It's difficult to evoke precise emotion in people through art. Creating fiction one would describe as "moving" alone, without digging deeper into his statement, is enough of a triumph for most storytellers. It's why the majority of horror movies are crippling failures. They are not trying to engage the viewer in a challenging story or appeal to their visceral fears, but merely to "scared them, like an older brother stoned out of his mind on Halloween night. EVENT HORIZON is one of my favourite movies, but I would also describe it as "absolutely fucking crippling". It's one of these films that came from a left field setting and put the fear of God into a generation of young nerds. If space ever was an object of boundless fascination to you, let's just say EVENT HORIZON might redefine that perception quite a bit, for you.
In year 2040, a spaceship built to explore the confines of the universe through groundbreaking technology disappears during its maiden voyage. The Event Horizon reappears seven years later, sending a distress signal from close to Neptune, in the Solar System. It's a small rescue ship named the Lewis andd Clark that is mandated with traveling to the outer limits of galaxy, find out what happened to the Event Horizon and salvage whatever they can from this marvel of human engineering. Unfortunately for the crew of the Lewis and Clark and the enigmatic doctor Weir (Sam Neil) who built the Event Horizon, the ship has been to unspeakable places and it's back into the realm of existence for a reason. Some catastrophic shit is about to go down and nobody's coming to their help.
I don't understand why there aren't more people who think outer space is fucking terrifying. It's where knowledge eventually runs out and your worst, most irrational nightmares could kick in. We don't even know the first thing about our own galaxy, so it could've been crawling with ghoulish creature since the beginning of time and he wouldn't know. EVENT HORIZON exploits that quirky and powerful fear of mine, by playing on the myth of hell in outer space. Don't worry, I'm not spoiling anything by saying that, it merely is the theme of the movie and if anything, it shows the limits of human imagination when we think about hell, chaos and evil in general. What makes EVENT HORIZON so scary is that it shows how ridiculously shallow and self-sufficient our knowledge of the universe really is. How insignificant we are in the big picture.
The stills on Google Image Search are both horrific and spoiler-heavy. This one's not too bad.
I've owned a DVD copy of EVENT HORIZON for a decade or so now, but it had been several years (at least since 2009, the inception of this blog) since my last viewing. It might sound ridiculous to you, but dealing with this kind of primordial terror takes an emotional toll on me that both gives EVENT HORIZON a mystical aura and makes me tentative to watch it every time. Before the crew arrived aboard the Event Horizon, I couldn't help noticing how much it aged, though. The space suits loo like they're made out of tin can metal. The Lewis and Clark looks like a submarine from the 1980s. Subtle stuff seems to rip off ALIEN. It's both a good and a bad thing I guess. A movie that went all-out on special effects like this one couldn't have aged all that well given the technological explosion of the last decade, but at least it still has the horror elements right, though. It's difficult to go wrong at fucking people up if your screenplay is savage enough.
EVENT HORIZON was (by far) not the first horror movie set in space, but it was the most convincing because it doesn't play in any gimmick and offers maybe three or four peek-a-boo scares at best, and they're never isolated incidents. They're a part of this escalating, overarching horror plot that has a lot more to offer. EVENT HORIZON became a cult movie because it tosses several comfortable ideas such as: we're alone in the universe, we're sophisticated and that we understand how things work. It's also why it has never been a mainstream success: it's a movie that features both gore and unbearable ideas that some people just don't want to have to deal with. In an ideal world, there would be a Criterion Collection edition of EVENT HORIZON and it would be celebrate on television and streaming services as a horror classic, but instead we're going to need the internet to remind us how awesomely terrifying this movie is.
BADASS
EVENT HORIZON was (by far) not the first horror movie set in space, but it was the most convincing because it doesn't play in any gimmick and offers maybe three or four peek-a-boo scares at best, and they're never isolated incidents. They're a part of this escalating, overarching horror plot that has a lot more to offer. EVENT HORIZON became a cult movie because it tosses several comfortable ideas such as: we're alone in the universe, we're sophisticated and that we understand how things work. It's also why it has never been a mainstream success: it's a movie that features both gore and unbearable ideas that some people just don't want to have to deal with. In an ideal world, there would be a Criterion Collection edition of EVENT HORIZON and it would be celebrate on television and streaming services as a horror classic, but instead we're going to need the internet to remind us how awesomely terrifying this movie is.
BADASS