Event Horizon – 1997 – United States, England
I like this movie. In fact, I like it so much, that I wrote an essay about it for my college cinematography course. Event Horizon isn’t especially original. It’s basically Alien (1979) combined with a haunted house story with a bit of Hellraiser (1987) thrown in, but that sounds like a winning combination to me. Director Paul W. S. Anderson (director of Mortal Kombat and Death Race) and actor Laurence Fishburne are always a delight.
In the year 2047, an outer space rescue team goes to Neptune to recover a ship that disappeared while testing an experimental warp drive. The ship is abandoned, and the only clues are some bloody remains and a series of violent and surreal video recordings from the crew. It turns out that the warp drive accidentally transported the ship to Hell, and the crew were all possessed by demons. As the rescue team uncovers the mystery, they are plagued by hallucinations and specters from their past. Eventually, one of them is possessed by a demon, and then the murders start.
Event Horizon doesn’t have much action. There are some gory deaths (a man’s eyeballs explosively decompress in the vacuum of space), but most of the movie is spent creating mystery and tension. Before the big demonic possession at the end, the rescue team gradually loses their sanity and turns on each other. The characters are developed just enough to have some identity. I like the single mom who just wants to get home for Christmas and see her disabled son. They are interesting and likable, and this makes their paranoid breakdowns have some weight. There are some genuinely tense scenes in here!
But the best part of Event Horizon is the visuals. The futuristic technology in the movie has an industrial aesthetic, and the spaceships have a cluttered, low-tech look. The haunted ship vaguely resembles a gothic cathedral with its pillars, archways, and cross-shaped windows. The warp drive, which is also a portal to Hell, is covered in spikes and whirls around looking fearsome. There are lots of other cool images too. In one scene, a frozen corpse drifts in zero gravity and then falls and shatters when the gravity generators activate.
Event Horizon might not be a mind-blowing work of originality, but what it does, it does superbly. Laurence Fishburne saying, “This place is a tomb,” is burned into my memory, and I’m not sure why.
Rating: 8/10
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