The Twenty-Ninth Night of Halloween: Sole Survivor

ON THE TWENTY-NINTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched Sole Survivor (1984), written and directed by Thom Eberhardt. A young TV producer named Denise emerges unscathed from the crash of a commercial airliner. She learns that all of her fellow passengers suffered grisly deaths. She feels as though the universe has made an accounting error and that it won’t be long before it corrects its math. She’s not wrong. She is nearly crushed by a truck with a faulty parking break, and she later spins out on a slick highway. When these freak mishaps fail to smite her, the angel of death decides to take a more direct approach by using the bodies of the recently deceased like weaponized meat puppets.  

This is a neat supernatural chiller with concepts that were fertile enough to inspire the plots of two major premise-based horror films, Final Destination (2000) and It Follows (2014). Final Destination (and its many sequels) dispenses with the corpse-puppet aspect and focuses on killing those who escape the grim reaper’s grasp by means of Rube Goldberg-esque accidents. It Follows, conversely, eschews the accidents and has an entity control an endless series of strangers in pursuit of those who have eluded its lethal curse. (Meanwhile, Sole Survivor itself must have been inspired by a couple of Twilight Zone episodes, namely 1960’s “The Hitch-Hiker” and 1961’s “Twenty Two” (more popularly known as “Room for one more, honey”).) 

Sole Survivor is a capably shot slow burn that most excels in its script, which is full of warmly quippy dialog and stimulating but never over-explained ideas. It makes especially good use of low whispers and shadows darting in the periphery, which recur so as to break up the cheery scenes of Denise getting back to normal life with subtle reminders that all is not right in the world.