During his heyday in the 1970s and 80, British horror novelist James Herbert was quite the phenomenon. The success of his best-selling debut, The Rats (1974), the tale of a strain of over-sized and highly aggressive rodents emerging in London’s East End, was the start of a long and fruitful career that saw him interspersing similarly apocalyptic stories (The Fog (1975) – nothing to do with John Carpenter’s 1980 film – The Dark (1980) and The Rats sequels Lair (1979) and Domain (1984)) with smaller scale but no less bloody novels (The Survivor (1976), The Spear (1978), The Jonah (1981), Shrine (1983) et al). He was never a subtle writer, but he was an exciting one whose crowd-pleasing books continued to sell in huge numbers right up to his death in 2013.
While his contemporary, Stephen King, has seen almost every word he ever wrote transferred to the screen, the history of Hebert adaptations is spottier and a lot less successful. The Rats was turned into a lacklustre Canadian horror film, Deadly Eyes/Night Eyes (1982) directed by Robert Clouse of Enter the Dragon (1973) fame (it also became a a little-remember computer game in 1985); Carlo Carlei’s Fluke (1995) was an undistinguished adaptation of Herbert’s most atypical novel (the story of a dog who believes he was once a man); Lewis Gilbert’s Haunted (1995) was based on a television script that was never optioned and was instead turned into a novel, the bulk of which the film ignores; and arguably the best of the adaptations, the three-part BBC television mini-series The Secret of Crickley Hall (2012).
First out of the gate was this adaptation of Herbert’s third novel, first published in 1976. Directed by David Hemmings, the story is transplanted to Australia to where Hemmings had relocated in 1979 after appearing in the modern vampire film Thirst. That film had been produced by the indefatigable Anthony I. Ginnane who secured the rights to the novel and had British novelist and screenwriter David Ambrose adapt it for Hemmings to direct. Unexpectedly Ginnane, Ambrose and Hemmings decided to tone down the more visceral thrills of the novel in favour of a more cerebral – and ultimately unsuccessful – take on the story, a decision Ginnane later regretted.
A Boeing 747 airliner crashes near a small Australian town shortly after take off, killing everyone on board except its pilot, David Keller (Robert Powell) who survives the disaster physically unscathed. Wracked with guilt and unable to explain how he survived, Keller begins to investigate the crash, helped by a psychic, Hobbs (Jenny Agutter). He’s haunted by the ghosts of the passengers who died in the crash as several locals meet nasty ends, seemingly murdered by the vengeful spirits who manifest as a young girl (Brigette Webster). Keller’s dogged investigations uncover a conspiracy to deliberately bring the aircraft down and he realises that there can be no peace for the dead until he exposes it.
The film gets off to an outstanding start with the extraordinary plane crash sequence, made using a full-sized replica of the aircraft. The actual crash, it’s hellish, fiery aftermath and the shot of Powell wandering dazed and bewildered but otherwise unharmed from the wreckage gets things off to a spectacular start but it’s all downhill very rapidly after that. The decision to abandon the gory outbursts of violence that peppered Herbert’s novel was a mistake – a subtle, skin-crawling ghost story is always welcome but only when all involved know what they’re doing and whatever his other obvious talents, Hemmings had no affinity with the genre at all. The film drags interminably and the drawn out suspense scenes utterly fail to either scare or impress.
There are plenty of quietly disturbing moments – scraps of clothing flapping forlornly in trees around the crash site, the ghostly voices of children killed in the crying out for their mothers, a looter encountering a ghostly child on a lake (a scene cut from many versions) but they’re few and far between. It’s never clear why the ghosts kill the people they do, many of who are entirely unconnected with the conspiracy behind the crash and although the film evokes the stories of Carnival of Souls (1962) and La Rivière du hibou/An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (1962) it lacks the otherworldly atmosphere of either.
Already over-long, the film shows some signs of having been trimmed and re-edited in post-production. Popular Australian actress Angela Punch-McGregor, then a familiar face after the international successes of The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978), Newsfront (1978) and The Island (1980), is third billed but is barely in the film at all, appearing in just a couple of largely non-speaking scenes. The rest of the cast is one of the film’s better aspects – Powell is suitably detached and icy as Keller and Agutter is great as Hobbs (a man in the novel) though Cotton, in his last screen appearance, is ill-served in a poorly-written role as a priest.
Beautifully shot by director of photography John Seale (he later shot The Hitcher (1986), Gorillas in the Mist (1988), Rain Man 1988) and Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (2001) among many others), The Survivor looks good but doesn’t really amount to very much. Hemmings mistakes long, drawn-out scenes for atmosphere and what the bookend scenes of children playing “it” are supposed to signify (if anything) is unclear. The whole film is far too enigmatic for its own good and was crying out for the trademark violence that Herbert brought to his best work.
Although The Survivor was nominated in several categories at the 1981 Australian Academy of Cinema and Television awards ceremony and took home the Medalla Sitges for Best Screenplay and Prize of the International Critics’ Jury at the Sitges film festival, the film was intensely disliked by Herbert. He later claimed to have fallen asleep while watching it and in an interview with David J. Howe dismissed both The Survivor and the film version of The Rats as “terrible … absolute rubbish. I can only say don’t blame me.” Whatever you may think of his novels you can’t argue with his assessment of the films they became.
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