Sole Survivor (1984)

Through luck so sheer it may as well be called a wonder, ad executive Denise (Anita Skinner) survives a plane crash that leaves everyone else dead. There was already a bit of strangeness surrounding the incident before it actually occurred. The star of Denise’s latest ad project, former beach party exploitation movie star Karla Davis (Caren Larkey) was trying to get in contact with Denise to warn her off going on the plane completely, because she had a vision of her surviving the crash, something that suggests a kind of doom worse than death to Karla the film will only make more concrete much later on.

Things really take a turn for the weird once Denise – who also used the opportunity of her short stint at the hospital to romance her doctor (Kurt Johnson) – is from medical care. She seem to be followed by curiously motionless, hollow-eyed people who stare menacingly at her, and there’s a series of near accidents that threaten to finish what the plane crash didn’t manage. And the people following our heroine? They just might be walking corpses (that look very much the part too, thanks to simple yet brilliant performances and make-up effects). It’s as if death itself is trying to correct the mistake of Denise’s survival.

Not to be confused with a couple of other films called Sole Survivor – some of them even concerning plane crash survivors too – this slow and subtle bit of horror filmmaking is to my eyes the magnum opus in the filmography of its director Thom Eberhardt, fan favourite Night of the Comet notwithstanding. But then I’m bound to prefer the deeply serious slow horror to the goofy (and also pretty slow) piece of horror goofiness.

Be it as it may, Sole Survivor certainly recommends itself by the right kind of slowness. Like a decades-early precursor of many of the more subtle indie horror films of today (It Follows seems an obvious example because it also shares a comparable mood of inescapable dread) this is a film that is slow because it takes its time – and really needs to take its time to work properly – slowly and menacingly building its mood and its main character, all the better to trap her in truly inescapable doom.

Eberhardt does a lot of the tale’s heavy lifting through small, seemingly throwaway details that come together to build his movie’s world, suggesting many things he doesn’t outright state about Denise and her life very effectively. He also has a great hand for making details precise. For example making Karla not just an aging actress with visions that ruin her life and what’s left of her career but one known for beach movies specifically draws a much more concrete picture of her and what her life has been like than the easier, shorter “generic aging actress” lesser films would have chosen. Generally, Sole Survivor handles even the more clichéd parts of its material well. The romance, for example, actually feels perfectly fitting and helps flesh out Denise as a person beyond her status as a woman doomed by Death itself.

Speaking of Death, I would be rather surprised if Sole Survivor wasn’t an influence on the Final Destination films, at least the brilliant first one. Calling the newer films rip-offs like some people on the internet inevitably do seems to be rather wrong-headed to me, however, and not just because the series’ love for complicated death traps and teen angst takes the idea of Death trying to correct mistakes into an emotionally and thematically very different direction. There’s also the tiny little fact that the idea of a personified Death taking care of business this way has been part of the literature of the fantastic long before Eberhardt was born.


This doesn’t, in any case, lessen the quality of the film at hand. Sole Survivor is such an effective and doom-laden experience, carried by such a subtle, insinuating air of actual dread that turns into highly suggestive moments of actual physical threat it is a little dark wonder to behold.