Crowd-Funded Harbinger Down Trailer Excites Monsterpalooza Crowd

Over the weekend, Gillis – along with his cast and crew – took to the stage at Monsterpalooza to preview the film with a trailer.

He informed the audience that the trailer was cut together in the days leading up to Monsterpalooza and that a version of it will ultimately hit the web, albeit with less creature footage to maintain some mystery. So, the Monsterpalooza promo was an exclusive to the eager crowd. 

The trailer itself was excellent. It was icky, sticky and dripping with potential, featuring a wide variety of monstrous threats with giant mouths, rows of teeth and plenty of tentacles. The film wears its heart on its sleeve for titles like The Thing (and its imitators like Leviathan) and for a production shot on a low budget with limited time and resources, Gillis and company – from the looks of it – made an incredibly slick movie. And the audience went nuts for it.

Harbinger Down came about from Gillis’ desire to capture the ingenuity and fun of the practical FX monster movies of the ’80s. With Tom Woodruff, Jr., Gillis operates Amalgamated Dynamics, Inc., an FX shop responsible for countless films. Naturally, the duo called upon their ADI team to step up and bring Harbinger Down‘s threats to life, proving you don’t always need CGI for films of this ilk.

The film tells of a group of grad students who have booked passage on the fishing trawler Harbinger to study the effects of global warming on a pod of Orcas in the Bering Sea. 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 three decades, the creatures aren’t about to give up the warmth of human companionship.

Following the trailer debut, the cast and crew enthused about the shooting and the “family” atmosphere that grew out of the tight shooting schedule. Henriksen went so far as to say it was one of the best films he’s ever been a part of. Everyone was hesitant to discuss the details of the monstrosities we’ll be seeing on screen, but if the trailer was any indication…they’re going to be pretty damn cool.

When the trailer hits the web, we’ll post it! Stay tuned…