Fog of Doom - TV Tropes

"I don't know what happened to Antonio Bay tonight. Something came out of the fog and tried to destroy us. In one moment, it vanished. But if this has been anything but a nightmare, and if we don't wake up to find ourselves safe in our beds, it could come again. To the ships at sea who can hear my voice, look across the water, into the darkness. Look for the fog."

• In Dragon Knights, Nadil has an ocean of souls to surround his castle. It's a terrifyingly effective moat.
• The Electric Tale of Pikachu: There was a Haunter called the "Black Fog" that's implied to have killed Sabrina's Pokémon at a younger age before casting a curse on Sabrina herself. Yeah, he wasn't friendly.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
  • Stardust Crusaders: Enya the Hag's Stand, Justice (seen above), can turn people into People Puppets by attaching strings of its fog to their open wounds.
  • Steel Ball Run: Oyecomova weaponizes this by using his Stand to attach a Sticky Bomb onto smoke and uses it against Johnny and Gyro.
• Naruto:
  • The ninjas of Kirigakure (meaning "Hidden Mist") use fog for their silent killing techniques. So, it's not the fog trying to kill you, but ninjas in control of the fog trying to kill you.
  • The Godaime Mizukage takes this a step further. Like the village she leads, she can use mist-like techniques. The difference is, hers can fill a room and literally melt people.
• In Sailor Moon, Sailor Mercury can produce this with her Mercury Aqua Mist attack (Sabão Spray in The '90s anime), producing a concealing fog that gives comrades an opening to attack an enemy unawares. (The fog itself had no special properties; she was The Smart Guy rather than having much in the way of offensive power. She gets more direct means of attack as once or twice per season the gang gets more powers.)

• Big Finish Doctor Who: The Eminence is an Eldritch Abomination presented as a sentient fog capable of reanimating the dead and making them its immortal warriors, so horrifyingly feared armies are mobilized at the mere sighting of a single Eminence soldier.

• The one-shot villain Ahrimadz in Paperinik New Adventures is a Middle-Eastern magician who can control mist, using it both to incite a Hate Plague in the people of Duckburg, and to restrain Paperinik during their fight, slowing him down and making him clumsy.

• An industrial accident in Cloudsdale produces the titular fog in Flash Fog. It's a miles-wide sphere of cloud that simply can't be manipulated and will eventually set "solid". Plus, the interior of it is cold enough that prolonged exposure can freeze Earth Ponies to death. Since it's spread itself over a large area of farming country, it's become very disruptive and has to be gotten rid of as quickly as possible.
• A Leaf of the Tree: The Cloying Bog is Takeo's Signature Move. It is a jutsu of his own design where he creates a mist to cover the battlefield that will slowly attach itself on targets within its grasp and hinder their movements. Additionally, through a feel for his own chakra, a sufficient build-up of mist on a foe will allow Takeo to track them by chakra sense. This technique obscures the foe's view and hinders their combat prowess, while allowing Takeo to hunt them down.
• The Power of the Equinox: When Twilight Sparkle cracks the crystalline prison of the Entity, it manifests itself as a thick miasma. It then enters Twilight through her respiratory tract, beginning her transformation into Dimmed Star that starts with the dissolvement of her body.

• A particularly nightmarish example of this trope occurs in 1985. Due to out-of-control air pollution, exacerbated by excessive road traffic, a massive smog event envelops Los Angeles and suffocates over 14,000 residents to death. Similar but less severe events are said to have taken place in over 130 other U.S. cities as well as in London, Paris, and Rome.
• 28 Weeks Later has the cloud of Deadly Gas unleashed on London by the U.S. Army in its attempt to kill off the remaining Infected.
• The Crawling Eye probably invented the "fog is full of monsters" take on this trope, with a mysterious and unexplained cloud on the side of a Swiss mountain turning out to be swarming with hideous evil Starfish Aliens. It ultimately turns out that they created the fog for the purposes of Hostile Terraforming — and it's starting to spread down the mountain and into the village...
• In The Fog, undead sailors came out of the mist to seek their revenge.
• In Planet Terror and The Return of the Living Dead, it's the fog that creates the zombies in the first place.
• Rubikon has most of Earth enveloped in a cloud of toxic gas in just a few hours, apparently due to permafrost gas reacting with pollutants in the atmosphere. The only survivors are on the eponymous space station and anyone who can make it to the few airdomes that have a self-contained life support system.
• In Sleepy Hollow (1999), the fog actually reaches out and puts out the torches around the village before the headless rider comes out of it.
• The Ten Commandments (1956): The tenth plague that kills all the firstborn in Egypt is depicted as this.
• Who Killed the Electric Car?: The infamous LA smog, which California lawmaker Alan Lowenthal described as the "black cloud of death". The desire to get rid of fog was what pushed the California Air Resources Board (CARB) to require car companies to build the electric car.

