Event Horizon: Bring All Your Bad Memories to the Blood Orgy - Reactor

Event Horizon (1997). Directed by Paul W.S. Anderson. Written by Philip Eisner. Starring Laurence Fishburne, Sam Neill, Kathleen Quinlan, and Joely Richardson.

First, a personal disclaimer: I had never seen this movie before I watched it to write this column.

You may be thinking, “Why does that warrant a disclaimer? You haven’t seen a lot of these movies before.” That is true. But it is also true that I wrote a book about a group of people going into a mysteriously derelict research spaceship where everybody aboard has died in a horribly violent manner. There is a scene near the beginning of Event Horizon that was so uncannily familiar I texted a friend, “How did I rip off this movie without even watching it???” My friend laughed at me. But they were also surprised I had never seen it.

Because I really had never seen it before—I considered that maybe I had forgotten watching it, as it came out when I was in college and many things are possible during such a time period, but nothing about it was familiar. I went in with some general impressions about the premise (some of which were very wrong) and a spoiler about the ending (which was accurate). In the end, I must conclude the similarities exist because those of us who like stories about creepy spaceships of death just happen to like a lot of the same things.

I always want to know where the idea for a movie originated, and in this case we have a very illustrative answer in a 2022 Inverse oral history interview with cast and crew. The whole article is full of fun tidbits; I recommend reading if it you enjoy actors and filmmakers telling stories about making a movie they all seem to think of pretty fondly.

Regarding the origin of the idea, screenwriter Philip Eisner says, “I love reading physics books. I used to smoke medical marijuana and my idea of falling asleep was, I’d smoke and then I’d read a physics book because being high gave me the illusion that I understood what I was reading. I wanted to do a haunted house in space.” He goes on to add a bit more specificity and describes the idea for Event Horizon as “The Shining in space.”

Right. He got high and imagined The Shining in space. That explains almost everything we need to know.

Event Horizon has a very typical Hollywood production story, in both good and bad ways. After the success of his 1995 film Mortal Kombat, director Paul W.S. Anderson had a lot of options for what to do next. He turned down a chance to direct X-Men (2000) because he wanted to make a horror movie. Paramount offered him Eisner’s script for Event Horizon, along with a respectable budget. Anderson made good use of that budget, for the most part. Event Horizon has problems, but for the most part they aren’t problems that come from anybody half-assing the filmmaking.

Anderson wanted the titular spaceship Event Horizon to look grand and gothic, so he went to the iconic source of gothic grandeur: Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris. That is, he literally went there, and he took some people from the production along; they scanned the interior of the cathedral and rearranged its structure into the spaceship that appears on screen. The result isn’t a ship that looks churchy, exactly, but it does look huge and intimidating and ominously cavernous, which is exactly what it should be.

Anderson also name-checks Dutch painters Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Hieronymus Bosch as particular inspirations for aspects of the film’s visual design. Early Northern Renaissance art might seem like a slightly odd inspiration for a film that features a frozen corpse shattering across the floor of a spaceship, but if you look at Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights or Bruegel’s The Triumph of Death, it actually makes perfect sense for a film about opening a wormhole to Hell. Also notable is that Bruegel’s work features prominently in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972), a movie that very obviously inspired some aspects of Event Horizon, particularly in the guilt-driven hallucinations the ship plucks out of the characters’ minds: Miller’s (Laurence Fishburne) former shipmate, Peters’ (Kathleen Quinlan) son, and most especially Dr. Weir’s (Sam Neill) tragic dead wife. Filmmakers do love a space man with a tragic dead wife backstory.

You might be thinking, hey, wait a second, the movie doesn’t actually seem to have a lot of visual material inspired by the Dutch masters? You are right, but we’ll get to that in a moment.

So we’ve got Gothic architecture, Renaissance art, The Shining, and Solaris, but there are a couple of other ingredients mixed in there as well. One is the work of American photographer Joel-Peter Witkin, whose photos showcase human bodies in a range of strange, unsettling, and often macabre situations. And there is inspiration from Alien (1979), of course, because making a space-based sci fi horror movie in the ’90s was always going to mean following in the footsteps of Alien. But while Anderson is known these days for his own Resident Evil horror franchise, at the time he had never made a horror movie before, and he didn’t want Alien to be the only thing on people’s minds. So also looked to Robert Wise’s classic horror film The Haunting (1963), which is based on Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, because that’s where you look for inspiration if you want to build a setting that’s kinda alive and definitely evil and very much kills people.

They also actually built it, or at least as much of it as they could. The effects work was supervised by Richard Yuricich and Neil Corbould. We’ve seen and loved work from both of them before: Yuricich on Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and Blade Runner (1982), Corbould on The Fifth Element (1997) (as well as non-sci fi films likes Gladiator [2000] and Saving Private Ryan [1998]). Most of the effects in the film are practical or in-camera, and I think that is part of the reason they still look so good. They built both the huge, ornate gyroscope of the gravity drive and the spiky meat grinder tunnel. They lit things on fire and set off a lot of explosions. And everybody admits they only limited the amount of zero-gravity wirework they made the cast do because of budget constraints. They also built a full-body facsimile of Jason Isaacs, which he wanted to take home with him, but both his wife and the studio said no.

