All horror films are, at some level, necessarily daft; but often, they include wholly unnecessary silliness, and this film is no exception: it turns on the discovery, in a local church, of a previously unnoticed solid gold cross about two feet across! But director John Carpenter is a master of making surprisingly gripping tales from limited ingredients, as he showed most notably in 'Assault on Precint 13', and it's amazing how much spookiness he can find in a little bit of fog. Yet the film is unbalanced, the beginning is character-led, the middle quite menacing, the ending both ridiculous and tame. Very watchable, but maybe not wholly deserving of its cult status.
Review of The Fog
