The Fog Director John Carpenter Says Sequel Talk Has Happened

After changing the horror movie game with 1978’s Halloween, filmmaker John Carpenter continued his work in Hollywood with back-to-back-to-back bangers on the big screen, directing The Thing, Escape from New York, and his 1980 ghost story The Fog. Like so many other movies from his filmography, The Fog was caught up in the horror remake craze of the 2000s, with the 2005 version arriving to profound negativity and a rare single digit approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. There’s potential in going back to Antonio Bay however as Carpenter has revealed in a new interview that sequel talks have happened.

“There’s been talk of a sequel to The Fog,” Carpenter told NME in a new interview. “There’s been talk of sequels for a bunch of my movies. They just haven’t happened yet because of various reasons. But yeah, we’ve talked about them and I’m open to them.” For those that don’t recall the plot of The Fog, the film told the story of a small town plagued by pirate ghosts that rolled into town with a mysterious fog, which happened to coincide with the 100th anniversary of their ship wrecking on the coast.

News of a potential The Fog sequel shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise though as the success of 2018’s Halloween, a direct sequel to Carpenter’s 1978 film, has seemingly kickstarted Hollywood into considering decades-later-sequels to movies rather than outright remakes. Blumhouse, who brought the 2018 Halloween to the big screen, is already in development on some kind of follow-up to Carpenter’s The Thing and another company is pursuing a similar avenue for The Exorcist. In other words, the legacyquel has made its way to horror films.

Carpenter has previously spoken about coming out of director retirement to make a new movie, revealing in the same interview who he’d like to work with in a new project.

“There’s a whole lot that I haven’t worked with. Jennifer Lawrence, she’s a brilliant actress. Amy Adams – brilliant actress. I would love to work with them, but chances of that are kind of slim. You just don’t know what’s going to happen. I’d also really like to work with Kurt Russell again. That would be fun. We had such a good time working together.”

The original The Fog starred Carpenter mainstays like Adrienne Barbeau (the filmmaker’s wife at the time)and Tom Atkins, plus actors from Halloween including Charles Cyphers, Nancy Loomis, and Jamie Lee Curtis (plus her mother Janet Leigh). Also appearing in the film was Hal Holbrook as Father Malone, who tragically passed away earlier this year.