This Week In Retro: Event Horizon (Patreon)

August 15, 1997: It's Dark and Hell Is Hot…in space

by Diamond Feit

I've tried to steer clear of religious topics for this column as certain people find the subject very sensitive, but I have a complicated view of faith. I grew up in a Reform Jewish household, which means I had a Bar Mitzvah, yet even as a child I was never fully sold on the notion that an omnipotent being created our universe whom we must obey for all time and dedicate regular intervals of our mortal existence to thanking Them for bestowing us with life. Really, as soon as I completed all my teenage obligations to my synagogue, I told my parents I had no interest in attending more services or practicing Judaism anywhere else. They did not object.

Even though I stand by the choice I made over 30 years ago, I still consider myself Jewish because Judaism shaped my personality and worldview. We celebrated Hanukkah instead of Christmas and then I stopped paying attention to Hanukkah, so I lack any affinity for the "holiday" season in December. We never kept Kosher, but even today it feels a little weird to have a glass of milk when I eat meat, even though I love to consume both those things. My childhood diet of Mel Brooks and Woody Allen films absolutely influenced my sense of humor, and even if the last three decades have definitively painted the latter as a repugnant human being in my eyes, I still retain fond memories of Play It Again, Sam, Sleeper, and a number of other pictures Woody made before his personal life became public.

Even though I've settled into a comfortable agnosticism after a difficult bout with internet atheism, there's one aspect of faith that I never accepted as real but I still find fascinating: Hell. On its face, Hell as a concept makes no sense; believing in a single God who created absolutely everything is one thing, but arguing that a second being exists in opposition to God yet they also take responsibility for punishing any and all humans for eternity who break God's rules, well, that's asking too much. Yet I think anyone who's ever enjoyed The Twilight Zone or a Richard Matheson story gets a kick out of irony and likes the idea that bad people will eventually get their just desserts; if not in this life, then in the next.

It is my personal curiosity with Hell, combined with my lifelong interest in science-fiction, that makes Event Horizon an important film in my eyes. Released 25 years ago in the doldrums of August 1997, the movie flopped at the box office and did not review well either. Yet Event Horizon fans exist and I am one of them, for even repeated viewings and years of added wisdom and maturity cannot assuage me from feeling creeped out by a movie about a spaceship that goes to Hell.

Set in the once-distant year of 2047, Event Horizon imagines a space-faring future for humanity, one where we colonized the moon in 2015 and continued to explore our solar system to the best of our ability. To that end, Earth christened a long-range vessel—dubbed the Event Horizon—with the intent of traveling to another star and leaving our corner of the galaxy behind. Unfortunately, as the opening crawl of the movie explains, the Event Horizon disappeared shortly after launch in 2040 and neither the ship nor her crew ever appeared on our radar again. At least, that was the state of things prior to 2047 when, without warning, Earth detected a signal indicating a vessel in orbit around Neptune. After seven years of silence, the Event Horizon had returned.

Where did the Event Horizon go, and what became of her crew? The only answers to these questions lie on the ship itself, so Earth dispatches the Lewis & Clark on a search & rescue mission. Captain Miller (Lawrence Fishburne) has strong reservations about attempting such a distant journey from home without backup, but he and his crew head off to Neptune with one special guest: Dr. Weir (Sam Neill), the man who designed the Event Horizon's unique propulsion system.

As Dr. Weir explains to the Lewis & Clark crew, the Event Horizon's engines cannot push the ship faster than the speed of light, but they can create an artificial singularity to fold space and allow the vessel to cross vast interstellar distances in an instant. He demonstrates the effect by making two holes in a sheet of paper, folding the paper in half, and then pushing his pen through the formerly separate holes. If that sounds familiar, Dr. Jane Foster uses the same method to explain space travel in Thor: Love and Thunder, released earlier this summer, and she even mentions Event Horizon by name, making the reference implicit. Adding to the fun of this moment, Sam Neill also appears in Thor: Love and Thunder as an unnamed actor, meaning he could very well be playing himself.

The search & rescue mission goes awry even before they manage to locate the Event Horizon. Dr. Weir struggles with the loss of his wife Claire, and during hypersleep he has a vision of her mutilated body on the Lewis & Clark's bridge and wakes up screaming inside his pod. As the rescue vessel enters Neptune's orbit, a sizable storm scrambles its sensors and the smaller craft nearly rams into the massive Event Horizon before braking at the last possible moment. The infamous vessel appears abandoned, as no one responds to any transmissions and essential systems like heat and gravity are offline, yet the Lewis & Clark scanners indicate the presence of life forms aboard, but no one can pinpoint who, what, or where this life might be.

The situation only worsens once the Lewis & Clark crew set foot on the Event Horizon and find nothing but bad news. The only human being left aboard is long dead and frozen solid, a "corpsicle" in the words of their chief medic. A layer of bone and gore coats the walls of the bridge, the kind of mess where no amount of forensics experts could possibly determine any clues beyond the obvious: Something terrible happened on the Event Horizon and no one survived.

Event Horizon screenwriter Philip Eisner describes his original concept for the film as "The Shining in space" as he felt that the distorting nature of interstellar travel would acutely harm the astronauts' mental health. If a vessel could warp space or fly at light speed, it would fundamentally alter how the people on board perceive their surroundings. "We experience reality at a very particular scale and to be exposed to reality at a different scale would break you," Eisner said in a recent oral history of the film.

