Event Horizon (1997)
In astronomy, an “event horizon” is the point where light falls victim to the pull of a black hole – the point of no return. Black holes have long been theorized to be portals to other dimensions, other universes, even Heaven, or, in the case of this 1997 film, Hell itself.
In the year 2047, a rescue crew is sent to Neptune to investigate an emergency beacon coming from the Event Horizon, a prototype spaceship that mysteriously vanished seven years prior after employing its gravity drive that harnesses the power of a black hole to condense space travel. Their mission is to recover the crew and salvage the ship. Upon arrival, they discover everyone has perished within the ghostly environs, victims of a malevolent force that now threatens the rescue crew.
Screenwriter Philip Eisner devised the premise for Event Horizon in 1992. His father recently died in a freak skiing accident, leaving Eisner in shock. The numbness stalled forward progress in completing his four-picture contract with Largo Entertainment, owned by producer Lawrence Gordon. He spent idle time watching movies. A Stanley Kubrick fan, Eisner watched 2001: A Space Odyssey, noting how creepy it was for a science fiction film. HAL 9000, the AI entity created by humans to assist in space exploration, traps the astronauts into a nightmarish existence through its unemotional logical conclusions. Worse than a haunted house, in space, there’s no chance to escape, forcing characters to confront fears head-on to survive.
Eisner next watched Kubrick’s The Shining, observing how its terror resembles 2001, propelled by bleak isolation. The Shining could have similarly been set in space. This gave Eisner his next idea: What if astronauts experience a haunted spaceship that produces evil hallucinations representing their worst fears and regrets, resulting in madness where they begin tearing at each other?
Eisner pitched his premise: The Shining set on a spaceship. Largo execs wanted to know more, but he’d yet to write the story. After they commissioned it, Eisner had an easy time writing the first thirty pages before succumbing to severe writer’s block, hit hard by loneliness from his father’s demise. Marilee Wyman, manager of Largo’s New York office, checked in with Eisner persistently to help him re-focus his efforts.
As with 2001 and The Shining, Eisner wanted to avoid showing aliens or monsters, which lose their ability to frighten once seen. The xenomorph in Alien was an exception, retaining its fearsomeness by continuously changing its nature. Eisner wanted a similar ever-changing evil for Event Horizon. The Event Horizon violated the law of physics by jumping into a dimension it should never exist, which is affecting human minds in unexpected ways. The monsters are the inner demons the crew brings with them, their terror from experiencing a nightmare from which they never can wake.
Eisner drew inspiration from ‘ghost ship’ tales like the Flying Dutchman legend and Mary Celeste’s account. Additional influence came from films set in a bad place from which there is no easy escape like 1959’s The Haunting and 1956’s Forbidden Planet. Video game fans also claim striking similarities with “Warhammer 40000”, specifically its faster-than-light warp travel into demonic dimensions. In recent years, Eisner acknowledged he’d played “Warhammer” often and can’t deny it had a subconscious influence.
Eisner also admired James Cameron’s The Abyss, with its character named Lt. Coffey, a Navy Seal who goes insane from the effects of high-pressure nervous syndrome, attacking the other characters within an inescapable hostile environment. Eisner’s characters go mad from the effects of an experimental form of space travel. In October 1992, Eisner delivered his completed draft.
Largo execs felt strongly about Eisner’s script. They attached a director immediately, but he eventually lost the gig after his recent project fared poorly. Unfortunately, Lawrence Gordon soon left Largo, suing for rights to the properties he’d developed, leaving Event Horizon in limbo until settlement three years later. Gordon’s new venture, Golar Productions, shopped it to various studios, landing Universal, which later put it into turnaround and picked up by Paramount.
Director Paul Anderson scored big in 1995 with Mortal Kombat. His next slated project was a $50 million adaptation of Alfred Bester’s 1956 sci-fi novel, The Stars My Destination (coincidentally, Event Horizon‘s working title) produced by Bernd Eichinger from a draft script by David Giler and William Wisher. However, that project, which 20th Century Fox and offered Anderson $1.5 million to direct, wasn’t getting a green light so he pored over scripts he’d been flooded with.
