The Fog Revisited

John Carpenter's 'The Fog' just started on tv and I had to start watching. There are many problems with that movie, but the opening is not one of them. The whole opening sequence from John Houseman to the 1 am end is magical. The common lament, certainly from me, is what the hell happened to Carpenter? You look at that beginning and just look at the shot in the supermarket with the guy taking a sup of orange juice. There is no shot - NO SHOT - in Carpenter's later oeuvre that even looks like that (by later I mean the post-The Thing movies). I mean literally looks like that, a slightly off angle shot that nevertheless does not draw attention to itself. Art within the mainstream. There are no shots like that. A small little shot looking up a supermarket aisle. All his later movies, competent though they are, feature standard shots. They are well-made films without any individuality (even 'In the Mouth of Madness'). What the hell happened? Surely a director's internal vision doesn't just die.