Event Horizon (film)


Event Horizon is a 1997 science fiction horror film directed by Paul W. S. Anderson and written by Philip Eisner. It stars Laurence Fishburne, Sam Neill, Kathleen Quinlan and Joely Richardson. Set in 2047, it follows a crew of astronauts sent on a rescue mission, after a missing spaceship, the Event Horizon, spontaneously appears in orbit around Neptune. Searching the ship for signs of life, the rescue crew learns that the Event Horizon was a test bed for an experimental engine that opened a rift in the space–time continuum and left our universe entirely, allowing a malevolent entity to possess the ship.
The film had a troubled production history, with filming and editing rushed by Paramount when it became clear that Titanic would not meet its projected release date. The original 130-minute cut of the film was heavily edited by demand of the studio, to the consternation of director Paul W. S. Anderson.
Upon release, the film was a commercial and critical failure, grossing $26.7 million in the US on a $60 million production budget. Even so, it began to sell well on home video; its initial DVD release sold so well that Paramount contacted Anderson shortly after its release to begin working on a restoration of the deleted footage. However, it turned out that the footage had either been lost or destroyed. In the years since, the film has slowly built a cult following and is often referenced in other works of popular culture.

Plot

In 2047, a distress signal is received from the Event Horizon, a starship that disappeared during its maiden voyage to Proxima Centauri seven years previously that has mysteriously reappeared in a decaying orbit around Neptune. The rescue vessel Lewis and Clark is dispatched. Its crew – Captain Miller, second-in-command Lieutenant Starck, pilot Smith, medical technician Peters, engineer Ensign Justin, Doctor D.J. and rescue technician Cooper – is joined by Dr. William Weir, who designed the Event Horizon. He briefs the crew on the ship's experimental gravity drive, which generates an artificial black hole and uses it to bridge two points in spacetime, reducing travel time over astronomical distances. The distress signal seems to consist of a series of screams and howls but D.J. believes he can discern the Latin phrase "Liberate me" being spoken.
Upon boarding the Event Horizon, the crew finds evidence of a massacre. As they search for survivors, the ship's gravity drive activates, briefly pulling Justin into the resulting portal and causing a shock wave that damages the Lewis and Clark, forcing the entire crew to board the Event Horizon. Justin emerges in a catatonic state, terrified by what he saw on the other side. He attempts suicide by decompression, but is saved by Miller, forcing the crew to place him in stasis.
The team begins to experience apparitions of individuals from their past that only they can see, hallucinations corresponding to their fears and regrets: Miller sees Corrick, a subordinate he was forced to abandon to his death, Peters sees her son with his legs covered in bloody lesions and Weir sees an eyeless vision of his late wife, who committed suicide, urging him to join her. The crew soon discover a video log of the Event Horizons crew fornicating and mutilating each other shortly after first engaging the gravity drive. The video log ends with a shot of the Event Horizons captain speaking the complete Latin phrase from the earlier distress call, which D.J. translates "Liberate tutemet ex inferis".
Deducing that the ship's gravity drive opened a gateway to a hellish dimension outside the known universe, and that the Event Horizon has somehow attained sentience, Miller decides to destroy the Event Horizon and orders an evacuation. Peters is lured to her death by a hallucination of her son. Weir, who has gouged his own eyes out and is now possessed by the evil presence, uses an explosive device to destroy the Lewis and Clark. The explosion kills Smith and blasts Cooper off into space. Weir kills D.J. by vivisecting him and corners Starck on the bridge. Miller confronts Weir, who overpowers him and initiates a 10-minute countdown until the Event Horizon will return to the other dimension.
Cooper, having used his space suit's oxygen supply to propel himself back to the ship, appears at the bridge window. Weir shoots at him and is blown into space by the ensuing decompression. Miller, Starck, and Cooper survive and manage to seal off the ship's bridge. With their own ship destroyed, Miller plans to split the Event Horizon in two and use the forward section of the ship as a lifeboat. He is attacked by manifestations of Corrick and a resurrected Weir. Miller fights them off and detonates the explosives, sacrificing himself.
The gravity drive activates, pulling the ship's stern section into a black hole. Starck and Cooper enter stasis beside a comatose Justin, and wait to be rescued. Seventy-two days later, the wreckage of the Event Horizon is boarded by a rescue party, who discover the remaining crew still in stasis. Starck sees Weir posing as one of the rescuers and screams in terror; this is revealed to be a nightmare with Starck waking up moments later. Cooper and the rescue team comfort the newly-awakened and terrified Starck as the bulkheads close.