Anderson declined the Mortal Kombat sequel, not wanting to spend the next year doing what he’d done the year before. He declined Marvel’s X-Men, not keen to do another PG-13 property. Discussions with Fox about directing Alien Resurrection fell apart due to scheduling conflicts, leaving the choice between Warner Brothers’ sci-fi actioner, Soldier, and Paramount’s sci-fi/horror hybrid Event Horizon.
Event Horizon came to Anderon’s attention when he and producer Jeremy Bolt had lunch with director William Friedkin and his wife, Paramount head Sherry Lansing. Anderson lauded Friedkin for The Exorcist, asking why masterpiece horror films that scare you for years aren’t made anymore. Friedkin recommended he read the script Event Horizon; Lansing sent Anderson a script copy.
Event Horizon began like a standard genre piece but kept defying expectations. Anderson read it entirely in one sitting, intrigued to learn how it resolved. Still, Anderson opted for Soldier because of its Western-tinged qualities, a genre he loved. However, Soldier‘s star, Kurt Russell, announced he wanted a year’s postponement to finish current commitments, then spend time with his children while getting into good physical shape for the part.
Given a year’s window, Anderson told Paramount he’d like to direct Event Horizon to Paramount right away to make it before his Soldier shoot in September 1997. He pitched his vision; Event Horizon would be the next genre phenomenon like Alien or Blade Runner – visually distinct from anything currently out there. Paramount gave their green light while Anderson secured Jeremy Bolt as line producer.
Anderson wanted Event Horizon to hearken back to older, theme-oriented sci-fi he loved – Solaris, Soylent Green, The Omega Man, Logan’s Run. These movies died out in the 1980s in favor of action-oriented fare involving brawny physiques and nonstop quipping. He also would emulate older horror films like Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, and The Omen – dark, deliberate stories that were supplanted in the 1980s by cheap, meaningless slasher b-movies. Clive Barker’s Hellraiser was a rare exception, which Anderson would draw from through Lovecraftian depictions of cross-dimensional demons in our mundane existence. He saw Event Horizon as a clash between humanity’s scientific future and its reckoning with the ancient, supernatural forces we foolishly dismissed as myth.
Anderson had his production team view the David Fincher film, Seven, and Adrian Lyne’s Jacob’s Ladder several times before filming for inspiration for how to shock audiences without revealing too much while maintaining a pervasive sense of dread. The viewer’s mind imagines things gorier than they are if you hold back on graphicness. He also liked the use of religious elements in Seven that gave weight to the story and the madman’s twisted sense of morality. He determined to escalate the religious imagery so that the Event Horizon felt like a trip into Hell itself.
Eisner’s script had the ship’s crew going mad from the effects of the space-warping, black hole-producing gravity drive. His supposition was that humans couldn’t handle the distortion of the space-time continuum and their reality would be shaped by their darkest fantasies. However, after Paramount sent representatives to nearby malls to ask average people what they understood about black holes, they found no one could adequately explain them. Paramount urged Anderson to de-emphasize the science of black holes and go for horror explanations. Anderson hired Seven‘s screenwriter, Andrew Kevin Walker, for an uncredited script polish to bolster the darkness, yuck-factors, and inject religious ambiguity that the black hole might have opened up a portal to Hell.
Anderson teamed with Eisner to revise the Walker polish to keep the dialogue consistent with his established characterizations and match the production designs. In Eisner’s original screenplay, the ship is also infested with tentacled, mollusk-like aliens from the other dimension, an homage to the horror of H.P. Lovecraft. Anderson wanted to avoid any alien presence. He viewed Ridley Scott’s Alien as a perfect film and didn’t want to be accused of making a knock-off, He preferred the Kubrickian formula of not showing aliens but always feeling their presence, a la 2001, preserving ambiguity as to the source of the menace, as in supernatural horror films like The Shining and The Haunting.
Eisner also had scale up the script to match the production. His original script was envisioned as a $5 million picture for an independent studio. It needed to be re-imagined for a $50 million studio picture. Anderson keyed in on Eisner’s description of the Event Horizon seeming like a cathedral (Dr. Weir called it a cathedral to science), as well as Starck claiming the ship was somehow alive. He envisioned a Gothic set design and a story that tapped into religious themes, while the ship, having jumped into literally Hell, could be construed as becoming sentient and tainted with evil, fitting in better as a haunted house, The ship is the villain, luring people to it, and then feeding off of their misery. Anderson toyed with an ending revealing Devil himself had taken over the ship but soon rationalized that any depiction of the Devil would be a letdown. There should be no monsters except those harbored monsters within the characters themselves, who project and manifest from their worst nightmares into hallucinations or perhaps realities. Scares remain potent when the audience can’t grasp the cause of the madness.