They were doing just about everything right in order to end up with at least a moderately successful horror movie. Horror audiences are often quite forgiving, and I don’t mean that in a bad way. I mean that horror film lovers don’t always go into films looking for the same things as critics and non-horror audiences, so critical response and broad appeal are not reliable measures of successful horror. As I was researching this piece, I went down an illuminating rabbit hole about the tension between traditional film critics and horror film aficionados regarding the Resident Evil films. There is a lot to unpack there and I am not the right person to unpack it, but it’s a good reminder that not everybody wants the same thing from all movies at all times.

But Event Horizon didn’t end up as a moderately successful horror movie upon release. It bombed. It bombed badly. It was savaged by critics and didn’t make back even half of its budget. It took years—and a very successful DVD release—for the movie to gain a cult following and the favorable regard of sci fi horror fans. We’ve seen this before—it was the same with John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), for example—so we know it’s not an uncommon life cycle for a horror film. In fact, Anderson likes to tell a story about how after Event Horizon’s release, The Thing star Kurt Russell told him that even if people initially hated it, he would one day be glad he made the movie. Russell seems to have been right, but then Anderson comes across as a guy pretty satisfied with his career in general, for all that film critics and cinephiles keep insisting he shouldn’t be.

But I still think there is something weird about how strongly Event Horizon was hated upon initial release. It’s less of a mystery why it’s been so aggressively reassessed in the subsequent years, because it’s not a bad movie. Sure, there are some parts that make me roll my eyes, such the scene early on where Weir has to explain how physics and black holes work to a bunch of actual professional space travelers, but that’s the sort of thing where you can practically hear the studio execs demanding audience hand-holding. It’s very common in sci fi films. Watch enough of them (which is what we do around here!) and it’s easy to identify. It’s not a perfect movie, but it’s not bad, and many aspects of it are in fact pretty great.

It doesn’t help that Event Horizon suffered because the studio rushed it to release, and it shows. Paramount was panicking because James Cameron’s Titanic (1997) was running way over schedule, leaving the studio without a big summer film that year. So they asked Anderson to drastically shorten the post-production timeline of Event Horizon; he was supposed to have ten weeks but ended up having only four. Anderson is open about the fact that his first cut of the film was too long and very rough. In a 2020 interview he says, “I think when we trimmed it, we made some good decisions but we made some bad decisions as well.”

It’s also clear the studio was pushing for a flashy summer sci fi film without actually paying attention to the specific movie they were pushing. By many accounts, the studio execs were shocked that the horror movie that had been pitched as “The Shining in space” was in fact very gory. They screened an early cut of the film, and the audience was also shocked by how gory it was, which only contributed to the studio seeming to resist the idea that they were dealing with a horror movie at all. Anderson cut out the worst of the gore, including most of the scenes that would have given a look at the hell dimension—scenes that were inspired by and in reference to the aforementioned Renaissance depictions of Hell. With no actual scenes of the cosmic hell dimension left, the film’s horror focuses on the crew members’ hallucinations drawn from their guilt and their resulting reactions. That’s still scary and gory, but it does tilt the overall story in a slightly different direction.

Paramount also approached marketing the film as a serious, action-packed sci fi from the studio that brought us Star Trek, rather than the kind of horror movie where a main character gouges his own eyes out on screen. It’s also a movie with a pretty grim ending, even though three of the crew survive, and that is not generally what people want out of a summer blockbuster.

I don’t know what Event Horizon would have looked like without the accelerated timeline or the studio pressure. We’ll never have a chance to find out; while Anderson has said he would love to do a director’s cut, most of the excised footage seems to have been lost or degraded beyond use while it was in a storage facility in a salt mine. Horror fans still hold out hope somebody might stumble across a box of lost footage someday, because that’s how horror movie fans are, but it seems unlikely.

And I don’t know if what Event Horizon needed was more gore. A gorier movie would appeal to me less, because I’m a squeamish scaredy-cat, but my personal preferences are irrelevant to a movie’s overall quality. It’s a movie about opening a wormhole to a hell dimension, and we never really get to see that hell dimension, so it’s hard not to wonder what might have been.

I think that’s my main takeaway from Event Horizon: It’s a good movie that’s spooky and creepy and enjoyable, but it sits right on a cusp where I can’t help but think about all the ways it could have been better.

The pieces are there! The cast is fantastic, the premise is interesting, and the atmosphere is delightfully unsettling. The visual and sound effects are top-notch. Many of the individual scenes are beautiful in a macabre and uncomfortable way, which is what horror films need to be memorable. The gradual realization that the ship is actively trying to drive them all insane is delicious. I love a homicidal spaceship! And many of the gross or scary parts are quite effective. The movie is good and certainly deserved its critical reassessment over the years. But it could have been great, and that’s always going to be a little frustrating.

I know that at the time of its release, and even now, there was some eye-rolling about the “wormhole to Hell!” reveal, but as Dr. Weir says, “Hell is only a word.” It doesn’t change the central premise, the idea that we might encounter something out in space that is so horrifying that it infects our machines and breaks our minds completely. There are lots of potential horrors in space, but that one is always going to fascinate me, even in an imperfect movie.

What do you think of Event Horizon? Which of those memorable set pieces have stuck with you? I’m a particular fan of the early scene where Peters is first exploring the ship’s bridge and the limited light gives us only fleeting glimpses of the gore splattered on the walls. It’s absolutely a familiar horror movie trope, but it works and I love it.

Next week: We’re heading into interstellar space with another critically thrashed box office flop that nonetheless maintains a fanbase among sci fi horror fans. Watch Pandorum on Roku, Hoopla, Amazon, and others.