31 MORE Days, 31 MORE Screams: Day 27 (Event Horizon)

Sorry not sorry. 

Well now, that was... interesting, to say the least. Thank goodness I'm back in my usual spot of talking about movies and TV shows and stuff. Sure, I do it just as surface level as the other things, but it's like a comfort food at this point and I'm used to how it works and how to talk about it. To that end, here's a 20 year old space horror movie. Event Horizon is a strange beast, at once feeling like it's plucking elements from other popular horror films and, at the same time, being its own wholly original and unique-ish thing. Some of the concepts it works with really resonate well with me, especially the reveals late in the movie. I admit though, that as soon as I saw Paul Anderson's name on this I was expecting a goofy trash-fest akin to his Resident Evil movies (next year maybe?). To my surprise, this plays it fairly straight. It's a pretty decent little spooky space film, so let's do the usual thing and delve into it for like a couple hundred words or whatever. Boy howdy am I going to appreciate only having to do that much when November hits and I'm doing 1700 fiction words a day. Anyway. Event Horizon!


It's a ship! This will be very important later on, but the whole point is that the lost ship Event Horizon has resurfaced after seven years, and a bunch of space search and rescue folks have to fly out to Neptune and get it. It takes 'em 56 days in cryo-sleep or gravity tank statis or whatever made up technobabble bullshit this movie uses to say IT TAKES AN ASS OF A TIME TO GET ANYWHERE IN SPACE SO EVERYONE GOES TO SLEEP. The Event Horizon herself is massive when first revealed, easily dwarfing the rescue ship in size. Along for the ride is the guy who helped make the special gravity core of the Event Horizon, and this is important because the ship folds space/time to go faster than light. It's Dune. It works on Dune rules but without weird slug people in a jar or whatever the fuck the Navigators were in Dune. Everyone on the Event Horizon died, horribly, and the rescue team's job is to figure out what in the world happened and look for survivors. Okay, so the idea's solid enough. It's a ghost ship, but in space! I can roll with that! Bad shit is happening on board and there's lots of spooky visions. What's going on, then? Is it space ghosts? Space demons unleashed from hell by the fancy warp core? It's sort of that, actually. The Event Horizon passed through something, something outside of the universe that's purely chaotic. She took something back. The ship isn't haunted. She's sentient. The Event Horizon herself is the goddamned monster, a sentient spaceship which torments the people on board with horrible visions of their worst fears and memories. It eventually possesses our scientist pal, and here's where shit gets wild.


Event Horizon is full of all sorts of fucked up shit. Mostly eye trauma. There's some bad shit here and Sam Neill looks like shit at the end. I'll talk more about the good cast in a moment, but I'm just really in love with that central idea of a sentient ship as a haunted source of malice. The Event Horizon is something which has transcended normal space/time with its warp core, and discovered the existential horrors lurking just beyond. All the people died, yes, but the ship itself has gained its own fucked-up Dark Enlightenment and wants to use Sam Neill to warp back into the hell void for something. The idea that it's only hell because hell is a human concept is good as well. This movie's got some real crunchy terror shit as well as plenty of blood and people getting totally fucked up or exploded. Great cast as well! Sam Neill and Laurence Fishburne are people I knew from other films, yes, but I was real surprised by Sean Pertwee. Yeah! Doctor Who's son is in this and he's the pilot and he's real good in it! This is also a movie which bucks the usual horror movie traditions by having the second black guy and the second woman in it survive at the end. It's Jason X's whole idea of the future being more than just a final girl, but done a few years early. At least Laurence Fishburne gets to go out like a hero, taking out the rest of the ship with him. Of course, the front of the Event Horizon is still around, even if the warp core gets blown to shit. Some part of that ship still exists, and as the nightmares at the end indicate? Things might not be over. She's still out there, an enlightened machine that's been where angels fear to tread. Event Horizon is an okay movie, but by fuck do I really just love the idea of the ship in it. A living machine that wants to torture people with horrible visions to further its own agendas of getting back to hell outside the universe. We're fucked, because you know what they say.


In space, no one can hear you scream.