Harbinger – Review – Pics to Pixels

The general premise of Harbinger, you could say Child’s Play via Big, is a fairground curiosity turned into a nightmare, and it’s an idea that, on paper at least, should really work.

Directed by James Crow from a script by Simon Cluett, the film centres on Julia (Jeanine Nerissa Sothcott), the sole survivor of satanic killer Henry Decker. Decker’s played by Peter Woodward, who’s no stranger to cult telly, having turned up in Babylon 5, Charmed and, well, the little thing of being the actual son of The Equalizer himself. Five years on, Julia’s still dealing with the fallout and trauma of what happened to her when paranormal TV presenter Mike Craggs (Gary Webster) talks her into revisiting the house where it all happened, for a ghost-hunting show. She reluctantly agrees, and it isn’t long before the crew stumble onto the Harbinger itself. From there it’s a fairly gleeful body-count setup: the machine predicts a death, the death duly arrives, and Decker needs six of them before he’s walking the earth again.

There’s a nice bit of casting throughout, with Carole Ann Ford (the very first Doctor Who companion, no less) as Julia’s mother, and Nick Nevern lending his voice to the Harbinger itself. It’s the kind of casting that suggests everyone involved knew exactly what sort of film they were making, and leaned into it.

Where the film lets itself down a little, for me, is the house itself. It’s the sort of big old place that surely came with big plain white walls, so naturally the makers have opted to bathe it in red light almost constantly, and it does the film no favours. It becomes distracting to the point where I was genuinely wondering if I’d missed a line of dialogue explaining that Decker had some rare genetic disorder that made his eyes sensitive to anything below 610nm on the spectrum. A little more restraint here would have gone a long way, since the sets and practical work underneath all that red wash look like they deserved to actually be seen.

As a low-budget horror, it does well not to lean too heavily on shock and gore, favouring the supernatural instead. The fortune cards the Harbinger hands out are maybe a little on the nose, and it’s mildly baffling that nobody seems especially bothered on receiving a card showing a naked body with its intestines repurposed as a scarf, but the idea itself is a good one. The Harbinger has the makings of a proper recurring horror icon, the sort of thing that could easily build its own mythology and keep coming back for more, in the way our friend till the end, Charles Lee Ray, has managed for decades.

Overall, this is a low-budget British horror that feels like it struggles slightly to get all its ideas onto the screen within that budget. There are a couple of clunky dialogue moments, too, like a scene where characters discuss what their cards “said,” despite the cards being purely pictorial and not saying anything at all. Yes, I’m being a bit picky, but it’s the kind of small inconsistency that sticks once you’ve noticed it. That said, Harbinger has everything you want, and expect, from a film like this: a great antagonist, at least a couple of characters you’re actively rooting to see off, a mismatched group of people you’d never believe would tolerate each other in real life, and a big, old, largely empty house to put them all in.

Funnily enough, having the Doctor’s own granddaughter, Carole Ann Ford, in the cast feels rather apt, since this would honestly make a great feature-length episode of Doctor Who, maybe a slightly more gore-filled Christmas special than we’re used to.

Harbinger is worth a watch. It’s got some nice kills, a decent supernatural hook, and if you’re already a fan of low-budget horror, you know exactly what you’re getting, and you’ll get it here in abundance. I just wish they’d gone easier on the red light.