The movie takes place in a small California coastal town that is invaded by a deadly fog containing the ghosts of shipwrecked sailors who were murdered by the ancestors of the present townspeople exactly 100 years ago. Barbeau, playing the owner of the local radio station, finds herself relaying warnings to the ships at sea as a mysterious fog bank rolls in and begins, somewhat ominously, to glow in the dark.
"It wasn't pleasant to work with the fog," she said, "and that's an understatement. They made it out of kerosene and water. It was smelly and sticky and the entire production was permeated with it. And there was a basic problem: It was the easiest thing in the world to get the fog into a scene, but it was almost impossible to get it out. We had to act backwards in some scenes: They'd blow the fog in and have us move in reverse, and then reverse the film to create the illusion that the fog was retreating. I had one scene in which I had to move from terror to apprehension to interest to indifference, so they could then reverse it for the fog."
Barbeau said she and her husband have different approaches to movies. "I'm not especially a movie buff. When I left home, I went to New York to become a stage actress. I thought of Hollywood as a flesh market - and, for that matter, it is a flesh market. I like movies that explore the human condition, that deal with issues. John, on the other hand, is a total movie fanatic who loves to sit for hours in front of the TV, watching old black-and-white movies.
"He wants his movies to manipulate people, pure and simple. He talks about his first movie-going experience, which was when he was 4 or 5 years old. He was taken to a 3-D movie, and something exploded out of the screen, and he was so scared he ran down the aisle, and then he stopped short, turned around, came back and sat back down and said to himself, 'This is for me!' He isn't concerned with deep psychological dramas. He knows what he's doing. 'Halloween' was so frightening that I don't want to see it again. Once was enough."
She said she and her husband remain totally outside Hollywood's social circles, never go to parties, don't get their names in the columns and stay home most evenings: "We live up in the Hollywood hills, and our social life mostly consists of going out to dinner or having friends over. In the evening we'll sit around and John will play the guitar and I'll knit, or we'll play Parchesi...completely quiet and peaceful. The one big difference we have is that I'm really a very good cook, very interested in nutrition, and John has no idea what he eats. He could miss every meal and not even notice, and when he does eat, it's plain meat and potatoes and bacon grease. I've got him off of sugar and onto honey, and thats it.
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