Welcome to Into The Void, a weekly pilgrimage into, well, whatever happens to be going on in the horror-obsessed (and unfortunately opinionated) mind of Scott Wampler, officially licensed opinion-haver and co-host of the FANGORIA Podcast Network’s The Kingcast. All sales are final. No refunds will be issued.
When Event Horizon hit theaters back in 1997, I was just a teenager toiling the grueling days away at a military school in the south of Texas. We didn’t have much contact with the outside world, much less access to the internet, and so new movie releases were often a surprise to me and my fellow cadets: if we hadn’t already read about it in Newsweek or USA Today (the only two periodicals available for sale to students), we had no idea what might hit the local multiplex on any given weekend. Here in the roaring 2020s, where we’re being advertised to months if not years before a new movie arrives, such a time is hard to imagine.
Anyway, my folks came to visit one weekend, and my mother – who knew what a fan I was of genre movies – suggested that we all go see a new “sci-fi” she’d heard about on one of her morning talk shows. It was called Event Horizon, she said, and it sounded like it’d be right up my alley! Having never heard of the film (I hadn’t even seen a poster at that point), I had no idea what to expect but went along with the plan, anyway. At the very least, it was true that I did enjoy sci-fi. Sounds like it might be a little scary, she said. Even better.
I do not recall my parents enjoying that screening of Event Horizon (you’ve seen the movie, right? Well, hold that memory in one hand and the knowledge that my parents never watched anything gory in the other), but I sure as hell did. The director, a guy I was unfamiliar with named Paul WS Anderson, had combined elements of Lovecraft with the Alien franchise, then brought it to life with some of the most impressive production design I’d ever seen. He’d also brought one helluva cast along for the ride, including Sam Neill, Laurence Fishburne, Kathleen Quinlan, and Jason Isaacs. Added bonus: Anderson and his screenwriter, Philip Eisner, followed through their premise to its natural, horrific conclusion – no punches pulled here! Event Horizon became an immediate favorite.
Critics embraced Anderson’s film about as much as my folks had (which is to say: Event Horizon still holds a 30% rating on Rotten Tomatoes) and it was not successful at the box office, raking in $42M on the back of a $60M budget. Common complaints revolved around the film’s extreme violence, inconsistent quality in the cast’s performances, and unavoidably unfavorable comparisons to Alien (which, to Anderson’s credit, he’d tried to avoid while rewriting the film’s original script, which apparently hewed far closer to that film’s plot). Pish-posh, I say. While some of these critiques are on-point, I find them to be irrelevant in the face of everything Anderson pulled off here.
The set-up’s pretty standard, as far as these things go. In 2047, a distress beacon (“Save me”) from the long-thought-lost starship Event Horizon is received. That ship vanished into space long ago, during its maiden voyage, and because no one in this kinda film has ever seen a sci-fi horror movie, a second crew (alongside the Event Horizon’s original designer, here played by Sam Neill) is deployed to find out what the hell happened to that long-missing starship. Typically in a movie like this, the second crew would discover the first crew slaughtered on a ship that’s since been overrun by some horrifying beastie with a taste for human flesh, but in Event Horizon it turns out (after various crew members attempt to kill themselves, go mad, or both) that, whoopsie daisy, the first crew accidentally used the ship’s experimental gravitational drive to launch themselves straight into Hell. Happens to the best of us!
Positioning Hell as the ultimate reveal here is a great twist and goes a long way towards making Event Horizon stand out from a bazillion similar movies. But the film’s biggest strength comes in its aforementioned set design, which looks like it used up every cent of the project’s $60M budget. The gravitational drive is a swirling orb surrounded by rotating concentric circles, the entire face of the thing covered in strange plates of armor and little gold orbs. It resides within a chamber whose walls are dotted with giant, iron spikes and what look to be polished hubcaps on buzzsaw blades. This design of this particular room is almost enough to make Event Horizon worth recommending on its own, but Anderson and production designer Joseph Bennett don’t stop there: the same level of detail and WTF-inspiring designs are all over the goddamn place, most notably in a particularly terrifying tunnel that connects that bizarre drive-chamber to the rest of the ship.
Rewatching Event Horizon earlier this week, I was struck by how purely Late ’90s this thing is. Everything about it has that glossy sheen that dominated mid-budget genre efforts throughout that decade, and in most cases that sheen would drive me nuts. I lived through that era and do not remember most of those films warmly. I was therefore surprised to realize that Event Horizon‘s in-your-face ’90s-ness now feels more like a pleasant nostalgia bath than everything else. These actors, these sets, these camera angles all took me back to a time where I was sneaking into movies with my buddies, smoking cigarettes in the parking lot, and generally just being a punk-ass kid with a growing interest in film. I’d been holding off on an Event Horizon for some time because I was worried that my positive opinion of the film might change, but was relieved not to be put off by the film’s time capsule-like quality. In fact, I found it quite endearing.
Is that nostalgia also what’s making me champion Anderson’s admittedly uneven film here in 2022? Could be. I’m as susceptible to that shit as anyone else. But I really do think this is Anderson’s best film, and I still love the Hell reveal, the production design, Sam Neill in Evil Scientist mode, and the gore. I don’t know if I can call Event Horizon a “great film,” but it’s certainly one of my favorites from the era. If you’ve never given it a whirl, check it out this weekend, see if you don’t get possessed by it.
