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137 137 8 Forbidden Thresholds: The Fog, Ghosts of Mars, Halloween, Prince of Darkness, In the Mouth of Madness John Carpenter’s films are filled with invading forces laying siege, and those considered in the preceding chapter share the fact that the invasions are without any clear cause. There is no particular reason that the ruthless gang surrounds the specific individuals within the police station in Assault on Precinct 13 or that the alien force descends upon the specific residents of Midwich in Village of the Damned. Misfortune simply happens. But Carpenter’s invasions are not always so random. In the films I explore in this chapter, sieges are not the result of mere chance but instead are the results of dark forces from the past released into the present. This is, of course, a classic motif in ghost stories in which some unsettled spirit connected to a past tragic event returns to haunt a location. At one level, this sense of the buried past adds to Carpenter’s broader critique of the foundations of contemporary civilized society. Not only did explorers and settlers push forward to claim the territory once occupied by the wild, primitive, and dangerous—forces that still linger just past our borders—but the seizing of these wild frontier lands involved countless acts of cruelty and injustice. These injustices do not disappear but are buried in secret places where they await the opportunity to reemerge. As Andrew Smith notes when discussing this classic motif in gothic literature , “The past returns and undermines the present.”1 In the films considered in this chapter, spectral figures and ghosts emerge from the past to seek revenge for past injustices, and in keeping with Carpenter’s broader geographic framework, their reemergence is triggered by the Desolate Frontiers in the Films of John Carpenter 138 breaking of a threshold—the physical act of crossing a boundary. In so doing, the constructed barrier between the present and the past injustices upon which it was built is broken. The Fog, Carpenter’s follow-up to Halloween, provides a useful illustration of the logic of Carpenter’s forbidden thresholds. But in other ways, it is also a tale of siege. As with Village, a small coastal town in northern California finds itself besieged by supernatural forces. In The Fog, however, the attack is predicated on crimes of the past. In the film’s narrative, the town of Antonio Bay is preparing to celebrate its centennial when strange events begin to occur related to a mysterious fog bank. We later learn that the town’s founding was made possible by the slaughter of a wealthy leper and his similarly afflicted compatriots who were offering to pay for land to establish a leper colony. The town’s founding fathers chose instead to kill the lepers and steal their gold and were aided in their evil deed by a mysterious fog that concealed their assault. The parallel here with the long history of American treachery toward indigenous peoples who also had their wealth ransacked and their people killed is clear. In the film’s climactic third act, the enormous glowing fog bank descends upon the town, its movements tracked and called out by the local radio disc jockey who watches from a local lighthouse. Soon the fog has surrounded the town, and the film’s principal characters find themselves under siege by the vengeful spirits contained within it. As with Assault, there are several plot threads following different characters whose fates are bound up together in the end. The three primary figures are Nick, a local who becomes involved with the mysterious fog when his friend’s boat ends up adrift with the crew missing or dead; Elizabeth, a hitchhiker who gets wrapped up in the situation through her growing relationship with Nick; and Stevie, the female disk jockey who eventually warns the town of the impending threat. Stevie watches helplessly as her house and young son are consumed by the fog and calls out on the airwaves for someone to rescue him before she retreats to the roof of the lighthouse to avoid the pursuing ghouls that come out of the fog. Nick and Elizabeth, who rescue Stevie’s son, end up with a small group of townspeople at the old church, which becomes the last refuge against the fog and also turns out to hold the secret of the root cause of the assault. Importantly, the main narrative begins in the church. After an opening...

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