Cast

Development

After Mortal Kombat had become a commercial success in the United States, English director Paul W. S. Anderson was inundated with screenplay offers, as well as the opportunity to direct the Mortal Kombat sequel , and the upcoming X-Men. Anderson turned the offers down in favor of making an R-rated horror film, hoping to shift away from making another PG-13 film. Paramount Pictures then sent Philip Eisner's original script for Event Horizon, which they had been trying to develop with producers Lawrence Gordon and Lloyd Levin. According to Eisner, he first pitched its concept to Gordon as a "haunted house story in space", which the producer thought had the potential to become a motion picture: "Luckily", said Eisner, "he liked the idea enough to trust me to do it." Anderson's initial reaction to the script, which involved the cruise ship Event Horizon experiencing a series of hauntings by "tentacular" aliens having crossed the threshold of their planet or "dimension", was that it bore striking resemblance to Alien, while producer and longtime collaborator Jeremy Bolt felt it was a "terrific concept" but was "very dense" in terms of length and the storyline was "a bit lost." Anderson disliked directing a mimicry of Alien so he gave the script a major rewrite. Anderson had in mind a "classic haunted house movie", incorporating significant influences to moderately successful horror films such as Robert Wise's The Haunting and Kubrick's The Shining because they enforce suspense from the unknown, meaning the ghost or creature was hidden from the viewer, and their endings induced ambiguities of perception in the audience. Anderson, too, said he was interested in the concept of Hell, as well as the idea of "the ship itself being possessed rather than going 'Oh, it's an alien consciousness that is doing this,'" and added these in the script.
Screenwriter Philip Eisner acknowledged Warhammer 40,000 as a major inspiration for the plot. In the fictional setting of Warhammer 40,000, starships travel the galaxy by passing through "the Warp", which is a parallel dimension where faster-than-light travel is possible, similar to "hyperspace" in the Star Wars setting, but also infested with daemons which are liable to infiltrate the ship and possess the crew. Many fans of Warhammer 40,000 consider Event Horizon to be an unofficial prequel to the former, when humankind discovers the Warp and learns of its dangers the hard way.

Editing

As Anderson explains, directors usually have a standard 10-week editing period to produce the first cut of a film, as guaranteed by the Directors Guild of America. However, due to the short production schedule of the film, the rapidly approaching release date, and the fact that principal photography had not yet finished, Anderson agreed with the Paramount studio to an editing period of six weeks and promised to deliver the film by August 1997, as Paramount wanted to have a hit film before Titanic's planned September release date. When the main unit wrapped, Anderson was supposed to start editing the film, but he still had to shoot two weeks with the second unit, effectively shortening the time he could spend in post-production to just four weeks. In that short amount of time, only a rough cut of the film could be assembled. Anderson notes that at two hours and 10 minutes, it was overly long, with weak directing and acting that could have used another editing pass, unfinished special effects, and a poor sound mix.
In test screenings, the cut was poorly received. There were complaints about the extreme amount of gore, and Anderson and producer Jeremy Bolt claim members of the test audience fainted during the screening. Paramount, which had stopped watching the dailies before any of the gore was shot and were seeing the completed film for the first time along with the audience, were similarly shocked by how gruesome it was and demanded a shorter runtime with less gore. Anderson believes that while his first cut was justifiably considered too long, Paramount forced him to make a cut that was instead too short, and that the film would benefit by the restoration of around 10 minutes of footage, including some of the deleted gore.