Anderson wanted the Event Horizon to evoke 2001: A Space Odyssey until the lights turn off, after which it’s images of Torquemada’s torture chamber or Dante’s “Inferno”. They designed the ship by plugging blueprints for the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris into a computer and making lots of modifications to give it a look they dubbed, “Techno-Medieval”. The Gothic-looking cruciform ship’s engines were designed using the Notre Dame towers turned on their side, the antenna dishes resemble the gargoyles, and stained glass windows provide the motif for the ship’s interiors. The brickwork is changed to metallic, while additional art design draws influence from the works of Hieronymous Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder, plus the photography of Joel-Peter Witkin. For the flashback footage of what happened to the Event Horizon crew, books on S&M were consulted to denote the pain/pleasure of the horrific orgy of murders.
Cinematographer Adrian Biddle wanted sickly, fluorescent colors to unsettle audiences. Visual effects were spearheaded by Richard Yuricich, who was initially hired by Anderson for Soldier but retained his services when that was postponed. Yuricich signed on because Anderson was open to letting him experiment on zero gravity techniques he was wanting to try, though most zero gravity sequences were replaced after giving the character magnetic boots because the wirework involved took far too long to choreograph for a film on a very tight schedule. These time and budgetary constraints also resulted in nixing Eisner’s opening sequence establishing the characters going on an unrelated mission called the “Lucky Strike”. All of the requisite character development would need to occur during the Event Horizon mission.
Given a wide latitude by Paramount, Anderson pushed the envelope of gore and body horror into the dark and twisted nightmarish displays to keep viewers unsettled. He wanted them to experience the misdirection he felt while reading the script. He deliberately wanted actors cast against type. Viewers should think the scientist will be the hero and the captain the heavy. As Paramount felt confident that the story was the selling point, Anderson avoided major stars in favor of securing the best actors to achieve his goals.
Because they were shooting anamorphic, they wanted enormous sets to avoid looking claustrophobic and cheap. The vast emptiness of the ship is crucial to the story, like the Overlook to The Shining. The massive sets were constructed at London’s Pinewood Studios across nine soundstages, making it Pinewood’s third largest production to date, after Batman and The Fifth Element.
After Gary Sinise and Jeremy Irons passed on playing brilliant-but-troubled scientist, Dr. William Weir, they landed Sam Neill. Weir is plagued by memories of his deceased wife, who committed suicide in a bathtub (changed from cancer in Eisner’s original screenplay). He designed the Event Horizon as a colossal cathedral, a place of worship for science rather than God. However, Weir hasn’t been forthcoming about the nature of his physics-defying creation to reach distant stars using faster-than-light travel by bending space. Weir’s invention is a gravity drive, designed through revolutionary science to create black holes and bend the fabric of space itself to instantly cross destinations.
After Amy Brenneman joined and then left to pursue a stage role, Kathleen Quinlan took the part of medical technician Peters, a mother who left her disabled child back on Earth for this job. Quinlan liked that it was a rare strong female role in sci-fi, and identified with Peters as a mother of a young boy she left in America to make this film in England.
Lifelong sci-fi fan Laurence Fishburne, plays Miller, the captain of the rescue ship, the Lewis and Clark. Although more of a Texas cowboy in the script, Anderson was a huge fan of Fishburne and pursued him immediately. Fishburne liked the script’s unpredictability and that Miller, haunted by the memory of leaving a colleague in a burning ship, performs an honorable act in the film’s climax. He prepared notes about what his character would do for each scene. Some scenes only had the note, “NAR” which meant “No Acting Required” – he would react naturally to whatever was happening.
Period piece regular Joely Richardson was cast over others auditioning because she adeptly delivered scientific jargon convincingly, despite not knowing what she was saying, and Anderson liked seeing her do a kind of film she’d never been in before. Anderson filled the supporting cast with actors he worked with before, like Sean Pertwee and Jason Isaacs.
