In 1980, director John Carpenter cast two generations of scream queens for 1980's The Fog, Jamie Lee Curtis, along with her mother Janet Leigh, star of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. It was the first (but not the last) time the mother-daughter duo appeared together in a film. Leigh also had a cameo in 1998's Halloween: H20, which celebrated the twentieth anniversary of the original film. Carpenter's casting stunt proved quite fitting for a supernatural thriller about the sins of ancestors being revisited upon their descendants.
In The Fog, Curtis stars as hitchhiker Elizabeth Solley, who finds herself in the fictional coastal town of Antonio Bay, California as it prepares for the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the town's founding. Her arrival coincides with an eerie glowing fog moving in from the sea after it envelops a fishing trawler. Leigh plays Kathy Williams, who is overseeing the town's festivities, and is the wife of one of the missing fisherman. As the bodies pile up, the mysterious fog is revealed as the harbinger of vengeful spirits, the crew of the Elizabeth Dare, a ship that was attacked and sunk by the founders of Antonio Bay, who used the plunder to build the town.
The idea for The Fog was inspired by a trip John Carpenter took to England with his then-girlfriend, writer/producer Debra Hill, where they witnessed an eerie fog rolling in as they approached Stonehenge. Though a hit at the box office, grossing $21.3 million, nearly twenty times the budget, the film initially opened to mixed reviews. The Fog was re-evaluated over the years since its release and is now regarded as a cult classic.
Leigh & Curtis Are Both Legendary Scream Queens
The daughter of Leigh and actor Tony Curtis, Jamie Lee Curtis was a teenager with only a few television appearances under her belt when she auditioned for the now-iconic role of Laurie Strode for Carpenter. Her strong performance as the terrified babysitter who turns the tables on her attacker is an inversion of the infamous role her mother played in Psycho. As thief on the run Marion Crane, Leigh falls victim to hotel manager Norman Bates in one of the most legendary and notorious sequences in cinema history.
Psycho's shower scene shocked audiences and critics alike in 1960. In a masterful combination of storytelling, tone, and filmmaking technique, audiences sat helpless as they watched Janet Leigh's Marion Crane brutally dispatched by a barely glimpsed assailant barely halfway through the film, leaving viewers unmoored and adrift after the sudden loss of the story's emotional anchor. Psycho was, and is to this day, tremendously influential for generations of filmmakers, including John Carpenter. Halloween was a surprise hit that launched an ongoing franchise. Playing a very different type of character two years later, Jamie Lee Curtis relished her role as Elizabeth in The Fog, as she relayed in a behind-the-scenes Rolling Stone article at the time, "That's what I love about John. He's letting me explore different aspects of myself. I'm spoiled rotten now. My next director is going to be almost a letdown."
John Carpenter's love of horror cinema is part of what makes him such a beloved - and inspired - director; the decision to include two iconic scream queens in The Fog is just another way he pays homage to the genre's roots.