Question: Build a movie plot around this: Who was young hitchhiker? Elizabeth Solley
Answer:
Set in a Northern California fishing town called Antonio Bay, the town is about to celebrate its centennial on April 21, 1980, and are having a celebration led by Kathy Williams (Janet Leigh). However, the centennial is also marked by ominous events, including the appearance of a glowing fog that spreads over land and sea.In the first scene, on the night before the town's celebration, a group of children seated around a campfire on a beach, are entertained by a ghost story, told by 'old' Mr. Machen (John Houseman) (exactly at the stroke of midnight), the resident elderly fisherman. The story being told is indicative of the history of the town's formation, which is being discovered at that exact moment by the local priest, Father Malone (Hal Holbrook), when he finds the diary of his grandfather (who was also the town's priest).The diary later reveals a dark secret unknown to the current inhabitants where, in 1880, six of the founders of Antonio Bay (including Malone's grandfather) deliberately sank and plundered the Elizabeth Dane, a clipper ship owned by Blake, a wealthy man with leprosy who wanted to establish a colony near Antonio Bay. The six conspirators lit a fire on the beach near treacherous rocks, and the crew of the clipper, deceived by the false beacon, crashed into them. Everyone aboard the ship perished. The six conspirators were motivated both by greed and disgust at the notion of having a leper colony nearby. Antonio Bay and its church were then founded with the gold plundered from the ship.The mysterious fog contains the vengeful ghosts of Blake and the clipper's crew, who have come back on the 100th anniversary of the shipwreck and the founding of the town to apparently take the lives of six people (symbolic substitutes for the six conspirators).This same night, three local fishermen, Al Williams, Tommy Wallace, and Dick Baxter, are gruesomely murdered by supernatural attackers after the fog covers their boat. Just prior to their deaths, Al and Tommy are standing on the deck of the boat and...