‘Terror is just beneath the surface’
Harbinger Down is a 2015 American independent science-fiction monster horror film written and directed by Alec Gillis and produced by Tom Woodruff, Jr.; the founders of the special effects company StudioADI. The cast includes Lance Henriksen, Giovonnie Samuels, Camille Balsamo, Reid Collums, Matt Winston (Wes Craven’s New Nightmare; Zodiac; The Boy Who Cried Werewolf), Camille Balsamo (Parasitic; Nightcomer) and Milla Bjorn.
Plot teaser:
A group of graduate students aboard the fishing trawler Harbinger are studying the effects of global warming on a pod of Orcas in the Bering Sea. When the ship’s crew discover the wreckage of Soviet era spacecraft, they are attacked by shapeshifting alien monsters.
When the ship’s crew dredges up a recently thawed piece of old Soviet space wreckage, things get downright deadly. It seems that the Russians experimented with tardigrades, tiny resilient animals able to withstand the extremes of space radiation. The creatures survived, but not without mutation. Now the crew is exposed to aggressively mutating organisms. And after being locked in ice for 3 decades, the creatures aren’t about to give up the warmth of human companionship.
In 2010, Amalgamated Dynamics was hired by Universal Studios to create the practical special effects for the 2011 The Thing prequel. However before the film was released, the majority of ADI’s effects work on the film was digitally replaced in post production by (CGI). This decision was upsetting to the crew of Amalgamated Dynamics, as this was not the first film of theirs where they later found their work replaced.
After the release of The Thing, in response to fan queries about what became of ADI’s effects for the film, Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff, Jr. uploaded a behind-the-scenes video to YouTube which showcased their original practical effects prior to their replacement. According to Gillis and Woodruff, the video received such an overwhelmingly positive response that it inspired them to create a YouTube Channel which would feature their archived videos of creature effects from throughout their career. Gillis said that it was the tipping point that prompted them to go ahead with their dream of producing their own film. “Honestly, we were resistant to it at first, so it wasn’t until I looked around my shop and saw an empty facility that I realized we were actually at the mercy of studios that didn’t actually care about our techniques anymore. They view it as a commodity and a product, and they’ve corporatised the structure of creating art and in the end it all becomes disposable. That’s not how the fans see our work.”
On May 8, 2013, Alec Gillis began a Kickstarter drive for Harbinger Down, advertising the film as being a monster horror film that was, “in the spirit of two of the greatest sci-fi/horror films of all time, Alien and The Thing“, and that would feature only practical techniques to create the films monsters, including the use of animatronics, prosthetic makeup, stop motion and miniature effects, with the film’s creatures featuring no digital animation outside of rod/rig removal and digital compositing.
