Thanks to its gruesome imagery and terrifying tone, 1997's Event Horizon has attained cult
status in the years since its release.
But the behind-the-scenes story is just as fascinating as the film itself.
So buckle up and let's take a look back at the untold truth of Event Horizon.
In the mid-'90s, Paul W.S. Anderson was still a relatively green director.
His debut feature, the 1994 action film Shopping, was notable mostly for featuring a young Jude
Law in his first leading role.
Unfortunately, the British flick hardly registered a blip with stateside audiences.
But Anderson's second film, the 1995 video game adaptation Mortal Kombat, proved to Tinseltown
brass that he could make a profitable genre film on a tight budget.
Because of this, he was given a choice of projects for his next feature.
One of those projects was X-Men, which would eventually kick off the modern superhero genre
under the direction of Bryan Singer.
While Anderson was offered the director's chair on X-Men, he turned it down in favor
of making the sci-fi horror flick.
He does admit that it, quote, "probably wasn't a good career choice," but he just didn't
want to make another PG-13 film.
On the DVD commentary for Event Horizon, Anderson said...
"I definitely had something dark and scary in my psyche to get out."
So he gravitated toward Event Horizon and passed on the opportunity to introduce the
world to the cinematic version of Wolverine and all his mutant buddies.
“This is the stupidest thing I've ever heard.”
Event Horizon's original screenplay needed a bit of surgery before going in front of
the cameras.
This is because the initial version of the script was a little too close to 1979's Alien.
Similar to the central plot in Ridley Scott's legendary film, the crew of Anderson's spaceship
was supposed to encounter something unexpected on their voyage — alien monsters.
In the first version of the screenplay, a bunch of evil extraterrestrials had slaughtered
the vessel's crew and were hungry for more.
However, Anderson had something a bit more unique in mind.
He wanted to tell a ghost story more along the lines of The Shining, in which the spaceship,
called the Event Horizon, gains a wicked form of sentience and becomes a crucial character
in the film.
"What are you telling me?
That this ship is alive?"
Anderson was given free rein by the studio to reshape the story as he saw fit, as well
as a budget of 60 million dollars to bring his vision to life.
The director basically took a scalpel to the original script, jettisoning the elements
that would've made it little more than a slightly spookier Alien rip-off in favor of an altogether
more disturbing project.
In reworking Event Horizon to his liking, Anderson drew heavily on Solaris, a 1972 feature
from the Soviet Union based on the 1961 novel by Polish author Stanislaw Lem.
Solaris is a meditative, dreamy movie, but it's easy to see the influence of its plot
all over Event Horizon.
In Solaris, a psychologist is sent to examine the crew of a space station that's been orbiting
a planet for decades.
He finds a borderline hostile, uncooperative crew inhabiting a station that's been dangerously
neglected, and he soon comes to find that his friend, a scientist who accompanied the
original crew, has killed himself.
Then, he begins to see people roaming the halls of the station who aren't supposed to
be there — including his late wife.
More than one critic, including the great Roger Ebert, recognized the influence of Solaris
on Event Horizon upon its release, and Anderson himself has acknowledged as much.
In a 2014 interview with Grantland, the director said...
"I love the movies like Solaris, the original Solaris — the script [for Event Horizon]
clearly draws from [that film].
Those kind of meditative European films that are unsettling but don't really play to a
modern audience.
By adding that kind of visceral thrill, that's making it my own."
Anderson's Solaris-influenced tweak to Philip Eisner's original screenplay was diabolically
simple.
The Event Horizon, designed to travel at faster-than-light speeds by breaching the space-time continuum,
had traveled somewhere that it was never meant to go, and in doing so, it had become infected
with something evil.
While it's never made crystal clear, the implication is that the ship has literally been to Hell
and back.
And since that basically made the ship itself the villain of the film, it needed an appropriately
ominous design.
Talking with The Ringer, Anderson recalled that for the design of the ship, he drew from
Gothic architecture and one iconic site in particular.
The director said...
"Using an architectural cam program, we basically built Notre Dame Cathedral in the computer,
and then we pulled it apart, and we used different elements of it to build the Event Horizon.
So, the towers from Notre Dame became the engine thruster pods."
Thanks to the film's beefy budget, the entire interior of the Event Horizon was constructed
on a cavernous sound stage, and once it was finished, Anderson knew he was on the right
track.
"[Cast members] would go, 'I love working with you, Paul, but I hate coming to work.
It was just horrible.'
[...] It was actually the sets themselves because the crew couldn't have been nicer.
But there was a disturbing vibe.
I really felt like we created a very physical haunted house for the actors to interact with."
However, in the end, the ominous sets were the perfect match for the sinister characters
that inhabited them.
"I am home."
Anderson would need a veteran of genre films to effectively shoot his bizarre sets, and
he got one in Adrian Biddle, who worked on such instantly iconic films as Aliens and
The Princess Bride.
Biddle immediately understood what Anderson was going for, and with the help of the director
and production designer Joseph Bennett, he carefully selected a lighting scheme that
would make the Event Horizon ship appear appropriately futuristic and sterile in cold artificial
light and take on a whole new personality when bathed in dim light and darkness.
Anderson recalled his co-workers’ contributions in a 2020 chat with American Cinematographer
magazine.