While it does take a certain amount of chutzpah to compare your original story about a haunted spaceship to one of the most celebrated horror films of all time, Event Horizon has more in common with The Shining than it does most science-fiction tales. From the moment we first see the derelict behemoth to the final shot before the credits roll, Event Horizon makes it clear that the ship itself is responsible for the deaths of its original crew, rather than any alien influence or human machinations. The true villains of the Alien franchise aren't the monsters with acid for blood but the callous board members of the Weyland-Yutani corporation and their quest for profit at the expense of people's lives. Event Horizon lacks any individual antagonist; the closest thing to a monster on board is Dr. Weir, but only after the ship uses his mental frailty against him, much like the Overlook Hotel manipulates Jack Torrance to become an ax murderer.

I wish Event Horizon director Paul W.S. Anderson had the patience of Stanley Kubrick, or at least the confidence to not force the audience to jump every few minutes, but my recent viewing of the film highlighted how often Anderson employs loud noises or shoves an object into frame to startle both the characters and everyone watching. These faux scares come from the most benign sources, including a set of window blinds and a single, floating glove in zero gravity, and they only make sounds because the soundtrack insists that they must; he would repeat all these bad habits five years later in his 2002 film adaptation of Resident Evil.

I don't want to linger on petty complaints because Event Horizon does offer genuinely frightening moments and invokes legitimate sensations of dread in its brief 96-minute runtime. A great deal of the terror comes from the Event Horizon itself, as depicted courtesy of incredibly-detailed models and magnificently-designed sets. Online sources indicate Event Horizon cost about $60 million to produce and every cent of that appears on screen. A smattering of computer graphics were used to fill the cavernous ship with floating space junk, but the majority of the effects were all realized on actual sets with real actors and stunt performers. There's at least one shot late in the picture where Lawrence Fishburne's arm is on fire and you can clearly see his face reacting to the situation. Anderson tells a story in interviews of seeing Fishburne writing "NAR" in his script and asking him what those letters meant; the answer he got was "No acting required."

In rewatching Event Horizon for this column, the abundance of authentic sets and props really stood out to me, given that few films today would bother to build an entire engine room when a green screen would suffice. Yet the Event Horizon's engineering section is one of the most striking pieces of art I've ever seen: Accessible through a catwalk placed inside a rotating tunnel of jagged metal, the main chamber walls are lined with spikes and grates that, with a bit more rust, wouldn't look out of place in Silent Hill. At the center of the room sits the space-warping Gravity Drive itself, a sphere set inside two concentric rings, all of them rotating independently of one another. When all the lights on the rings align, it creates a brief but powerful flash that cannot possibly serve any useful function, but it looks damn cool.

When I sat down to watch Event Horizon for the first time 25 years ago, I didn't know what to expect. The poster and original trailer suggested the film might frighten me, but the same could be said about the Alien movies. I never thought I would walk out of the theater pondering if our quest to explore space might someday lead human beings to discover a gateway to Hell. Event Horizon was also the first time I saw a depiction of Hell which suggested that other people, not demons or Satan, would be our primary tormentors. The crew of the Event Horizon do not boil in a lake of fire or serve as food for some great beast, they tear each other to pieces in a literal orgy of violence. Anderson says his first cut of the movie ran over two hours long and featured much more graphic content which the studio insisted he trim down. I think this ended up making the final film more disturbing because Event Horizon's goriest scenes play at an accelerated speed with lots of incomprehensible cuts, making them less coherent and giving the viewer more license to imagine what's actually happening.

Since Event Horizon is science-fiction, I do believe the movie subtly poses a question to the audience as to whether or not the Event Horizon truly goes to Hell. Clearly, the vessel went someplace outside of our universe, and during that journey the crew suffered a massive, fatal case of space madness, but did they go to literal Hell or did they apply a relatable term from human mythology to describe a horror that they couldn't otherwise comprehend? As Dr. Weir puts it after he goes full self-mutilation, "Hell is just a word." If the Event Horizon had taken the crew to a dimension of soft white lights where everyone had a wonderful feeling of euphoria, they might just as well have said they went to Heaven even if they didn't meet any angels or see any dead people carrying harps.

I think this final piece of ambiguity helps me retain my fondness for Event Horizon even in the face of all its obvious shortcomings. For me, the film sits comfortably alongside other squirm-inducing sci-fi tales from the late 90s such as Cube (1997) or Pi (1998), and these movies helped me mentally prepare for more reality-twisting tales like Dark City (1998), Blade (1998), and of course The Matrix (1999). Frankly, Event Horizon is easily the weakest of all these films, but that hasn't stopped me from thinking about it for 25 years. In fact, amongst my circle of friends, the film caught all of us by such surprise that "Event Horizon" became shorthand for any inconceivable scene of horrors, meaning that to us secular Gen-X punks, Paul W.S. Anderson's gruesome vision of Hell carried more weight than the biblical version.

Come to think of it, Woody Allen also made a movie in 1997 where he went to Hell and met the devil (played by Billy Crystal) and in that scene, Woody argues that he is more powerful than Satan because he is a "bigger sinner" than the Prince of Darkness.

When people show you who they are, believe them.

Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan but is forever online, sharing idle thoughts on Twitter and playing games on Twitch.