• In "Black Colossus", the Evil Sorcerer Natohk sends a mist over the desert to block his army's sight.
• In The Dark Tower, creepy fog-cloaked areas called "thinnies" are a rare, but deadly and unpredictable hazard. It's implied that this is what caused the events of The Mist.
• In the first of the Deathlands novels, the Darks are protected by this trope, apparently a pre-World War III weapon called Project Cerberus used to guard the MAT-TRANS Portal Network found in the Darks. The Sole Survivor of a well-armed expedition into the Darks comes staggering back babbling about a fog with claw and teeth that tear you apart.
• The Mind Fog is a creepy and illegal magical effect in The Dresden Files. It renders those touched by it dumbstruck and defenseless to anything unaffected by it.
• The Elric Saga: Elric of Melnibone has the Groaning Mist, which after enveloping its victims attempts to drive them insane with hallucinatory voices whispering of their fears and inadequacies.
• Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser: The titular cloud in The Cloud of Hate turns people into killers.
• Fate/Apocrypha: Jack the Ripper can shroud the area in a poisonous fog. The fog also fulfills one of the conditions needed for Jack to use Maria the Ripper.
• In The Fog (1975), a fog descends over Britain that turns almost the entire population insane.
• In Larry Niven's For A Foggy Night, the mist isn't actually mist, but rather times when the various alternate timelines intermesh. When you walk out into a fog, you're actually walking into an alternate world... it's just that most of the time the "alternate" is so close to your original world you never notice. But sometimes, just sometimes, you cross over into a world that's completely different...
• Friday the 13th: The Tales from Camp Crystal Lake series of books by Eric Morse^note  all feature a yellow fog which seems to make everyone feel more negatively, lubricating the lethal intentions of whomever finds the hockey mask as well as the Final Girl.
• The Hunger Games: The fog in question is a kind of nerve gas that causes seizures, muscle failure, and skin burns.
• Into The Broken Lands: The titular Death World has wandering mists that cause fatal acid burns from even brief exposure, courtesy of a power-mad mage with a penchant for Weather Manipulation.
• In The Lord of the Rings, the hobbits run into one of these on the Barrow Downs and end up captured by a Barrow-Wight.
• A strange ecosystem comes out of the fog in The Mist.
• In Mistborn: The Original Trilogy, the mysterious threat called the Deepness is actually the normally benign mists, which Ruin intensified until they form a crop-killing particulate winter.
• In "The Night Wire", two newsdesk-workers receive incoming reports of a city they've never heard of being overwhelmed by a mysterious fog that consumes people. It's unclear if the town actually existed, but some creepy force clearly does, because one of the newsmen dies while listening to the wire yet keeps on transcribing the report.
• The Purple Cloud has nearly the entire human and animal population of Earth being killed off by the mysterious title cloud.
• Re:Zero: The White Whale creates a white fog that erases people from existence.
• Reign of the Seven Spellblades: Gino Beltrami, the premier alchemist of the former student council's faction, tends to surround himself in combat with a cloud of soporific chemicals, which he combines with Lanoff Style sword arts to produce a Fantastic Fighting Style that Tim Linton refers to as the "booze blade".
• In Septimus Heap, the bank of Fog surrounding the House of Foryx conceals an Abyss.
• Space Wolf: In Grey Hunters, the Chaos forces cause a green and yellow fog to boil up. It obscures vision, allows their enemies to sneak up, and contains some kind of poison.
• Tales of the Magic Land has a book aptly named The Yellow Fog where a witch named Arachna who attempts to subdue the Magic Land with the titular fog. While not lethal (it's meant to subdue rather than exterminate, after all), it has several negative effects: it's toxic, for one, and it also blocks off the sun leading to intense cold in the usually winterless Magic Land.
• In The Traitor Son Cycle, before he manages to get a more corporeal form, Ash manifests as a cloud of thick black fog stalking the underground of the Harndon palace.
• The Smog in Un Lun Dun is effectively a sentient version of the smog that covered most of industrial-revolution London, and as such, is very lethal. It is also able to possess people to an extent, creating hideous creatures known as 'Smombies' and has been possessing Unstible for some time.
• An early example can be found in The War of the Worlds (1898). The Martians use a weapon called Black Smoke that acts very much like a semi-sentient, malevolent killing black mist. It's described in the book as moving almost like a living thing to cut off escape and trap its victims.
• The Wheel of Time has a city full of murderous mist. Touching the corrupted fog of Shadar Logoth will either kill you outright or infect you with an eventually lethal Hate Plague. Originally, the fog was contained in the city, but once one of the infected escaped into the countryside, it came with him, and is now (under the command of the aforesaid infectee) capable of forming spontaneously in unexpected places and ripping apart everyone within.
• In Zoo City, the Undertow is a cloud-like entity that appears and rips apart those whose familiars have died.

