30 in 30: A MONTH OF HORROR. EVENT HORIZON
DAY 22
EVENT HORIZON (1997)
This is one of those movies you either love or hate. Do I love it? Yes. But we are not here to hear me ramble about why this movie is actually great, or why screenwriter Philip Eisner was way ahead of his time.
We are here to explore horror, and this movie has interesting ideas we should, at the very least, take notice of.
EVENT HORIZON plot is:
When the Event Horizon, a spacecraft that vanished years earlier, suddenly reappears, a team is dispatched to investigate the ship. Accompanied by the Event Horizon’s creator, William Weir, the crew of the Lewis and Clark, led by Capt. Miller, begins to explore the seemingly abandoned vessel. However, it soon becomes evident that something sinister resides in its corridors, and that the horrors that befell the Event Horizon’s previous journey are still present.
In our exploration of the genre, we’ve discovered that isolation and threat are essential to horror. This is why space is the perfect location for a truly scary story. In space isolation is total, the characters are light years away from anyone that can help them. Even though they are “together”, they are still in a vacuum flotation away from everything that made them human, they’re completely disconnected from home. Every time they look out of a hatch and off into space they know they are utterly helpless and alone.
In the movie, there is a threat hanging on board the ship, the “Event Horizon”, but we must not forget that space itself is a threat. They are vulnerable inside the ship and out. They are being hunted by the ship itself, which is the thing keeping them safe from “space death”. They’re effectively trapped within their own nightmares in a cold tin can in the middle of the dark and cold space.
This movie explores the breakdown of a crew amidst their reckoning with the unknown, which they call “hell”. But what they’re experiencing has less to do with a religious “hell” and more to do with the breakdown of reality. The Event Horizon has been to places where the laws that rule our world are not there, and it has brought that chaos back with it.
In our post about THE EXORCIST, we touched briefly on that idea. Rules and limits create our reality, if they change or disappear then there is nothing for us to hang onto. We are free within the limits of our reality, but if those limits change then we lose our control (or the illusion of control) over it.
EVENT HORIZON takes us to the limits of space and time to explore the limits of our reality. I remember watching ALICE IN WONDERLAND and being scared that the things happening to her made no sense to me. This movie is almost a similar exploration, a tumble down a rabbit hole of death and despair where reality is turned into:
Pure chaos.
Tomorrow: TRAIN TO BUSAN (2016)
Yesterday: THE EXORCIST (1973)
