The Fog- Silence is Scarier than Sound

I think that by now most of us horror filmgoers are pretty accustomed to the usual run of the mill horror monster. You know the ones- whether it's the devil, or an alien, a vampire or a werewolf, we pretty much know those monsters. But john Carpenter did something unique- he made a natural thing, a bank of fog, something scary. That's the work of a true horror genius.

The Fog tells of a small town called Antonio Bay, which celebrates its 1100^th birthday the day the movie takes place. We get to know a few of the inhabitants of the town, and we get to know of the curse put upon the town a long time ago, a curse that lays a deadly and scary fog on the town. True, the fog has some zombies in it, but they're not so scary, and the fog does work pretty much on its own as we could see with the electricity lines…

Anyway, what makes the fog so scary is the silence. It is a deadly killer, this fog, and it works toward achieving its goal, but it does all of these in silence. We never hear the fog, we never hear the zombies inside the fog (except when they knock on the doors). The fog moves silently, kills silently, avenges silently. And silence is far scarier than sound, because we know sound, and if we hear the danger we can run. But when it is a silent killer like this fog? We won't hear it come, we won't be able to run, and it will kill us.

And it can be incorporated into RPGS. Let the PCs witness this silent killer unleashes its power on some NPCs in this dreadful silence, and the players will be scared as hell. Why? Because they'll understand a simple truth- when the fog will go for them, they won't know about it 'till it's too late. And this thing is scary as hell, knowing that there's something that is ought to get you, but you won't know about its presence until it will be far too late.

But the silence isn't there only when the fog comes, it's also when the fog attacks. True, the fog knocks on the doors to announce its presence, but if one doesn't open the door, the door will be destroyed in silence, and then the fog will enter in silence, and the zombies will come out of it I silence and kill you while still don't making a sound. Silence by itself is scary and unnatural. Silence accompanied by a certain sound signaling your doom is even scarier.

How about you? Have you watched this movie? What did you think about it? And what did you learn from watching?