Critically panned and hiding some infernally interesting ideas: Revisiting the glorious Gothic mess of EVENT HORIZEN

An interstellar riff on the ghost ship story, Paul WS Anderson’s film Event Horizon (1997) deploys a mix of haunted house-style encounter horror and cosmic fears of what might dwell just beyond the reach of humanity. After spending seven mysterious years adrift and missing, the prototype ship returns, apparently empty, her original crew vanished. As any half-decent fan of the supernatural suspects, this will prove categorically untrue. After all, she is named Event Horizon for her gravity drive, the delightfully on-the-nose black-hole-driven technology at its core. The hapless search-and-rescue crew, accompanied by Dr Weir, the scientist who originally designed the gravity drive, find themselves at odds with an increasingly volatile ghost ship. The culprit, naturally, is the reawakening of Dr Weir’s “perfectly safe” gravity drive, which appears to turn on by itself, sparked from inertia and into life by some unseen malevolent force. This piece of turbulent technology prompts the “folding of space-time”, unlocking a “gateway”. While the ship should have plunged through a gateway to Alpha Centauri, it soon becomes clear that she has in fact been sent entirely elsewhere.

           The visual design of both the gravity drive itself and the ship housing it are striking, situating the film smack bang in the intersection of Gothic and science fiction. It is also a rather terrible film, infamously critically hammered. Jonathan Rosenbaum’s Chicago Reader review laments that his “idea of hell would be having to see this stinker again.” Roger Ebert’s Spectator review is a little kinder, but still concludes that the film has “not much substance”. In Sight and Sound, Mark Kermode responds differently, however, noting its “eye-pleasing fantasy” is one that visually sits upon the prongs of “hitech [sic] futurism and medieval gothic.” Interestingly, Kermode’s review of the film is the only one that both considers and understands its visual borrowings: “Modelled [sic] upon the Notre-Dame cathedral, the Event Horizon becomes the perfect location for a tale of deepspace demonism, suggesting a craggy haunted castle cast adrift on the very edge of space.”  Bristling with hooked teeth, the corridor leading to the gravity drive “looks like a meatgrinder”, while the drive itself grotesquely resembles some Middle Ages torture device. Its hauntings are tailored, personalised, and, in Captain Miller’s words, “this ship knows my secrets”. His deepest, darkest secret, in fact, is that he once abandoned a young ensign to die a hellishly fiery death in order to secure his own escape. Rounding out the Medieval allusions is the use of Latin, first seen in the classical ‘found footage’ of the Event Horizon’s first helmsman, Captain Kilpatrick, signing off with “ave atque vale” (“hail and farewell”) before ordering the gravity drive turned on the very first time. This trope is voraciously mined further later, when more fragmented footage reveals a mutilated, eyeless Kilpatrick hissing out, “Libera te tutamet ex inferis.”  This is handily translated by the equally handily Latin-reading trauma technician DJ as “save yourself from Hell”, something that seems increasingly improbable as the ship’s gravity drive threatens to open again.

           Of the search and rescue crew, the ship’s first proper victim is Justin, a well-meaning ensign who might as well be a sacrifice with the way he is lured in by the gravity drive’s hypnotic surges. Opening wide, the gravity drive exposes its core - a black, viscous film of some sort, stretched between the toothy circular frame, unsettling in its liminality, clearly signifying something else. Transfixed, and clearly not understanding what genre he is in, Justin reaches out to touch the rippling gateway, and is swallowed up. Time, it seems, behaves oddly beyond the threshold as Justin returns comatose, though scant seconds have passed. Framed against the cathedral-like deep-sleep tank room - the image here is one of Medieval arches and shifting shadows - Captain Miller and DJ attempt to address the infernal elephant in the room.  “You don’t believe in all that stuff, do you? Hell?” Miller asks. DJ’s response is a delightfully deadpan: “Whoever recorded that message certainly believed in Hell.”

           As its creator, Dr Weir has more than a little of the gothic mad scientist about him as he becomes obsessed with his “beautiful” ship’s uncanny spaces. Since this is, also, a body horror film, he carves out his own eyes upon witnessing where the gravity drive leads. This is Hell, of course, the “realm of pure chaos”. Taken and then returned back through the gateway, Dr Weir is entirely altered - a gothic abomination embodied, his skin a mass of interlocking and seemingly ritualistic lacerations, naked, certainly not entirely human anymore, and adamant that “the ship brought me back”. After this, though, the film’s climax collapses into a morass of awkward editing. The last act is missing at least twenty minutes of character development for Dr Weir; Lieutenant Stark is dramatically washed along the floor by geysers of blood (possibly her greatest and most specific fear, though the film declines to ever mention this prior, or indeed to give her a mid-narrative arc at all); technician Cooper (literally) crashes back into the main plotline after drifting off into space earlier; and there is a great deal of shoddy (even for the 90s) CGI fire that overwhelms the atmospheric set-pieces of the film’s first half. Despite all its messiness, though, Event Horizon yanks itself back together for a jarring sting in the tail coda. Following the destruction of the gravity drive, Cooper and Stark, the shaken pair of final survivors, assume they are safe in the lifeboat that has disconnected from the ship’s main section. They soon realise they are still haunted when the face of their rescuer, a salvage operative, transforms into that of Doctor Weir. The film closes on the delightfully Gothic suggestion that the spectrality of the Event Horizon is still at treacherous work. Of course it is - they are, after all, adrift in haunted wreckage, part of the ship itself, and the door seems to have taken on – been infected by – the tooth-edged design of the gravity drive. The threshold, it appears, may have been displaced, but cannot be closed.

Works Cited:

Ebert, Roger. “Event Horizon.” The Spectator. August 1997. Retrieved from: https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/event-horizon-1997

Event Horizon. Directed by Paul WS Anderson, performances by Sam Neill, Lawrence Fishburne, Joely Richardson, Jason Isaacs and Kathleen Quinlan.

Kermode, Mark. "Event Horizon." Sight and Sound, vol. 7, no. 10, 1997.

Rosenbaum, Jonathan. “Event Horizon.” August 1997. Chicago Reader. Retrieved from: https://www.metacritic.com/movie/event-horizon/critic-reviews/