• Episode 4 of The Crown (2016) covers the Great Smog of 1952. As detailed in Real Life below, it was a noxious soup of fog and vehicle exhaust that was exacerbated by coal smoke from furnaces. The hospitals are quickly overwhelmed by respiratory patients and both Winston Churchill's opponents and fellow Conservatives try unavailingly to convince him that the smog is a serious problem of human origin—it gets so bad that they encourage the young Queen Elizabeth to intervene with him. He only realizes the depth of his mistake when the lack of visibility results in his young secretary being fatally struck by a bus, and he sees just how swamped the hospital is when he visits the morgue. The ending titles of the episode inform viewers that 4,000 deaths in the following months were attributed to the smog, but more recent research raises the estimate to 12,000.
• Mistfall in the classic Doctor Who serial "Full Circle". K9 analyzes the fog and declares it non-toxic.
• Interview with the Vampire (2022): In "What Can the Damned Really Say to the Damned", Morgan Ward describes to Louis de Pointe du Lac an ancient, supernatural fog that the Romanians believe is extremely harmful if they're exposed to it. Emilia firmly states that it's not a myth.

  Morgan: The superstitions of a backward country. Mad fog in the dirt, trees and rivers. I keep my trousers pinned at the ankle when I sleep for fear it will get me, too.
  Emilia: This is an old country with old things in it.

• Legion (2017): In "Chapter 22", a bodiless Shadow King appears as a thick fog of black smoke, and his consciousness travels halfway across world in order to invade and contaminate the mind of David, the infant son of his adversary Charles Xavier.
• Alioth in Loki (2021) is a sentient cloud that hunts down and consumes variants sent to the Void, the true fate of anyone "pruned" by the TVA.
• The Lost monster is portrayed as one.
• Sherlock gives us the fog in "The Hounds of Baskerville". It contains a drug which makes the mind extremely susceptible to fear and stimulus.
• In the Supernatural episode ""All Hell Breaks Loose, Part Two", black smoke explodes from the Devil's Gate as the forces of hell are released.
• Star Trek: The Original Series: The episode "Obsession" features a star-traveling, vampiric cloud.
• An episode of Ultraman Tiga have the team dealing with a fog from out of nowhere that covers a mountain observatory, and from within the fog comes a horde of bloodsucking extraterrestrial alien critters hunting the main characters. The episode is a Whole-Plot Reference to Stephen King's The Mist, with one of the characters remarking "this fog reminds me of a horror novel I read somewhere."
• A World War I era episode of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles depicts a poison gas attack in this manner. For added terror, German flamethrower teams emerge from the gas cloud soon afterwards.

