Event Horizon (1997)

directed by Paul W.S. Anderson

UK, USA
95 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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September is well underway, and as we all know, September is just a long pregame for Halloween. So I wanted to revisit one of my favorite horror movies, which I somehow haven't seen in eight years. Not only does it hold up as well as it did the last time I watched it (with the exception of the CGI, which continues to age like milk), I might have actually liked it better.

This is such a heavily visual film. So much of the information it wants to give the viewer is conveyed not through scenes where the human characters strive to figure out what's wrong with their surroundings but through those surroundings themselves. While we're onboard the rescue ship Lewis & Clark, we have an inkling of the sense of foreboding that surrounds the mysterious disappearance and reappearance of the Event Horizon, but it isn't until the crew actually boards the Event Horizon that we feel the full weight of its menace. Even before it went to Hell, the Event Horizon must have been an intensely discomfiting place for its crew to inhabit. One wonders if it always looked like that or if being in Hell changed its architecture on a fundamental level. It looks like a huge Gothic cathedral floating through space; remarkably cruciform, apparently captained by a man fluent in Latin.

The design of the ship's core cannot be anything other than an intentional nod to the idea of a "biblically accurate angel". It is three concentric wheels orbiting each other around a central mass, covered all over with spikes and orbs of light. There's a scene fairly early on where one of the rescue crew ends up in the chamber alone while they're all still surveying the ship, and all three rings of the core turn directly to him and lock into place - it's like it's looking right at him.

I actually feel like the area where this movie fails is with the dialogue. It doesn't feel like the language used can match up with the visual and psychological impact of the rest of the film. Lines like the ones from the aforementioned crew member who, after being corrupted by looking directly into wherever the ship's black hole drive sent it, would talk about the "dark inside of [him]", just feel trite in comparison with what the movie is trying to tell you in a big-picture sense. Even Weir's monologuing frequently falls short of describing everything that is implied by the film's concept.

That being said, high-concept science fiction movies like this oftentimes let character development fall by the wayside, but thankfully this one doesn't. The cast plays off each other perfectly, and they assemble to create a ship's crew that feels like an authentic crew, like seasoned sailors who know what they're doing and are not as enamored with the idea of the film's futuristic science as modern viewers, to whom it is fiction, would be. And - most importantly - they seem to care about each other as human beings. I appreciated Captain Miller about ten times more on this rewatch: he's extremely competent, always in control, but not unfeeling; surprisingly for such a stoic, no-nonsense spaceship captain, he's also one of the most vocal proponents of something being direly wrong with the Event Horizon. He takes what his crew experiences at face value even when they themselves don't, because he respects them. And for some reason I noticed this time that he was married. He wears a wedding ring. Only a few of the rescue ship crew are afforded backstories, but I found myself thinking about the idea that Miller had family back home, and never spoke of them.

I think this movie is extremely good at operating on multiple levels of horror. There is the basic concept of a ship that goes to hell and comes back demonically possessed, which is shown to us in every inch of film, basically, but then there's the real blood and guts of it - and that is restricted to only a few key moments. I always like to include the link to this Imgur gallery that shows frames from the film you wouldn't be able to catch without pausing it repeatedly (although if you are at all averse to graphic imagery, including imagery of a sexual nature, please don't view it). Had we been seeing things like that constantly, the film would be nowhere as scary as it is. As Weir says, hell is just a word. But while he follows that up by saying that reality is far worse, I would argue that - as a film viewer - what we can cook up in our imaginations is even worse than that. That's why I like that the movie respects its viewers enough to let us think about the implications it presents to us without having to be shown them at every corner.

I just really love this one. It's one of those movies that, to me, doesn't feel like anything else, and nothing else feels like it. It has its cheesy moments here and there (any time it attempts humor is just... really, really bad) but it's such a vibe. I wish it was three hours long.