Hello readers! I recently watched Event Horizon, a science-fiction horror film from 1997. It has been largely forgotten, and a quick Google search unearths a host of unflattering reviews. The film was received poorly by critics and was a box office flop – and it didn’t make much of an impact on popular culture. However, Event Horizon has a cult following, and I wanted to find out why.
Event Horizon has a significant fan base. It might have flopped at the box office, but it sold so well on DVD that Paramount wanted to produce a director’s cut. They had originally forced the director, Paul W. S. Anderson, to remove excessive gore and violence, and this reduced the runtime from 130 to 96 minutes. There was plenty of appetite for a better, bloodier version – and there have been multiple attempts to revive the franchise over the years. Clearly, the fans see something in this film that the critics cannot.
That being said, even the critics weren’t entirely displeased. According to Metacritic, the film received “generally unfavourable” reviews on its release, but if you dig a bit deeper, you find that most reviews were actually “mixed”. There is something about this film which drew people in, and this intrigued me enough to want to see it. I’m always curious about the ingredients of a cult classic.
Let me caveat this review with the fact that I went in with low expectations, and that I watched it with friends. The pleasant surprise of discovering a film to be better than anticipated will always lead to a more favourable review, as will the ability to share a laugh at the stupidity on screen. I would not recommend watching Event Horizon alone. And I would not recommend watching it through a serious or critical lens. However, if you’re looking for 96 minutes of sci-fi silliness with an easy-to-mock screenplay, Event Horizon is a perfect fit.
WARNING: There will be spoilers from here on out. Personally, I don’t think this film can be damaged by plot spoilers, because its story is an incoherent mess. But just in case you care about that sort of thing, here is your warning.
A basic but promising premise
Be under no illusions: Event Horizon is basic. It falls neatly within the “haunted house” sub-genre of horror films, even though it is set on a spaceship. The plot is very simple: a ship called “Event Horizon” was sent on a voyage out of our solar system in the year 2040, and it went missing. Seven years later, it reappears in orbit around Neptune and sends a distress signal, so a smaller ship is sent out to investigate. The investigatory crew comprise a classic mix of one-dimensional characters, including some military lads, space engineers, a computer person, a medical doctor, and a decidedly suspicious scientist who designed the ship’s engine. The list of characters is so formulaic that they couldn’t enter a bar without triggering a punchline.
When the crew arrive, they discover that Event Horizon is empty, and that its occupants died in a bloodbath. The stage is set for the rest of the film to consist of spooky corridors and jump-scares as the crew unravel what happened – and even if the premise is basic, the film never over-promises. Nobody expects hard-hitting philosophy from a haunted house film, and Event Horizon never pretends to be anything else. It’s simple. And the concept of exploring a ghostly space shipwreck has a lot of potential. I’ll be honest: I was genuinely intrigued by the setup.
The bad, the bad and the ugly
Unfortunately, the film fails to live up to its potential. The dialogue is stand-out awful, seemingly compiled from a list of Hollywood tropes and one-liners, and the actors struggle to make the best of bad material. None of the characters are particularly convincing. The worst acting comes out at times when the tension should be high, when inevitably someone lets out the most lack-lustre scream of terror that you’ve ever heard. These moments are unintentionally hilarious, and they increased my enjoyment of the film for all the wrong reasons.
The plot is a mess. It doesn’t make sense. Of course, nobody cares too much about the plot of haunted house films, and we all expect characters to make baffling decisions such as wandering down dark corridors on their own, but Event Horizon manages to hit new levels of stupid. For example, the distress signal that prompts our formulaic crew to go and investigate is sent in Latin. This is not because the ship was filled with Catholics, or was broadcasting a weekly news bulletin to Finland, but because it delays a pathetic plot twist. The crew initially thought that the message said “liberate me” (save me), but it was actually saying “libera te” (save yourself). And yes, the serious manner in which this is revealed makes this scene incredibly funny.
The bad acting, excruciating screenplay and brainless plot are all tied together by a medley of comfortingly familiar stock sound effects. You know that one where the door whooshes open? That plays a strong supporting role. And that classic punching sound, like hitting a tree in Minecraft? That gets multiple cameos. But my personal favourite is, without doubt, the stock sound effect of someone dropping a metal pipe onto a concrete floor. Mike Oldfield’s got nothing on those tubular bells.
Finally, it is worth noting that this film was over-ambitious in the CGI department. By modern standards, it looks dire – but part of me respects the artistic vision. This film is from 1997, and there were some genuinely brave attempts to animate liquids floating in zero-gravity (if you’ll excuse the term). It looks bad, yes, but I appreciate the care and attention that must have been required to render those unconvincing blobs in the mid-90s. They were really pushing the limits to make something this ugly.