• Lights Out by Arch Oboler had a classic story called "The Dark," about a fog that turns people inside out, famously referenced in The Simpsons' "Treehouse of Horror V" (see the Western Animation folder). Originally broadcast in the early 1940s, the original version was lost, but an abbreviated version Oboler made in 1962 still exists and is creepy as ever.

• In Dawn of a New Age: Oldport Blues, a mysterious green fog settles over the high school and transforms into various smokey snakes that attack the children inside. While the end result is them getting imbued with superpowers, bringing the actual hostility of the fog into question, it's nevertheless an extremely painful and traumatizing time for the teenagers.

• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • The mist-loving Sea Zombies in the Greyhawk Adventures supplement were inspired by John Carpenter's zombies.
  • D&D also features air elementals, crimson deaths, vampiric mists, and mist dragons.
  • The most iconic set-piece of Ravenloft are The Mists that hang over most of the Land, and this is often used as a means to pluck players out of their home world. It gets to a point where experienced players will run screaming from the slightest sign of mist. One of the nastiest salient powers mentioned in the Ravenloft supplement Van Richten's Guide to Vampires was the possibility of a Patriarch vampire using its energy-drain ability while in mist-form. This was a particularly terrifying prospect under 2nd Edition rules, when there was virtually no way to fight back against a gaseous-form opponent.
  • There is also a spell call Murderous Mist, which was a druid spell that created hot steam that could boil your eyes. Then again, there are the more classic Stinking Cloud, Cloudkill, and Acid Fog spells.
  • X2: Castle Amber, an early adventure that inspired much of the Mystara setting's flavor, features a poisonous "dead-gray" mist that traps the PCs in the d'Amberville family mansion.
• Fabula Ultima: A life-draining Mist fills the streets of the Floating Continent of Seraphim, forcing its citizens to wear masks for their protection when they go outside. Its source is a mysterious device called the Mist engine. Shutting the engine off would get rid of the Mist, but it would also make the city drop like a rock.
• In Hoyle's Rules of Dragon Poker, when there's fog outside, all cards are hole cards and the first two rounds of betting are done blind.
• London in Unhallowed Metropolis is cloaked in heavily toxic smog. Going outside without a gas mask or at least a damp cloth to cover your mouth and nose causes unconsciousness in short order, and death not too long after. Direct sunlight penetrating the smog layer is rare, and on the worst days, it blots out the sun entirely. There's nothing supernatural or actively malevolent about it, but that's a small comfort.
• In the Villains & Vigilantes adventure Devil's Domain, killing demons released a cloud that caused humans to go insane and attack you.

• In BIONICLE, Lesovikk encounters a sentient acid cloud while he's trapped in a Lotus-Eater Machine. He easily defeats it by blowing it away.

