Weir goes through an excruciating transformation, eventually sewing up his eyelids, which leads to a killer line that oddly recalls Dr Emmett Brown: “Where we’re going, we won’t need eyes to see.” His final appearance, with the skin flayed all over his body, is a shockingly effective piece of make-up work.Īmidst a fantastic cast, Neill is a standout. One character gets eviscerated and strung from hooks in the med bay. Beyond the big-budget space CGI (much of which stands up surprisingly well), the focus is on practical effects with lashing of gore. Event Horizon was financed by Twentieth Century Fox and features international leads in Fishburne and Neill, but there’s a resolutely British feel that summons the grimy, B-movie blood-letting of Hammer Horror. It makes Alien look relatively bloodless, even if it can’t match the uncanny terror of that classic. While Venice and the Overlook Hotel in those earlier films are great haunted locales, the Event Horizon is almost their equal.Īnderson’s film also earns the accolade of spilling the most gore in any space-set film.
THE HAUNTED SPACE TORRENT
In another scene inspired by that movie, Lieutenant Starck ( Joely Richardson) is swept down a corridor by a torrent of blood – an image that is both derivative and incredible. Weir is haunted by the suicide of his wife, whose rotting corpse appears from a bathtub in the manner of The Shining. Medical officer Peters ( Kathleen Quinlan) sees her son in the ship, ultimately pursuing him to her doom in reference to Don’t Look Now. Whatever’s on the other side of the black hole clearly has an excellent knowledge of film history, because the crew’s visions are a tour of horror cinema greats.
In the oppressive atmosphere of the Horizon, the rescue team succumbs to the type of hallucinations common to the haunted house genre. Putting aside the fact that a vessel containing a top-secret black hole engine was given the on-the-nose name “Event Horizon,” it could be asked how on earth the original crew never questioned the medieval look of their ship. It’s reached by a rotating shaft with serrations that one character accurately describes as a “meat grinder” (although, disappointingly, nobody gets ground in it). When the rescue team makes it to the Horizon, the gravity drive is revealed as a spiked chamber covered in symbols with a spinning device in the center. RELATED: From 'Alien' to 'Sunshine': 10 Terrifying But Great Space Horror Movies It’s a science-y concept but, thanks to the film’s grungy production design, the realization is far from sterile. We learn that the Event Horizon has an experimental gravity drive that allows it to fold space by creating a mini-black hole.
As a piece of exposition, it perfectly encapsulates the film’s mix of sci-fi and schlock. Dr Weir, a typically untrustworthy company man, sets the scene with a demonstration of how space-time works by poking holes in a lad-mag centerfold (in case we need reminding it’s the '90s). At the time of its release, Event Horizon’s premise - that future science could open a dimensional gateway to Hell - would have been familiar to anyone who had played Doom, the defining first-person shooter of the decade.
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