Pointless plot
The story of this film is entirely forgettable, and I had to remind myself of the basics by reading its Wikipedia entry. For most of the film, it is unclear whether the ship is infected with an alien presence, or whether it is just haunted – and this is never really explained. The ship has a “gravity drive” to propel it using the power of wormholes (or something), and the previous crew appear to have gone mad and started mutilating each other after switching it on. The gravity drive looks classically evil. It is dark and shiny, with spinning parts and spikes on the walls. Once it turns on, the characters start hallucinating, and their hijinks take up most of the runtime.
The film wraps up by going completely off the rails. The creepy scientist explains that the gravity drive opens a doorway to hell (don’t ask how he knows this or why he kept it to himself for so long) and he ends up gouging out his eyes, blowing up the smaller ship, then killing off most of the crew. The survivors try to take him down, and end up tricking him into shooting a window so he gets sucked out into the void (pesky space windows). They decide to blow up the gravity drive, and for some reason the creepy scientist returns – maybe as a hallucination, but maybe not – and he gets killed a second time by a clanging metal pipe. It doesn’t make much sense, but maybe it doesn’t have to. My friends and I had ceased to care about the plot at this point.
A few of the crew members survive and are rescued, but the film ends without answering any mysteries. Why does the gravity drive open a portal to hell? Why did the scientist know this already, and why did he come along? Did he want to go eye-gouging crazy? However, I wouldn’t recommend pondering these questions for long. You didn’t watch this film for its plot.
The science
We have established that Event Horizon fulfils its duties as a “haunted house” film – but how does it hold up on the science fiction front? Early in the film, the scientist explains that Event Horizon is powered by a gravity drive, and every single one of us watching either laughed or groaned when he pulled out a pencil and paper to explain black holes. But then, as he folded the paper and punched the pencil through it, we started to wonder – is this where that trope comes from? And it is! The famous pencil punching paper explanation, popularised by Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, comes from Event Horizon. Is it helpful? Or accurate? Who cares! It’s funny.
Event Horizon makes no attempt to be scientifically accurate. At the start of the film we are presented with a very optimistic timeline of the near future: a permanent Moon base in 2015, commercial Mars mining in 2032, the Event Horizon ship leaving the Solar System in 2040… Did people really believe this in 1997? What a time to be alive.
Speaking of 90s attitudes, we see a fair amount of workplace harassment towards the female crew members in the opening scenes of the film. Nice to know that the screenwriters saw commercial Mars mining as more achievable than gender equality. Other hangovers from the 90s include the use of DVDs to store video data, which I’ll admit to finding charming rather than laughably shortsighted. The DVD was new tech in 1997. And it’s not as if the writers had seen vinyl, floppy disks and VHS come and go in their lifetime, or as if they had bothered to read up on Moore’s Law. They couldn’t have known any better. Leave them alone.
However, one science fiction aspect stands out as a success: the ship designs. Both the small rescue craft and the big haunted ship are interesting and visually appealing. These visuals are, without a doubt, one of the main reasons that anyone could love this film.
Redeeming qualities
The best part of Event Horizon is the set design. The ships don’t just look good on the outside, but on the inside, too. It is evident that lots of time and care went into creating the sets, and they remain sincerely charming even while the film derails inside them. This stage deserved to host a better film – but alas. We must enjoy the glory of the spinning gravity drive while pipedrop_2.wav plays out in the background.
I also think that the bad parts of this film make it quite a lot of fun, provided that you enter with the correct mindset and in the company of friends. Most horror films are better when shared, and this is no exception. We don’t really care about the plot or the characters, and we don’t mind a bit of stupidity. We’re here for the visuals and for gratuitous levels of gore, and under these circumstances, a little bit of goofiness goes a long way – even if it was unintentional. I’m sure Event Horizon never intended to be as silly as Evil Dead II or Braindead, but it almost does it accidentally, and in doing so it saves itself. Event Horizon is amusingly awful rather than painfully awful, and I can see why people like it.
In summary…
I enjoyed Event Horizon far more than I expected. The film is dragged down by bad writing, bad acting, and stock sound effects, but the set design is charming, and the accidental goofiness is consistently entertaining for all the wrong reasons. It is certainly more of a horror film than a science fiction film, so I can see why some people in 1997 might have felt misled – but at the same time, science fiction is a very broad genre. Deep, philosophical questions aren’t a necessity. If you’re looking for something very silly to watch with friends, and with your brain in power-saving mode, Event Horizon is adequate low-impact entertainment.
C. W. Clayton 