• Bayonetta 3: The Homunculi are capable of creating something called "Clouds of Erasure," a fog-like gas with cyan highlights that is capable of breaking down anything it touches. These usually serve as level boundaries, and will damage Bayonetta or Viola if they touch it. As each universe's arc goes on and Singularity gets closer to destroying that world, the setting becomes increasingly covered in huge oceans of them.
• There was a fog in Blue Dragon that inebriates its inhalers. And it's at sea. Close to rocks to run into.
• In Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Alucard can actually change into a playable Fog of Doom once you've found the right items: with the "Form of Mist" and "Gas Cloud" relics, his mist form is invincible and causes damage to any enemies within it, while constantly draining a small amount of MP. It's every bit the Game-Breaker it sounds like, though you can only get it near the end of the game.
• In City of Heroes, Dark Astoria is a zone covered in a frustratingly opaque mist, filled with arcane and supernatural enemies. For extra points, all of the neighborhoods and landmarks in Dark Astoria are named after old school horror authors, filmmakers, and characters. Adding to the creepy lethality of the zone, players can see vague images of the zone's long-dead inhabitants in the mist... who fade upon approaching.
• The miasma from Cthulhu Mythos RPG: The Sleeping Girl of the Miasma Sea is this, as its the source of the supernatural and terrible monsters that plague the Haunted House the game is set in. Once this is discovered, your goal is to stop the source of it before the whole world is infected.
• Deadly Premonition has a purple fog that drives people insane.
• In Demon's Souls, the Kingdom of Boletaria has been shrouded in a deep fog. The fog carries soul-devoring demons and corruptes people, either driving them mad or transforming them in demons themselves. Each boss arena is hidden behind a thick fog wall, an element which is carried to the game's spiritual successor, Dark Souls.
• Digimon Survive has a particularly terrifying example in the form of a fog plaguing the Digital World, appearing and disappearing seemingly at random, that Digimon avoid out of pure instinct without even knowing why. You quickly see that this is for a very good reason, as those caught in it end up being Dragged Off to Hell by hundreds of ghostly hands. The group then learns that for generations a group of Digimon have been performing Human Sacrifices to keep it from consuming the Digital World entirely and it's being controlled by an Eldritch Abomination that wants to Kill All Humans with it.
• While it's not really explained how it works, death fog in Divinity: Original Sin II instantly kills anyone who enters a cloud of it, making it a deadly obstacle and potent weapon. It's also apparently mass manufactured, and stored in crates and barrels, and someone has stolen a very large shipment of it...
• The Dead Mines: The mine you explore is filled with toxic gas that heavily restricts visibility.
• In Dwarf Fortress, the surfaces of evil regions have a variety of clouds of randomly named materials ("execrable soot", "accursed gloom", etc) which cause randomly determined symptoms, ranging from mild dizziness to all of your internal organs rotting to becoming a zombie.
• Fallout:
  • In Fallout: New Vegas: Dead Money, the Sierra Madre is contaminated by the Cloud, a highly toxic red smog that also corrodes metal. It's able to penetrate the hazard suits that were supposedly meant to protect people from the Cloud but sealed them in, forcing them to mutate into the Ghost People. On Hardcore mode, it slowly saps the Courier's HP outdoors, with more concentrated pockets causing faster health loss, as if the DLC wasn't hard enough.
  • Fallout 4's Far Harbor DLC has The Fog, which may carry radioactive poison, conceal monsters such as Fog Crawlers, or cause visitors such as the Sole Survivor to hallucinate.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles has the Miasma, which is a shadowy purple fog that drains the life of anyone or anything caught inside it. To repel it, caravans must venture out and collect Myrrh to replenish their hometown's Crystals. Late in the game you see the ruins of a town whose caravan failed and is now a monster-covered wasteland.
  • Final Fantasy IX's Mist is the source of many a scary monster. On the other hand, it's also the source of many a black mage. The Mist was created by the Iifa Tree, which processes the souls of the dead into Mist. This is intended to clear Gaia of life to make room for the denizens of Terra. It has the bonus effect of making people bloodthirsty, accelerating the whole process.
• Freelancer has a number of nebulae that will corrode your hull, bombard you with radiation, or conceal pirates or Nomads.
• God of War:
  • God of War: Chains of Olympus: Morpheus envelopes the world in a black fog after Helios disappeared.
  • God of War (2018): Niflheim is cursed with a poisonous mist that limits the amount of time Kratos and Atreus can spend there.
• League of Legends features the Black Mist, which on top of looking what it sounds like, is swarmed with tortured, undead souls of the Shadow Isles and are seeking for more to join them. The Harrowing (Runeterra's equivalent to Halloween) is a night when the Black Mist ventures out beyond the isles and becomes even more dangerous — the closest neighboring faction, Bilgewater, has to prepare for its invasion every year. Some Shadow Isles champions also wield the mist in combat, such as Yorick (who uses it to summon and command units to fight with him) and Senna (who fires it out a giant cannon in combination with light magic).
