Adrienne Barbeau Reveals How Romance With John Carpenter Helped Land ‘The Fog’ Role

THE FOG, Adrienne Barbeau, 1980. — AVCO Embassy Pictures/courtesy Everett Collection

What To Know

Adrienne Barbeau continues her prolific career with two upcoming films.
Her iconic role in 1980’s The Fog launched her into horror film fame despite her initial unfamiliarity with the genre.
Barbeau reflects on her diverse experiences in horror.

Legendary “Scream Queen” Adrienne Barbeau has barely slowed down since her start in the industry 60-plus years ago. After thrilling fans with her appearance at the Hollywood Show at the start of this year, the 81-year-old Barbeau now has two films coming out later this year in theaters — Oddities and Hannah Goes to Hell. She also has two books available in bookstores There Are Worst Things I Could Do and GREASE Tell Me More, Tell Me More.

Barbeau sat down with ReMIND Magazine to chat about a lot of things, including her memorable turn in 1980’s The Fog.

In this case, dating the director definitely came into play in getting the role of Stevie Wayne in The Fog.

“I met John Carpenter on a film called Someone’s Watching Me! It was a television film. It was his first union film with Lauren Hutton and David Birney. Throughout the course of the filming, John and I became close,” Barbeau shares. “When the filming was over, he handed me a script [The Fog] and said, ‘I’d really like you to do this. I’d like you to play this role.’ I read it, and it was a ghost story. I thought, ‘What is this?'”

“It was not anything socially significant,” said the actress. “I had just been doing Maude for six years, and The China Syndrome film was big at the moment, and we were all fighting for the Equal Rights Amendment, and here was this ghost story. I didn’t watch horror films, and I didn’t know anything about them, but I loved the role, I loved the script, and I loved the director, so I thought, ‘Oh well, okay, why not.” That became my first feature film.”

THE FOG, Adrienne Barbeau, John Carpenter, Jamie Lee Curtis, Janet Leigh, 1980,

Embassy/courtesy Everett Collection

It certainly was the film that catapulted her into the scream queen arena, as Creepshow (1982) and Swamp Thing (1982) quickly followed. So does she love horror films now?

“I love them individually, depending upon the screenplay, depending upon the words on the page. I took one film simply because it was filming in Moscow and I’d always wanted to go to Russia. It was a unique experience. I got a lot out of it. I even got an entire chapter for my memoir “There Are Worst Things I Could Do” out of it because it was such an oddball experience,” Barbeau tells. “But God forbid, anybody should ever see that film.”

Horror films certainly are wonderful in terms of giving an actor an opportunity to play things they would never play in a comedy or in a drama.

“It was probably because of my relationship with John [Carpenter] and The Fog was my first feature, that I became known as somebody who did horror films, and it’s followed me through my career. I just finished two more, one right before Christmas and another one last May that I’m very excited about called Oddities. It’s an action-adventure horror film, a Thelma & Louise meets The Quiet Place.”

Photos by Amy Seach/Courtesy of Adrienne Barbeau

The Oddities was a 2023 short film from Tyler Savage about two self-destructive best friends who accidentally kill someone and find help with an older woman (Barbeau) who is anything but incapable, but things take a very dark turn.

“Oddities is a short film that we made during the pandemic that was very well received and won a lot of awards. It did the festival circuit and has done very, very well,” Barbeau shares. “The [expanded] feature written and directed by the same man, Tyler Savage, has not much to do with the short film, except that my character has a similar livelihood. In the short film, I was running a small curio [antique] shop that sells oddities. In the feature film, I’m living on a farm in Kentucky. I have a 5,000-square-foot barn that is filled with oddities and curios and antiques. The set designer did an incredible job. But there’s something going on at the farm that leads to the horror. Let’s put it that way.”