Event Horizon (1997) | Sci-Fi Saturdays

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Unleashing Hell on Earth at the end of the solar system.

Event Horizon is a scary, supernatural thriller set in the deep reaches of space. It borrows from some of the best science-fiction and horror films from the previous decades to create a film that might seem like a retread to some people, but actually has a lot going for it.

First Impressions

Looks like there’ll be some screaming in space this week. The trailer shows the return of a missing spacecraft, the Event Horizon, which was an experimental craft that jumped via wormholes. It has come back after 7 years gone. It left with 18 people but came back abandoned, yet something else is on board too. What secrets does Event Horizon hold for humanity?

Presented below is the trailer for the film.

The Fiction of The Film

In 2047, seven years after the experimental starship Event Horizon left Earth, it appears in the orbit of Neptune. The USAC ship Lewis and Clark has its shore leave canceled and is sent to investigate under the command of Captain Miller (Laurence Fishburne). Dr. Weir (Sam Neill), the designer of the propulsion system for the Event Horizon is brought along as well. Upon arrival at Neptune, 56 days later, Weir is released from the grav tank (also called a grav couch), a water filled pod that keeps the passengers in hibernation, and also isolated them from the stress of acceleration. He explores the ship, following a familiar voice calling his name, only to discover his wife Claire (Holley Chant) naked on the bridge, with no eyeballs. He awakens with a start having just been removed from the water.

Miller holds a briefing for the rest of the crew where Weir explains that the Event Horizon was a top-secret faster-than-light drive ship which in layman’s terms uses a black hole to to jump across dimensions to its new location. When the medical tech Peters (Kathleen Quinlan) scans the derelict ship, she detects a trace of life, but no definitive persons. Miller determines that he, Peters, and chief engineer Justin (Jack Noseworthy) will secure the vessel before anyone else is let on board, including Weir, much to his dismay.

The first thing they discover is a series of explosive charges in the central corridor, which links the gravity drive with the command deck. In an emergency the corridor can be destroyed making the command area a lifeboat. The lack of gravity on board has fluid and other objects, including some body parts, floating around. Peters removes the ships log on a CD-like disc, while Justin reviews the gravity drive. The drive features three rotating rings around a central sphere, which all align briefly creating a void with black goo which sucks Justin in.

A shockwave crashes out of the drive initiating explosive decompression in Lewis and Clark, while rescue technician Cooper (Richard T. Jones) uses the umbilicus to drag the catatonic Justin out of the void. The remaining crew heads for the Event Horizon, which only has 20 hours of breathable air left. Cooper tells Miller that the gateway was open, but Weir vehemently disagrees. Crewmembers begin to see visions of their deepest fears or past guilt. Peters sees her son, Denny (Barclay Wright), whose legs are covered in open sores. Weir is haunted by visions of his wife, who killed herself while he was away on a mission. Miller sees a former shipmate, Corrick (Noah Huntley ), who he was forced to leave on a burning vessel.

Justin awakens in a trance and activates the airlock, attempting to jettison himself. Cooper saves him, allowing him only minimal exposure to the vacuum. The ship’s doctor D.J. (Jason Isaacs) is finally able to translate the mystery Latin words used in the final log file. “Save yourself from Hell,” says the Event Horizon’s captain. Pilot Smith (Sean Pertwee) has fixed the rupture in the Lewis and Clark and they are ready to leave, but Weir has other ideas. He plants an explosive on the Clark and destroys it, and Smith. Peters follows the vision of her son and steps into an open hole, dying upon impact near the gravity drive.

Weir, who by now has removed his eyeballs, strangles D.J., vivisecting him and leaving the body hanging above the medbay. The remaining living crew, Miller, Cooper, and XO Starck (Joely Richardson) plan to blow the corridor in the Horizon and take the lifeboat back to Earth. Weir gets sucked out a hole made when the front view screen shatters, but is soon resurrected by the ship to fight Miller from activating the bombs. Miller manages to trigger the device, sacrificing himself. Seventy-two days later a rescue tug finds the life pod with Justin, Cooper, and Starck. She is the first to awaken and is shocked to see the scarred Weir as one of the rescue team. She begins screaming and awakens in the arms of Cooper who has brought her out of stasis when the real rescue team arrives. The door to the grav couches suddenly starts to close on its own.

“You know nothing. Hell is only a word. The reality is much, much worse.” – Weir

History in the Making

The final Sci-Fi Saturdays crossover with 31 Days of Horror features a film that is most decidedly horror and science-fiction. Event Horizon is one of the strongest horror crossovers that have been reviewed on these articles, much more so than last week’s Flatliners. This was the first sci-fi film directed by British director Paul WS Anderson, who was coming off the success of an adaptation of the video game Mortal Kombat. Rather than take a job on a bigger franchise or another IP, he decided to work on this original horror film. Anderson is also known for another video game series, which coincidentally is a horror/sci-fi film, Resident Evil. In fact he has multiple films in that franchise, which stars his wife Milla Jovovich, as well as Monster Hunter (also with Jovovich), Aliens vs Predator, and the sci-fi only Soldier with Kurt Russell.

The title of the film works on multiple levels. Primarily it is the name of the spaceship which went missing. But the phrase “event horizon” also refers to the bounding edge of a black hole where nothing can escape, including light. To an outside observer it would appear that the object approaches, but never quite enters, that horizon. This phrase has also become synonymous with the point of no return, which is an apt dual-metaphor for the film. Not only is the Event Horizon powered by a black hole, made in Weir’s gravity drive, but the trip is one that most characters won’t find their way back from.