• In The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky - Second Chapter, Rolent is covered in a mysterious fog causing some of the residents to act unusual, and later on, Estelle and the team get affected by it and sent into a Lotus-Eater Machine.
• Legend of Legaia provides a misguided Big Bad who creates the Fog of Doom, which warps the titular Utopia into a Crapsack World. But otherwise, the fog was harmless. Unless you were wearing a Seru, as the fog turned those, and anyone who was wearing one, into a horrible monster. And given that, before the fog, everyone was using them non-stop to do everything, it was a fog of doom. Oh, and if you ran into one of those previously mentioned monsters that were lurking in the mist just outside of the few remaining safe havens, you were screwed, since ordinary weapons were worse than useless against them.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker: The mist in the Earth Temple not only robs Link of being able to use items (including his sword), but also leaves him defenseless against the dreaded Floormasters.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess: Once you head to the Forest Temple in human form with Midna, you have to go through a mass of purple fog following a monkey with your lantern. The fog doesn't affect your enemies, sadly, making it very annoying when you're running along and the monkey suddenly stops in terror and you careen into purple death. The penultimate dungeon also has black, ashy mist that traps you in wolf form as long as you stand in it.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom: Gloom is essentially the Demon King's power made manifest. Just being around it is enough to make Hyruleans sick and weak, it corrodes their weapons to near-uselessness unless extra materials are banded on to them, and it empowers the monsters to the point that entire squadrons are called in to take out Bokoblins and Moblins. This isn't Gameplay and Story Segregation at work, either; if Link is caught in pools of concentrated Gloom or struck by Gloom-infused attacks, his Heart Containers start failing and only strong light can patch up that kind of damage. Ganondorf wields concentrated Gloom, and even in his mummified form it destroys Link's health and best equipment, grievously corrodes the Master Sword, and withers his right arm to the point it had to be amputated to save his life. The final boss battle has Ganondorf wield that same power to ruin Link if he's not careful.
• In Lost Kingdoms, the black mist contains monsters and is the influence of the Big Bad. A Side Quest reveals a scientist who tried to save his hometown, but ended up creating a white mist containing weird monsters.
• The H-Game Mist Train Girls has the Phantom Fog, randomly occurring fog clusters which is capable of spawning the primary antagonistic threat called Mist Monsters.
• The creepy fog in Sei-an City in Ōkami is slowly killing everyone in the city. Turns out it's caused by a monster called Blight, which is living in the Emperor's Stomach.
• The fog that appears in the TV World in Persona 4. It causes fatigue for those not wearing special glasses that allow them to see in it. It crosses over to the real world every so often and when it recedes, corpses are found in high places. Near the finale of the game, the fog starts seeping into the real world, and it's revealed that those exposed to the fog for too long will eventually turn into Shadows — which is how Izanami, the Big Bad behind it all who you fight in the True Ending, wants things.
• Prayer of the Faithless: Gauron and Vanessa's research led them to the truth behind the deadly Fog, which can turn people and animals into monsters with prolonged exposure. All people have Soulfire, which burns more intensely if they deny their true nature in some way. The current fog is the result of many eras of human negativity, and it's practically guaranteed that the Fog will be constantly produced due to humanity being constantly in peril.
• Rescue on Fractalus!: The acidic atmosphere of the eponymous planet both reduces visibility and dissolves the flight suits of exposed pilots.
• In the RuneScape quest "Broken Home", there is a purple fog that breaks through the windows and drains the player's health. The seasonal Deadman Mode features a fog that does heavy damage to the player.
• The Secret World features this throughout its first chapter: the action kicks off when Solomon Island was suddenly swallowed up by a mysterious grey fog, bringing with it a "siren song" that lured anyone who wasn't asleep or unable to hear out into the ocean; by the time you arrive, the Fog has receded until it merely surrounds the island, but by then the drowned citizens have returned as zombies, accompanied by the Draug. Anyone trying to escape through the Fog invariably ends up dead. It's later revealed that the Fog itself is an airborne strain of the Filth, and anyone who breathed it in has been infected.
• Shantae and the Seven Sirens: The first talk with the Tree Town Chief results in mentions of malicious "things" that hide in fog at night:

