From The Fog’, the piano and electronic harpsichord walking that fine Carpenter line between sclocky delivery and eerie witholding. The title original on vinyl or ’80s and ’90s CD reissue skips Houseman’s oral introduction and inserts the main theme after ‘Matthew’s Ghost Story’, creeping in on the plaintive, veiled beauty of its three note piano bars and wave-like, sensual pulses of fullsome analogue synth. For some reason, this piece has always put me in mind of Michael Rother’s more percussive ‘Feuerland’ from his 1977 solo debut ‘Flammende Herzen’, both rich with countryside darkness and teeming with subterranean life. Both sound best playing on the turntable of a dimly lit bedroom, unoccupied beyond the solitary listener, only the occasional hiss of passing traffic serving as a reminder of life outside. 

From there on, the tracklisting is essentially the same: ‘A Walk To The Lighthouse’, tracking the lovely Adrienne Barbeau’s solitary, light-drenched descent of the steps to her place of work as a radio station owner and announcer is a beautifully tempered piece centred around Carpenter’s synth flute melody, lower counterpoint and bass notes. It glitters like fresh dew and glides with a magesterial grace. ‘Rocks At Drake’s Bay’ is that main theme given added life by a ringing, sonar-like metallic coda which leans toward the industrial rather than the celestial, pausing to reprise that cautious piano. ‘The Fog’ drifts in on cavernous chimes and doomy chords which fuse Bowie’s ‘Sense Of Doubt’ (itself the horror movie soundtrack that never was) with the super-slow gothic doom of Holger Czukay and Conny Plank’s ‘Biomutanten’ from their fabled 1981 release ‘Les Vampyrettes’. Things continue along the plaintive piano/ stinging chimes/ oppressive synth route through ‘Antonio Bay’ and ‘Tommy Tells Of Ghost Ships’ until the pulverising, Goblin-inspired sonic crush of ‘Reel 9’, in the movie an accompaniment to Blake’s meeting with the priest grandson of the man whose decision sealed his mortal fate. Here, brutally compressed, reverb soaked slabs of ARP are interrupted by pounding bass drum, ear-splitting, monotone metallics and that Hammer movie organ in a track that lasts eleven minutes. The stew has been cooked from obvious ingredients, but the end result is nonetheless genuinely unsettling when listened to without the attendant picture (and the music really is the star). 

The Silva Screen re-release doesn’t end with ‘Reel 9’ however. The main theme is reprised for one and a half minutes, underscored with a skittering, metronomic layer of electro percussion which adds a great deal of urgency to the original. ‘The Fog Rolls In’ brings the static piano tones back in a higher, sweeter, almost poignant register. ‘Blake In The Sanctuary’ hisses and clanks with enough menace to scare Nurse With Wound out the cinema, more of those dead slow pulses of analogue terror which Carpenter used to singlehandedly reinvent the sound of scary movies, and which we still hear nearly thirty years on each time the heroine slowly pulls that dark door ajar. A six minute radio interview with Jamie Lee Curtis (recorded at the time of the film’s release) round things off neatly, but if you seek this out on vinyl or find an earlier CD reprint secondhand (note that the mix won’t possess the clarity and separation of this later release) you’ll hardly miss it. A fantastically fitting soundtrack, and alongside that of its more famous slasher movie cousin inestimably influential, but more than that a bloody good listen in its own right. Whether you love the musical simplicity with sonic richness of ’70s electronica, the hypnotic repetition of the Italian prog-rockers Goblin, the hauntingly barren sweep of the classical avant garde or the creaky, pre-modern grandeur of a hundred and one Peter Cushing films, you’ll be at home with this.