He said that they spent a lot of time coming up with a design concept, which they called
"techno-medieval."
He went on to say...
"When the lights are on, everything looks very technological and very spaceship-like.
But when the lights go off and the haunting begins, you start looking at the shapes, and
the architecture is actually very medieval.
We extended that techno-medieval design idea into as many aspects of the picture's look
as possible."
Biddle opted to use colored gels to augment the film's lighting, a time-honored technique
that had fallen out of favor, to further heighten the film's sense of unease.
He explained that he used some sepia brown coming up from the floor to make viewers uncomfortable
on the ship, as well as flashes of red and green.
He also said...
"Cinematographers generally shy away from green, because it's not very pleasant, but
on Event Horizon I used gels to produce that nasty, horrible green you get from fluorescents.
[...] I was going for that kind of an effect, to convey the idea that something not very
good is lurking in the ship."
At the time Event Horizon was in production, Paramount was waiting on another film that
was running just a bit over schedule, not to mention over budget.
It might seem counterintuitive today, but that film — James Cameron's Titanic, which
would become the highest-grossing movie of all time — was in no way a sure thing.
In fact, Paramount feared that it might have a disaster on its hands befitting the flick's
namesake vessel.
As such, the studio was hungry for a hit film it could squeeze out in advance of Titanic's
debut.
According to The Ringer, it settled on Event Horizon, which presented a slight problem
for Anderson and his crew.
The studio shifted production on the film into overdrive, and as a result, Anderson
was essentially made to shoot, edit, and oversee visual effects on the film on an insanely
tight schedule.
Rather than the usual ten weeks allotted for editing, he only ended up with four, forcing
him to work nonstop for that entire period.
And that's evident in some of Event Horizon's choppy editing work and rough line readings,
almost certainly the result of Anderson simply not having time to get as many takes of certain
scenes as he would have liked.
Against all odds, Anderson was able to slap together a cut of the film that was screened
for test audiences and Paramount executives.
Those execs had seen dailies that had highlighted the flick's sci-fi elements instead of its
disturbing vibe and graphic violence, but when they got a load of what Anderson had
turned in, they — along with the test audiences — had a reaction the director hadn't quite
expected.
They were, in a word, disgusted.
Anderson remembered the first, disastrous test screening on the DVD commentary…
"You can't underestimate the kind of shock that this movie had when it was shown to people.
[...] People were really, really upset by it, even by the level of unpleasantness there
is in [the final cut]."
And as Anderson explained, the studio felt the same way as test audiences.
Executives were, quote, "freaked out" by the film's grisly, gruesome nature.
As the director put it...
"Paramount is the studio [...] known for the Star Trek franchise, and I don't think that
this was quite the space movie that they had anticipated."
Just how gruesome was the first cut of the film?
We may never know for sure because, so far, an extended version of Event Horizon has yet
to materialize.
After its initial, disastrous test screening, though, Anderson cut over 30 minutes of footage.
While these cuts did effectively excise some of the more graphically unsettling moments
objected to by the executives, they also had the unintended effect of giving short shrift
to the development of the movie's supporting characters, whose fears and anxieties were
explored in much more unsettling detail than in the final film.
While it's certainly possible that she may have been overstating matters slightly, Joely
Richardson, who portrayed Lieutenant Stark, was creeped out enough while working on the
film that she's said in recent years that she believed the production to be "cursed."
In a chat with Den of Geek, Richardson described how one scene involving her and Sam Neill
required multiple takes, all of which ended in the same bizarre fashion.
During rehearsal, they were meant to be at a console, then there would be a fake explosion,
and the actors would throw themselves off their chairs.
Richardson went on to say...
"When Sam and I did the scene for real, there was the count of three, and then neither of
us remember what happened next.
The explosion went off, and we woke up a few moments later on the floor.
That happened every single time!"
During another scene, she and the ship's captain, played by Laurence Fishburne, were required
to crawl through a doorway just before a heavy steel door slams shut.
Richardson said that due to his vision being obscured by smoke, a special effect technician
closed the door just a bit too soon — causing her foot to get stuck in the door.
The actress said...
"It was jinxed!
But we all managed to have a laugh regardless."
Anderson's pared-down cut of Event Horizon was released in August 1997 to an absolute
critical drubbing.
Even today, after having undergone a significant critical reappraisal, it holds a dismal 28%
rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
Audiences were also turned off, and rather than the late summer hit that Paramount was
expecting, the flick turned out to be a massive flop, grossing a mere $26 million — not
even half of its budget.
Fortunately for Paramount, the film that the studio had feared was headed for disaster,
Titanic, saved the day.
"I'm the king of the world."
Of course, most cult classics get this kind of initial reception.
And while Event Horizon's flaws are many, it can hardly be denied that it's a film that
sticks in the memory of viewers.
In particular, Neill's unhinged performance is a thing of wonder, and the design of the
doomed ship's interiors, complemented by Adrian Biddle's expert camera work, is a remarkable
achievement.
Still, one can't help but wonder what the film might have been had Paramount not forced
Anderson to work on an impossible schedule or if that hellish test screening hadn't gone
so poorly.
But who knows, perhaps one day Anderson will make a triumphant return to Event Horizon
and blow everyone away with a director's cut.
"Here I come, motherf----ers!
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