  Tree Town Chief: ...They fear the sunlight.
  But when the sun sets...
  They come to the surface.
  They hide inside the ghostly fog...
  Those who are taken...
  ...
  They never return.

• Silent Hill: There is a red fog that chases Heather in Silent Hill 3 that will kill her if she lets it catch up with her. Some of the early pre-release materials for Silent Hill: Origins suggested that the town's Ominous Fog would cross the line to become an active, amorphous enemy. The game switched production teams midway through development, and though a later sequel, Silent Hill: Homecoming, did feature an otherwise corporeal monster named "Smog", the Fog of Doom idea never panned out.
• Splatoon: One random event which can occur during the Player Versus Environment "Salmon Run" game mode is Fog. Aside from greatly reducing your visibility, the Salmonids now attack randomly from all directions rather than in rows or clumps. This makes them much more difficult to deal with, especially if Fog occurs in conjunction with High Tide (another random event which halves the arena size, but keeps the same number of enemies); you and your team will very quickly find yourselves utterly swamped by enemies.
• Tokyo Xanadu: The Monster of the Week in Chapter 5 causes an enormous fog to overtake the city, attacking any civilians of its choosing.
• The Kvaldir, also known as the walkers of the fog, from World of Warcraft are ghostly sea raiders who only show up in areas of very heavy fog. There's also the noxious orange mist that passes for atmosphere in the zombie-infested Plaguelands. In high enough concentrations, it's a vector for the Scourge.
• Zork: In Beyond Zork, eldritch vapors are monsters that appear as clouds of fog and will steal the player's items (as well as tickling the player and touching the player in inappropriate places).

• Dreamscape: A flashback in episode 6 reveals that a black mist appeared in the vampire empire of the Underworld. It spread throughout the Underworld, then the surface world and cursed anyone it came in contact with. Vampire Lord, back then known as Vampire Knight, destroyed the fog and doing so is how he rose to the rank of 'Lord'.

• Cashmere Sky: The plot is focused around a deadly fog that shrouded over most of the world and seemingly came out of nowhere, forcing people to move to higher ground with little warning and fight over what few pieces of land there remained. It's described as a poison that makes it feel like you're drowning in fire if you breathe it in. After reports come in about thin patches in the fog, Lockridge plans on building machines that sustains the fog to prevent a mass migration until the company is ready, claiming that they currently don't have the supplies or infrastructure to support such a move.
• Soul to Call: Not only do abominations appear out of the Fog, but people who wander in tend not to wander out.
• Called "Bleach" in Third Voice, it's constantly expanding, requiring a lot of work from mapmakers. You need special filters to travel through it, or you'll get "bleached" — lose first your memory, then your colors, then probably even more.

• A Running Gag in Screen Rant Pitch Meetings is that the Producer has a phobia of clouds, and thus suggests them as the ultimate terrifying villain for Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer and Green Lantern (2011).

• The cloud of Joker Venom that the Joker doses Gotham with in the Batman: The Animated Series episode "The Last Laugh" could qualify as the "insanity-inducing" variant... but you have to be exposed to it for a long time in order for the insanity to take effect.
• Code Lyoko:
  • XANA's polymorphic specters enter the real world as a gas/liquid when their schemes involve possessing something, which sometimes ends up being even more gas.
  • This is also XANA's final form upon being defeated. After being destroyed in Lyoko, William is depossessed and XANA formulates in a gaseous fog before dissolving.
• Courage the Cowardly Dog has the Fog Spirit from the 2014 CGI special episode "The Fog of Courage". The spirit awakens when Courage digs up a necklace that belonged to the spirit's dead lover and engulfs the farm in its fog in an attempt to get it back. It isn't actively malicious at first despite clearly being dangerous, but it's when Eustace tries to bargain with it over the amulet, which he thinks is valuable, that the Fog Spirit becomes hostile.
• One episode of Danger Mouse has the "Dreaded Fog Monster of Old London Town". It being a kid's cartoon, the Fog is more of a prankster than a threat.
• In the DuckTales (2017) episode "The Missing Links of Moorshire", when Scrooge and the others arrive at an Ominous Fog surrounding the golf course, as they reach the last hole, they realize that it turns people to stone.
• The Legend of Korra has a somewhat chilling example for a kids' show with the "Fog of Lost Souls", which eternally imprisons its victims in their most traumatic memories.
• The My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic two-parter "The Crystal Empire" gives us a sentient, shadowy example in the form of King Sombra, who takes advantage of this alternate form to completely surround his former Place of Power while waiting for any and all openings to retake it. While he's in this state, anyone or anything he comes into contact with is infected with black crystals that can cause various Black Magic effects.
• The Simpsons: The episode "Treehouse of Horror V" has a fog that turns people inside out (a spoof of Arch Oboler's 1937 radio play "The Dark" in the program Lights Out, which featured a similar fog and allegedly had scared writer David X. Cohen as a child).
• The very premise of Spiral Zone: half of the planet is covered by an artificial fog that turns people into mindless zombies and gives them severe physical deformities.
• Xiaolin Showdown had the Woozy Shooter. It induces a Mushroom Samba in its victim, and the user can take advantage of that.

