1980

When a film opens with an old timey sea captain baby-sitting children by a campfire, telling them ghost stories, it’s safe to assume the town isn’t exactly on stable footing. For one, the story goes way over the children’s heads. They don’t understand maritime law or leprosy and why John Carpenter likes watching Jamie Lee Curtis get tortured. Some mysteries should be left to adults and lawyers.

Although there’s not a lot of good adults in this town anyways. A small coastal fishing village has somehow stayed alive in Northern California for 100 years. The town believes the charter was established legitimately and by no way had any terrible history. White people get a lot of things wrong, but gosh darn it, they are gold-medal award winning at denial!

A priest (it’s always a priest) discovers his grandfather’s diary in the walls of the church after some masonry falls off the wall. They don’t exactly give the denomination, but if this old dude is Catholic, he shouldn’t have a grandfather that was a priest. But who knows, Episcopalians and Lutherans can be in horror films too; this is still America.

In the old diary, it’s revealed that 6 of the original town founders decided to sink a ship carrying a wealthy man with leprosy and his friends (who also have leprosy). The lepers wanted to leave their current situation and establish a colony just north of the seaside town. The original Karens apparently got together, and decided that ew, no, we don’t want them. Let’s just murder them and steal all their gold, then use the gold to build the town! We know where this is going.

At midnight of the 100 year anniversary of this tragedy, a bunch of mysterious things start happening. There’s also numerous tremors (still California), random glass breaking (salt air can corrode things). A weird fog shows up on the weather radar. And the strangest thing of all: Jamie Lee Curtis hitchhikes right outside of town and gets picked up by a guy who DOESN’T murder her. In fact, they fall in love!

The fog is actual a vessel for bringing in the ghosts of the leper ship. They call them revenants, which I guess is cooler than “leper zombies” which just sounds redundant (no offence to current or future lepers). The leader of these ghouls leads them through the town murdering people with all the tools you would expect to find on an 1880’s ship about to set up a new town: fish hooks, bigger fish hooks, machetes, scythes, hoes, and the occasional saber. The lepers had a mission to make the town pay.

However, in the end, they just wanted 6 dead bodies and the remaining gold. I figure that is a fair deal between priests and lepers gone wrong. I mean they did cheat them out of prime Northern California coastal real estate for 100 years all because they didn’t want lepers to not live just north of their town. They didn’t even want to live IN their town. This is the reason why I think HOA’s were manufactured in hell.

Scare Rating: 5 out of 10 ghosts