Down With the Sickness: Event Horizon (Paul W.S. Anderson, 1997)

Hey there! I'm on vacation with my family this week, so there's no new post. However, in honor of the recent passing of the great Sam Neill – star of my first and still favorite scary movie, and scream king in so many more – I'm rerunning an old and out-of-print post about my other favorite Sam Neill movie, Event Horizon.

This also allows me to make a correction: I've been telling you that the last issue of Dead Teenagers drops on July 15, but it's actually July 29. Adjust your calendars accordingly, and make sure to get in a pre-order for Clayface: Celebrity Dirt #2 by FOC on July 20.

I have a very specific idea of what a good horror movie feels like. It has very little to do with the movie itself — the feeling doesn’t relate to what the movie should be about, or how it should scare me, or what social relevance it should have. My archetypal horror-movie feeling — the euphoric experience I am always trying to get back to — is about set and setting. I am in my parents’ den, at two or three in the morning, with all the lights off. There’s a scratchy, polyester-y knitted afghan over me, and a few friends, in varying states of consciousness, sprawled around me. The movie is playing on the VCR, fuzzy and distorted in the way tapes were, and something has just happened that is sofucken’ sick.

I don’t have a cinematic language yet. I have no judgment as concerns the movie’s aesthetic quality. What matters is the objective fucken sick shit-ness of whatever has just occurred on screen, and whether I have betrayed any weakness by screaming or hiding my eyes, which (I am proud to report) I rarely do.  

There are so many movies that I remember this way — The Amityville Horror, Carrie; one night we did the first four Alien movies, from sundown to sunup, and I was the only person still awake for Alien: Resurrection, which felt like a blessing — but the archetypal horror movie, the one whose sick factor trumps all others, is not a good movie at all. In my memory, it’s 1998, and I am watching Event Horizon. 

Event Horizon is a bad movie, but it’s gloriously bad, in part because its makers were so familiar with what a good horror movie looked like. There’s a spirit of happy, affectionate plagiarism going on throughout, and I say this knowing that “happy” and “affectionate” are the two adjectives no-one else is ever going to apply to Event Horizon. Summing up its plot, as an adult, means reflexively crediting everything it’s ripped off, the way newspaper reviews will slip the names of actors and directors into (parentheses) in mid-sentence. To sum up: 

It’s the far future. People go to space now. A spaceship full of exhausted working Joes is sent to investigate a spooky distress call (Alien) from a ship that was supposedly lost years ago. Among the working Joes is Sam Neill, whose wife killed herself (Solaris) and who is now haunted by strange space visions of her (Solaris) which seem to be aggravated by the presence of the spooky space ship (Solaris, this whole thing with Sam Neill is Solaris, just roll with it). The reason the spooky ship disappeared and then re-appeared is that it has been… TO HELL!!!!! Which, I guess, is in space now. Hell is a place where people mutilate each other and do strange sex tortures (Hellraiser). Going to Hell has changed the ship. It is now haunted! But also alive! Filled with its own malevolent consciousness and urge to be spooky! (The Shining.) It torments all the crew members by showing them images of their deepest traumas (Solaris) and in particular tempts Sam Neill until he decides he wants to murder everyone and live in the spooky haunted place for all eternity (The Shining) and gets him super into sex tortures until he shaves his head and gives himself alarming facial scarring and wanders around being British at people (Hellraiser) until nearly every last one of the working space-Joes is dead (Alien). 

None of this is even a little bit subtle, by the way.

You can process Event Horizon as a derivative mashup of several better movies — the Girl Talk of horror — and that assessment, objectively, would be correct. But try to imagine how this looks when you haven’t seen any of those better movies yet, and you find yourself suddenly watching something that is The Shining and Alien and Solaris and Hellraiser all at the same time.