So this is a John Carpenter horror movie with Jamie Lee Curtis, but not the one you’re thinking of. (Curtis is not actually the lead of the movie, though; that’s Adrienne Barbeau. She’s just… in it, in a way that seems out of line with her current star power, but apparently she was not yet big when this was made in 1980.)

So the plot setup here is that there was a shipwreck many years ago, and at certain times of the year (I forget the calendar details exactly), the spirits of the dead sailors roll into town in an evil fog, in which they take form as undead sailors and kill people. But only for the midnight hour, and then they fade away again. Why this happens, and how to make it not happen, is basically the plot of the movie.

It’s not a great plot, and involves people being moderately stupid in a bunch of places, but whatever, the point of the movie is just about its atmosphere (get it). The spooky glowing fog rolling in eerily at night, the undead coming out of the mist, the growing sense that nothing is safe. As in a lot of horror movies, it starts out really effective when the fog is rare and creepy, but then as the fog and the undead get ubiquitous, it turns less creepy — the one ninja/many ninja effect.

Carpenter is a talented filmmaker, and this is a perfectly fine movie. But, well, it’s probably illustrative that I completely forgot I had watched this movie until I looked at Letterboxd, saw that I hadn’t written it up, and had to look up what it was to remember that it existed. So yeah, competent but forgettable.