Lost footage

After the initial DVD release became a surprise hit, the studio and Anderson became interested in assembling a director's cut, but they quickly discovered that the excised footage had not been carefully stored and much of it had gone missing. The plan to assemble a director's cut was abandoned and instead a special-edition two-DVD set was released, featuring one deleted scene, two extended scenes, and a few shots of deleted material in the included making-of featurette. The footage is of "video" quality.
Known deleted scenes include a meeting scene between Weir and people in charge of the mission in which they discuss Event Horizon, some dialogue of which remained present in the theatrical trailer; more backstory for Cooper and Justin, including a stronger explanation for Justin entering the black hole; a deleted backstory of the relationship between Starck and Miller; additional scenes explaining what the gateway to hell/black hole is; Miller finding a tooth floating in Event Horizon; a longer version of the scene in which Peters hallucinates that her son's mangled legs are covered in maggots; a scene in which Weir hallucinates that Justin turns into his wife Claire; a bloodier version of Weir's wife Claire's suicide; a longer version of the scene where Miller finds D.J.'s dead body with his guts on the table; and a longer version of the "Visions From Hell" scene during Miller's final fight with Weir with more shots of Event Horizon crew being tortured.
The "bloody orgy" video was also longer. As Anderson was sometimes too busy filming other scenes, second-unit director Vadim Jean filmed some parts of this scene. Real-life amputees were used for special effects scenes in which Event Horizon crew members were mutilated, and pornographic film actors were hired to make the sex and rape scenes more realistic and graphic.
The film's final ending was a combination of two unused alternate endings that were filmed. One did not have a jump scare at the end when the last two survivors are found by another rescue crew and Starck hallucinates that she sees Weir, although there was a similar version of the scene included in this ending where she hears screams of Event Horizon crew and screams in fear before Cooper wakes her up. This was the original ending of the film included in the shooting script. The second ending had Miller fighting with the burned man from his visions at the core instead of with Weir, but this was changed due to the negative test screening.
In an Event Horizon Q&A in 2011, Anderson was asked when extra footage will be made available. He responded "never", explaining that much of it is gone forever. However, in a 2012 interview, he announced that producer Lloyd Levin had found a VHS tape with his original rough cut. Anderson said that after finishing , he planned to watch it for the first time since assembling the film. In a January 2017 interview, Anderson reiterated a director's cut will never be released as the footage doesn't exist anymore. Asked about the VHS tape, he said neither he, nor Levin, had watched it yet, as Levin moved to Spain; however, he was still excited about watching it at some point.

Music

was hired to compose the score for the film. Director Paul W. S. Anderson, a fan of hybrid genre music, invited the electronic dance music duo Orbital to collaborate with Kamen and to provide synthesizing sounds for the film's unsettling atmosphere.
A soundtrack album was released which edited various cues from the score into four tracks of approximately ten minutes.

Reception

Box office

Event Horizon was released on August 15, 1997 and was a box office failure. Event Horizon cost $60 million and only grossed $26,616,590 in the United States.

Critical response

On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, Event Horizon holds an approval rating of 27%, based on 74 reviews, and an average rating of 4.75/10. Its consensus reads, "Despite a strong opening that promises sci-fi thrills, Event Horizon quickly devolves into an exercise of style over substance whose flashy effects and gratuitous gore fail to mask its overreliance on horror clichés." On Metacritic, the film holds a weighted average score of 35 out of 100, based on 20 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "D+" on an A+ to F scale.
Roger Ebert gave the film two stars out of four, noting the opening portion as being particularly well-crafted, and commended its atmosphere. However, Ebert went on to state that the film never managed to become the intense, thought-provoking experience it wanted to be. The Washington Post critic Stephen Hunter called the film "pointlessly loud", with more devotion given to style rather than actual scares and a more satisfying explanation to its supernatual experiences.
The film had some early supporters, with Empire magazine awarding Event Horizon a 3 out of 5 stars rating, reporting: "That the film never fulfils its promise is down to its over reliance on horror vagaries in a precision-built sci-fi milieu, ultimately leaving too many unanswered queries. A sharper script and a more credible solution could have turned this impressive hokum into a force to be reckoned with". Additionally, Total Film also gave it a score of 3 out of 5 stars, stating that "Excellent special effects and an Alien-esque feel make this supernatural horror film well worth a look. There are certainly plenty of jumps on offer as a possessed ship torments and tortures any humans it can find. Well worth a look." Entertainment Weekly gave it a B-, stating, "Just when you've written off this deep-space nightmare as a late-summer melange of Alien, Fantastic Voyage, The Shining, and a dozen more forgettable otherworldly thrillers, it unleashes some of the most unsettling horror imagery in years", whereas the Time Out magazine mentioned that "despite its shortcomings, this is never dull. The movie avoids Alien space monster clichés brilliantly and the soundtrack contains more of the 'Boo!' effects than I've heard since Halloween."

Legacy

Television series

In August 2019, it was reported that Paramount Television and Amazon Studios were developing a television series based on Event Horizon. Horror filmmaker Adam Wingard is set to executive produce and possibly direct the series. Lawrence Gordon and Lloyd Levin, who produced the original film, are also involved.