Genre-fication

As a genre film, Event Horizon has a lot to offer. It pulls from both its science fiction roots as well as a lot of horror elements from both sci-fi related and traditional horror films. The first film that most viewers will see in this film is Alien, and that is probably a primary influence. The mission to a derelict spaceship, as well as the design of the Lewis and Clark bridge and cafeteria all have elements from that film. Surprisingly, the costume designer for both films was the same guy, John Mollo (who also worked on Star Wars), so there’s probably a bit of subconscious similarities as well. By nature of having inspired the film Alien, Planet of the Vampires also holds some influence on Event Horizon as well. This 1965 Mario Bava film has a lot in common with both films, and features a distress call from a derelict ship that the crew lands to check out. It has a moody and atmospheric planet with lots of fog, and has a similar haunted house vibe that Event Horizon plays on. Another film that viewers may see elements of is 2010: The Year We Make Contact. That film also features the mysterious return of a long lost ship (nine years in this case), out near Jupiter. A less malevolent force exists on the Discovery than the demonic one seen here.

As far as horror films go, there’s also a lot of similarities to other films. Picking the most prominent is definitely a toss up between The Shining and Hellraiser. While the design of the Lewis and Clark is more technologically futuristic, the Event Horizon’s design has a number of the neo-Gothic or industrial designs seen in Hellraiser, specifically the design of the Lament Configuration (aka the puzzle box). The “meat-grinder” hallway to the gravity drive, as Justin calls it, and the design of the chamber both include the retro-styled unpolished metal elements that give an older, otherworldly feel. The film’s similarities to The Shining are also numerous. The ship appears to be haunted and sentient in some fashion just as The Overlook Hotel does in the Stephen King story. Anderson also makes use of many symmetrical shots onboard the Event Horizon, which mirrors the symmetry of the designs and cinematography of the Kubrick film. Finally, who can miss the giant river of blood that gushes from the grav tanks, nearly drowning Starck. That’s about as obvious as you can get.

There’s also a general haunted house element where the film makes use of lightning flashes in the atmosphere on Neptune which light up the hallways and bridge of the Event Horizon when the crew first arrives. A clever use of atmospheric effects to subconsciously turn the ship into a mysterious castle as seen in classic horror films. At the end of the film, as Peters is chasing the vision of her son, the corridors he begins running through have the distinctive shape of a classic coffin. The bottoms are narrow, sloping up to a wider shoulder-width, and then tapering slightly at the top. Again, subconsciously this adds an element of foreshadowing to Peters’ impending death.

Societal Commentary

As with other films looked at this month, the thematic crux of Event Horizon is the characters being haunted by their memories of pain, guilt, and fear. In this way it is most similar to the events of Flatliners. But instead of having to die and be resuscitated to experience these visions, the malevolent force living in the ship connects to people on board, and draws these visions out of them. Weir is the one affected the most, which is possibly due to him being the designer of the ship and having a strong connection to it. But also his trauma is most painful. It appears that his wife killed herself in a bathtub at some point while he was away on a mission. That painful memory seems to be on repeat for the character as he continues to experience Claire calling his name through his time on the ship. This is similar to how Miller reacts to seeing visions of Corrick. It was not as personal of a relationship, but the guilt of the event still weighs heavily on him. His shipmate was trapped on board a ship when O2 tanks ruptured flooding the space with fire. There was nothing for Miller to do but close the lifeboat hatch, and survive. Peters’ thoughts seem to echo similar feelings of guilt with her son. Since the mission was a complete last minute situation, she had to leave the wheelchair-bound boy with her ex-husband. Her vision of Denny with open sores on his legs may be a reaction to the trust she places in her ex to properly take care of him, or potentially something else. For all these characters the pain, loss, and guilt feeds into the spirit possessing the Event Horizon, putting them all in harm’s way.

The Science in The Fiction

Unlike many sci-fi films that deal with fictional science, this film has some real elements of science fact. One of the first things audiences are introduced to is the use of the grav tanks, which are fluid filled tanks that the characters ride in to withstand the 30gs of force the ion drives put on the ship. To put that all in perspective, Neptune is approximately 4.5 billion kilometers from Earth. Using their ion drive to get there in 56 days they are traveling about 3 million kilometers an hour, or a little less than 30% of light speed. The tanks also keep them in some kind of stasis, presumably via the injection they got. This is a little different than the cryo-pods seen in the Alien franchise, which presumably have a slower mode of travel and as such freezing people works better.

But the most famous scene from the film is the explanation of the faster-than-light drive by Dr. Weir. The joke is that this extremely smart physicist says he will provide the answer in “layman’s terms.” He responds with “We use a rotating magnetic field to focus a narrow beam of gravitons. These in turn fold space-time, consistent with weyl tensor dynamics, until the space-time curvature becomes infinitely large and you produce a singularity.” Scientists, right? The singularity in question is the black hole that they produce. From there he uses a piece of paper (actually one of Smith’s centerfolds) and explains the concept of folding space, by literally folding the piece of paper and placing a pen through the two halves. This definition was so well conceived in the film, it has been repeated in other films, including Interstellar and Thor: Love And Thunder, in which Jane Foster, who is explaining the process, asks if they’re even seen Event Horizon.

The Final Frontier

Event Horizon is not for everyone. It’s neither a straightforward sci-fi film nor a conventional horror film. It does require an ability to let go of preconceived ideas, and just experience the raw horror that the film contains. The performances of Neill and Fishburne are both well done and help the audience understand the risks and terror from the character’s persepective. Thanks for joining me this month as I’ve looked at the more horrific side of science-fiction. We return to the late nineties again next week, with Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element. Be sure to have your multipass out and ready.

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