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THE SURVIVOR
David Hemmings, 1981, 100/99/81 mins)
Release date: 23 March 2026
Limited Edition 4K UHD (World premiere)

Pre-orders: UK 4K UHD/US 4K UHD/UK BD/US BD (all region-free)

Robert Powell (Harlequin), Jenny Agutter (Walkabout), and Joseph Cotten (Island of the Fishmen) star in The Survivor, a terrifying tale of supernatural horror from director David Hemmings (Voices).

When pilot David Keller (Powell) is the sole survivor of a plane crash, he begins to experience terrifying visions. Assisted by a clairvoyant (Agutter) who claims to have contacted the crash victims, Keller starts to investigate the cause of the accident, only to find that those who can help him keep turning up dead...

Based on the novel by the celebrated horror writer James Herbert (The Fog), scripted by David Ambrose (Alternative 3), and produced by the legendary Antony I Ginnane (Patrick), The Survivor is a classic of Ozploitation horror.


INDICATOR LIMITED EDITION 4K UHD SPECIAL FEATURES

• Brand-new 4K HDR restoration from the original negative by Powerhouse Films
4K (2160p) UHD presentation in Dolby Vision (HDR10 compatible)
• Three presentations of the film: the previously unseen director’s cut (100 mins); the original Australian theatrical version (99 mins); and the shorter US version (81 mins)
• Original mono audio
• Audio commentary on the Australian version with producer Antony I Ginnane and film critic and archivist Jaimie Leonarder (2018)
• Audio commentary on the Australian version with Ginnane and horror hostess Katarina Leigh Waters (2012)
• ‘Not Quite Hollywood’ Interviews (2008): outtakes from Mark Hartley’s acclaimed documentary on Australian cinema, featuring Ginnane and cinematographer John Seale
• The Legacy of James Herbert (2016): critic David Flint and filmmaker and academic Christopher Cooke explore the work of the acclaimed horror author, with a focus on The Survivor
• Antony I Ginnane on ‘The Survivor’ (2004): an introduction to the film
• Clapperboard: ‘The Survivor’ (1980): excerpts from the Australian TV programme, featuring behind-the-scenes footage and interviews with actors Joseph Cotten, Peter Sumner, Jenny Agutter, Ralph Cotterill and Angela Punch McGregor
• Archival TV interview with Peter Sumner (1980)
• Original promotional film (1980)
• Behind the Scenes: ‘The Survivor’ (1980): Super 8mm footage filmed and narrated by stuntman Dean Bennett
• Appreciation by the academic and Australian cinema specialist Stephen Morgan (2026)
• Original theatrical trailer and TV spot
• Brian Trenchard-Smith trailer commentary (2013, 3 mins): short critical appreciation
• Image galleries: promotional and publicity material, and behind the scenes
• Limited edition exclusive 80-page book with a new essay by Sergio Angelini, an exclusive extract from producer Antony I Ginnane’s unpublished memoirs, an archival production report, archival interviews with director David Hemmings, and actors Jenny Agutter and Joseph Cotten, and full film credits
• World premiere on 4K UHD
• Limited edition of 10,000 individually numbered units (6,000 4K UHDs and 4,000 Blu-rays) for the UK and US
• All features subject to change

#PHILE436U
BBFC cert: 15
REGION FREE
EAN: 5060697923872

I've seen the two shorter versions of this and have them both on DVD copies, but the longer director's cut will be new to me. I wonder if it has more of Angela Punch McGregor. It's clear that a lot of her role must have ended up on the cutting-room floor, and even so she's billed fourth.

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!

I've always wondered if anyone turned up to the John Carpenter Fog expecting an adaptation of Herbert's novel, then being sorely disapointed at the lack of castration, lesbianism and schoolboy orgies.

We really should not be giving any producers of a remake of Harry Potter those ideas!

colinr0380 wrote: Fri Dec 12, 2025 9:47 am 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!

colinr0380, thank you so much for your in-depth write-up on Herbert's books and adaptations. This is super-helpful! I had some Herbert books in my to-read pile for a while now, but was not sure where to start and if this would be my cup of tea at all.

The Fog is probably the most disturbing novel I have ever read - I still get nightmares from it!

Final specs:

Jenny Agutter's character only being referred to as Hobbs (I assume it's her character's surname) reminds me of a funny bit in, I think, The Fog where the hero's girlfriend orgasms and cries out his surname "Holman!" which is really weird if you think about it.

CineOutsider.