Despite the grimness, Anderson had a great time directing the feature, especially in concocting torturous things for the actors to do. The actors found the set oppressive and being on the set every day gave them cabin fever, which Anderson felt worked well to put them in the right frame of mind. Although it was subconscious, it was pointed out that it was the American actors that Anderson put through the most physical demands.
Normally, horror films are released near Halloween, rather than in the broader appeal of summer. However, when Titanic‘s July release was pushed to winter due to production issues, Paramount pressed Anderson to get his film ready for an August release so they’d have a summer movie on their schedule. Anderson rationalized that it would be a good thing be released ahead of Fall’s sci-fi/horror flicks spearheaded by Starship Troopers and Alien: Resurrection. He agreed to an accelerated post-production schedule of four weeks rather than the customary 15 needed to edit and fine-tune, which meant rushing to complete all facets of post-production concurrently rather than in stages.
Unfortunately, the first test screening of Anderson’s 130-minute cut with Paramount brass didn’t go well. They were caught completely unaware of the level of gore and graphic body horror Anderson had put into the picture. Many of the “Visions of Hell” sequences – full of cannibalism, dismemberments, and disembowelings – were shot on weekends by Anderson and Vadim Jean, tagging them as “second unit”, which studios often ignore. Amputees were hired so the dismemberment looked realistic while porn actors were used for simulating sex scenes. Paramount expressed concerns because their studio was synonymous with “Star Trek” and didn’t want their reputation sullied with a bloody orgy of despair. A test audience of everyday American filmgoers agreed, so put off by the lengthy, intense, maggot-infested, gory sequences that they ceased to enjoy the movie. They also despised that the worst things happened to the most likable characters – Anderson had simply gone too far in a direction the audience wasn’t prepared to go and needed to reel it in.
Believing Event Horizon wouldn’t have the legs to stand up to blockbuster competition, and that it would easily garner an NC-17 rating, Paramount ordered a less-is-more approach. Under Paramount chair Sherry Lansing’s directive, the 130-minute film was cut down to 90 minutes to increase the theatrical showings during the first two weeks when the studio took the highest percentage of the profits. Paramount even suggested that Anderson work out a PG-13 cut, which he assured them was not possible.
On the chopping block were the goriest moments, the development of side characters, lengthy fight scenes, and most of the mood-setting sequences expanding on the loneliness and emptiness of space and the cavernous Event Horizon itself. Anderson made hasty compromises to keep the story coherent, including adding text to provide missing context. He also added jump scares to up the frights in place of the missing gore. By the end, he felt he may have chopped out more than he should have and crippled the film’s overall impact because the narrative was confusing and the pacing was off due to the rush edit.
When it was released, Event Horizon debuted at #4 before escaping the top ten two weeks later, garnering only $26 million. Though considered a significant misfire in its time, the film has garnered a small and growing cult following among horror-sci-fi fans.
While it attempts to subvert genre tropes, it embraces them far too heavily not to be constantly reminded of at least a dozen better movies. Credibility strains early once it’s explained that the Event Horizon made a fold in space, forming an artificially created black hole to travel through. Anderson concentrates too much on his virtuoso directorial at the expense of exposition that keeps the characters superficial and suspense at bay.
Set design favors mood over believability, opting to look cool rather than embrace basic practicality. Fishburne and Neill lend an air of credibility but can’t overcome the inherent blandness of their sketchy characterizations.
With credibility and suspension of disbelief mostly absent, the film’s appeal may be limited to audiences that enjoy grotesque images, flashing lights, and lots of noise.
- Paramount asked Anderson to put together a Director’s Cut for DVD but much of the excised material could not be found, while others discovered at a Transylvanian salt mine in recent years are too damaged to salvage.
- In 2019, it was announced that Paramount and Adam Wingard were producing an “Event Horizon” series in development for Amazon.
Qwipster’s rating: D+
MPAA Rated: R for strong violence and gore, language, and some nudity
Running Time: 96 min.
Cast: Laurence Fishburne, Sam Neill, Kathleen Quinlan, Joely Richardson, Richard T. Jones
Director: Paul W.S. Anderson
Screenplay: Philip Eisner