The remake of the 1980 John Carpenter classic had a short presentation at this year's San Diego Comic Con and both British Director Rupert Wainwright and actress Maggie Grace were on hand to talk about the film both to the public and to the press. The panel kicked off with a new trailer debuting later this week showing off the film in which a mysterious fog engulfs the small town of Antonio Bay and something within it starts killing off the residents including a former couple (Tom Welling & Maggie Grace). Scenes of the fog showing near sentience, the shadowy pirates, ghostly underwater figures and Selma Blair trapped in a drowning car could be glimpsed.
During the talks, it was revealed that Carpenter himself had only very little involvement such as supervising the script and visiting the set - "He really wanted to let us do our version of the movie" says Wainwright, whilst Grace was very grateful he was "very present" on the set especially towards the start. Fog has proven tricky for the visual effects artists because computers are having a hard time rendering the softness of layered fog, so most of it was practical.
Whereas the original was quite ambiguous about the mystery behind the fog itself, the new film tries to get truly behind the reason why these strange things happen and a whole storyline involves one of the characters having a strange connection to the past events responsible. The original story was very much an ensemble drama whereas this is more focused on two people (Grace & Welling). Both films however get the creeps from atmosphere as Wainwright hates 'jump scares', but for a PG-13 film he admits "its as gory as it can get".
Wainwright confirms some pretty awful things will be shown - burning, stabbing, lepracy, etc. Unlike the original, there's a lot more than six deaths. The general back story about the ship and the pirates hasn't really been changed but has been fleshed out a lot more. What they're trying to do is "add stuff to the original, not take away what worked so well" but both admit they changed a lot more than they expected initially, especially towards the final scenes. Finally and best of all - Tom Welling has a shower scene!!!
