Glad to see this finally turn up, as it seemed inevitable that The Survivor would be on the docket for Indicator as soon as the Robert Powell starring Harlequin/Dark Forces turned up a year or so back, as they make for a good matched pair. Powell always seemed to have that kind of ethereal, spaced out quality to his performances, which may have been a holdover or continuation from his Jesus of Nazareth role!
Compared to how many Stephen King adaptations to the screen there have been (even just this year alone!), this is one of the few adaptations of James Herbert to the screen. I think a lot of that comes down to just the large scale nature of Herbert's horror combined with often darkly comic and brutally nihilistic gory setpieces that sort of makes them unfilmable. Or at least unfilmable if you want to capture the essence of what Herbert was going for properly.
The Survivor may be the best of all the adaptations (although weirdly uncomfortably premonitory of the 1988 Lockerbie incident now) because it is able to do the big plane crash opening setpiece at the necessary scale to have the proper weight to it before settling down into his tale of being tormented by the spirits of the dead who are needing you to face your own reckoning before they can be at peace (this groups The Survivor with a couple of his other later stories of facing up to the complicit part one has played in historical deeds: Others, The Jonah and Creed particularly, but even the sequel to Haunted, The Ghosts of Sleath, veers into that territory in its final section)
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To digress into the other James Herbert adaptations, the other one that mostly works is 1995's
Haunted, because that is a bit of a smaller scale work on a more standard 'ghost story mystery set in a spooky old mansion' aspect, which is well handled by Educating Rita/Shirley Valentine director Lewis Gilbert. That kind of became Herbert's second keystone work because he revisited the main paranormal investigator character of that one, David Ash, in two further works, The Ghosts of Sleath (which is done on a much wider local village scale, and is much more violent than the relatively restrained Haunted - the only way it could be made into a film would be as something comparably similar to Lucio Fulci's The Black Cat or City of the Living Dead), and one of Herbert's last books before his death, Ash.
Then there are a couple of adaptations that did not entirely work with 1996's
Fluke, which as a novel is a really surprisingly emotional work about a man who is murdered and reincarnated as a dog racing against time both to save his family from the killer and against the slowly encroaching doggy nature overwhelming his former memories of his past life (kind of the anti-Cujo! And it has one of the most satisfyingly moving endings), but was made into a film with Matthew Modine in that Babe/Jack Frost era which kind of diluted the emotion of self-abnegation for a more whimsical tone about cute animals and estranged dads learning to reconnect with their children.
Similarly the least successful adaptation (but very entertaining if in the right mood!) was the Canadian horror film Deadly Eyes, which I
wrote up a few years back and is an adaptation of The Rats, the first in Herbert's Rats trilogy, which is his
first keystone work. There is enough of Herbert there to be discernible but Deadly Eyes has turned the disconnected setpieces into more of a straightforward narrative and changed the setting to a Canadian one, so it does not entirely work as the critique of London and its environs that the novels are primarily focused on (After The Rats does urban decay and set pieces exposing the callous nature of big city life and the toll it takes on vagrants, single mothers and children in general; Lair goes out into the countryside and has your parochial vicar types and canoodling in lover's lane couples fall prey to the rat menace; before Domain returns back to the city just in time for it to be annihilated in a nuclear explosion and we travel with the few remaining survivors through the various government underground bunkers dotted throughout the capital).
And that is about it for James Herbert in film, though the BBC did an adaptation of one of Herbert's late novels,
The Secret of Crickley Hall (again another more low key ghostly one rather than a gore soaked apocalyptic one!), which I have on DVD but is still trapped in my to watch pile. And I should get to it at some point because I keep seeing on imdb that they apparently shot a scene for the production in my local town!
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In terms of my recommendation for Herbert's
books, beyond the wonderful but tonal outlier of Fluke I do love The Fog and The Dark the most, because they are the ultimate in terms of widescale, horribly violent, apocalypse narratives (Herbert did an even wider globe-spanning one in the mid-part of his career, Portent, but that felt as if it spread its net a bit too wide for comfort). Moon is also great and may be the best of Herbert's 'troubled lonely male protagonist haunted by existential guilt' run of books (The Survivor, the Ash trilogy, The Jonah, Sepulchre, Creed). If you want rollicking action adventure chase yarns I would recommend '48 (the alternate history of if the Nazis won the Second World War and invaded London, but then unleashed a plague, story which like the Rats trilogy is kind of Herbert's love letter to London itself as a city. Particularly in its Tower Bridge-set climax!) or The Spear, which is a kind of Indiana Jones-esque chase against a sect of Neo-Nazis for who can get to the fabled Spear of Longinus!
As for what I would recommend to any enterprising film producer to adapt, I would suggest that either Creed or Shrine would probably work well cinematically. And weirdly both already have kind of been adapted, as Polanski's The Ninth Gate, whilst not specifically about an amoral sleazy paparazzi who comes a cropper when he unwisely decides to start investigating a Satanic cult for a story, is otherwise really close tonally to Creed; whilst Shrine I found out recently (though I have not yet seen the film - so an Arrow edition of this would be much appreciated!
) actually
has been adapted into the Jeffrey Dean Morgan starring film
The Unholy from 2021! That's kind of Herbert's religious-tinged response to Stephen King's Carrie, with similar matching final firery setpiece. I will be curious to see that at some point, if only to see whether they kept that specific death of the father from the book in there!