• London is known for its Ominous Fog, thanks to much of the city being in a large river valley known as the Thames Basin. Combine that with extensive industrialization and a lack of environmental regulations and you have a recipe for this trope appearing several times in the past. Smog conditions got bad enough to be a public health hazard fairly regularly, but the last and worst incident was in 1952: From December 5th to December 9th, London was enshrouded in what has come to be called the Great Smog of 1952. One of the worst pollution episodes in history, the Great Smog killed nearly 4,000 people, and hospitalized nearly 100,000 more from respiratory tract infections and hypoxia (the inability to get enough oxygen). This finally convinced the government that enough was enough, and the UK's first Clean Air Act was passed soon after.

  • The Ominous Fog phenomenon London experiences isn't just exclusive to the Thames Basin, it regularly occurs in other parts of the river upstream as well — Sections of countryside in the Home Counties the river runs through (Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire to be exact) often get particularly gloomy fogs and mists during the winter.

  • A nearly identical situation happened in the mill town of Donora, PA in 1948, which led to the death of 20 and the infection of nearly 7,000, almost half the town's population, from respiratory illness. The smog also left many survivors with lasting illness. The event is still considered one of the worst environmental disasters in US history.
• Take the inherent danger of driving in thick fog with some Californians' infamous driving habits...and you have a recipe for disaster.
• On August 21, 1986, volcanic activity released a massive amount of carbon dioxide into Lake Nyos in Cameroon. The gas emerged from the water's surface as a massive cloud that (due to CO₂ being heavier than air) hugged the ground like a fog bank. This "death fog" engulfed three lakeside villages, killing approximately 2,000 people.
• Time and medical statistics have made it increasingly clear that the dust-clouds from the World Trade Center attacks constituted a slow-acting example of this, given the number of rescue personnel who have succumbed to respiratory disease and cancer after breathing in those dust particles.
• The 2010 forest and peat fires in Central Russia caused a Smoke of Doom in many Russian cities including Moscow.
• Many chemical weapons take on this feature when released, from the viewpoint of the victims. This sometimes crosses over with Deadly Gas.
• Two of Britain's deadliest railway accidents occurred in fog. In 1952, a sleeping car train from Perth to Euston ran past danger signals and crashed into the back of a local train at Harrow & Wealdstone, before a London to Liverpool express crashed into the wreckage, killing 112 people. Five years later, in 1957, an express from London to Ramsgate ran past danger signals and crashed into the the back of a local train at Lewisham, causing a bridge to collapse onto the wreckage. As a result of these accidents, new safety equipment was brought in across the network which would warn the driver if the signal was not at clear.
• One of the many factors that led to the Tenerife Airport Disaster, in which two jumbo jets collided with each other, killing 583 people, was a fog so thick that planes on the runway couldn't see each other, nor could the air traffic controllers in the tower see anything on the runway.
• The worst peacetime marine disaster in Canadian history was the 1914 sinking of the RMS Empress of Ireland, which happened because another ship collided with her at 1:56 a.m. in heavy fog.
• Rain-wrapped tornadoes can be a particularly lethal example of this trope. Take all of the dangers already associated with tornadoes and multiply them with heavy rainfall that makes them hard to see or hear, and you have something highly lethal that can sneak up on people without them knowing until it's too late. Might want to pay more attention to that random rainstorm if you live in a tornado-prone area.
• The Bhopal Disaster in 1984 took this form.