With inspirations varying from Hieronymus Bosch and Warhammer 40,000 to the literal architecture of the Notre Dame Cathedral and Fritz Lang, Paul WS Anderson’s earliest great work Event Horizon (1997) more than holds up as it approaches its 26th year. It’s one of the great 20th-century space-horror films, a sub-genre lost with the turn of the millennium.
Early into the career of the popular but unrevered stylist, Anderson’s two earlier films (Shopping; Mortal Kombat) showed glimpses of promise, but they lacked the post-digimodernist panache that the British director would maintain up to his nearly experimental 2016 blockbuster, Resident Evil: The Final Chapter. It’s his third film, Event Horizon, where Anderson solidifies as an auteur: a photographic respect for negative space, an addictive commitment to legible geographies and spatial relationships, blank slate characters, innovative uses of digital film technologies, narrow corridors shot in deep focus, claustrophobic production designs, and, as I argued in my two-part essay on Anderson, a profound religious-visual perspective. It’s also the first (and arguably best) of his three haunted-house films so far, with Resident Evil (2002) and AVP: Alien vs. Predator (2004) following a handful of years later.
I’d make the argument that Event Horizon doesn’t suffer from the artistic flaw that has plagued most of Anderson’s filmography: a poor track record as a director of actors. From stars Laurence Fishburne and Sam Neill to the supporting cast of Jason Isaacs, Kathleen Quinlan, and Jack Noseworthy, the cast of Event Horizon might be the most talented he’s ever worked with. If Anderson’s hands-off actor direction and pop-friendly approach to action filmmaking in Death Race (2008) or Mortal Kombat turned you off, Event Horizon might make for the easiest entry point into the filmography of the “video-game guy.”
Sam Neill is particularly excellent as Dr. William Weir, the scientific mastermind behind the titular ship that has been missing for seven years. In 2047, the crew of the Lewis and Clark is sent to the far reaches of the solar system to investigate a disturbing distress call filled with inaudible noises, screaming, and at least one Latin phrase; the call appears to be coming from the missing Event Horizon. Weir’s a cunning, sharp, and somewhat elusive scientist who seems to think he hovers above the lower intellectual realm of his peer travelers; and he seems to have earned this right … the ship he built possesses the ability to fold time-space on itself to travel from Point A to Point B instantaneously (after passing through a mysterious in-between space). But he doesn’t seem much help in answering the pressing question that haunts Fishburne’s Captain S. J. Miller from beginning to end: where has the Horizon been for these seven years?
Born to a family of Welsh coal miners, Anderson has been hyperfixated on the visualization of the physical geographies within his films from the very beginning. That he finds horror in the mystery of the Horizon’s geographical transgressions is no surprise. Weir explains the science in simple terms to the crew: if you poke two holes several inches apart on a sheet of paper, the simplest path from the first hole to the second isn’t the way the crow flies; the shortest path is to fold the paper so that the two holes, essentially, occupy the same space. And this is what the Horizon does to time and space. But for a brief moment, the Horizon goes somewhere else– a place not even Weir knows before it emerges from its intended destination. His increasingly frequent use of computer-generated map inserts, diegetic security footage, and claustrophobic spaces with geographical threats (like the famous laser scene in Resident Evil) finds a more raw expression in Event Horizon. In his third feature, what can happen when space isn’t accounted for is downright frightening. Not unlike M. Night Shyamalan’s Old (2021), where characters age rapidly when they leave the safety of the camera’s perspective, no one is safe off-screen. Event Horizon uses similar logic with a less obvious gimmick (though I adore Old). The terror is found in more or less the same place.
The futurist-Gothic production design by Joseph Bennett (Deep Blue Sea; Rome) has few comparisons that can do the work justice. “I thought, ‘2001’ had NASA, Ridley had Giger, I’ve got to have something going into this. I can’t go and do a generic space movie where we just sit with a production designer and draw some corridors. We need a concept. For me the concept came when I was in Paris,” the director told Space.com last year. And that’s where he got the idea to “[scan the] Notre Dame cathedral into the computer and then [build] the Event Horizon from its constituent elements.” If the Parisian cathedral is one of the great architectural achievements, its distortion into a futuristic spaceship must be one of the boldest production decisions in mainstream horror. The production fully commits to the conceit too, with the main captain’s chair reimagining the altar and tall walls rarely seen in film history’s many deep space cruisers. The creative decision reinforces the dark, religious imagery that the film crystallizes with a hellish take on the Beatific vision.
The revelatory answer to the question of where exactly the Horizon has been for the past seven years is one of my most haunting cinematic memories. And no matter how many times I watch it, the horror never loses its substance. The scares of Event Horizon do not depend on jump scares or carefully timed music cues but instead play on the most innate and universal fears across spiritual expressions. The final revelation, as a result, isn’t something that spoils rewatches but rather hangs over the frame from beginning to end. Every minute brings the ship closer to its terrifying destination like a ticking clock. Event Horizon is even scarier when you know where the ship is headed.
Event Horizon
1997
dir. Paul WS Anderson
96 min.
Screens Friday, 9/29, 8:00pm @ Cinema Salem
Hosted by Trivia Time Bitch with introduction by Kelly Kapow.
