Sunday Musings - Entering The Event Horizon

Every week, Adam attempts to write an article in 90 mins. Due to recording a conversation with Dawfydd recently for the Fluffenbusters, Adam's been thinking a lot about Event Horizon.

So….Let’s talk about Event Horizon. Yes, that one. The doomed spaceship, the screaming blood orgy, the doomed release date—and the doomed attempt to resurrect it as a director’s cut from the depths of a Romanian salt mine. Honestly, there’s more doom in this film’s history than in a Sisters of Mercy album.

But before we plunge into the meat grinder of 90s sci-fi horror, let’s set the scene. The summer of 1997 was a curious time in the UK cinema landscape. For every Fifth Element (mad, neon, French, glorious) there was a Batman & Robin (cold, dead-eyed, nipple-armoured). For every Con Air soaring on the wings of Cage and bunny-related sentimentality, there was a Speed 2 drifting helplessly into a port and our collective shame. Tucked somewhere between these cinematic extremes was Event Horizon—a film that seemed to fall screaming into the void and just… vanish. No splash. No crater. Just silence. A sci-fi horror movie that should’ve been a scream-fest sensation but instead felt like the ghost of a better movie that might’ve been.

Of course, hindsight gives you 20/20 vision and a box set of director commentaries. In the years since, Event Horizon has clawed its way out of the oubliette of forgotten mid-budget genre fare and earned itself a fiercely loyal cult following. Not quite mainstream, not quite obscure—just orbiting in its own cursed little corner of cinematic space.

And the journey there? It’s as cursed as the ship itself.

Let’s rewind to the cause of all this mess: Titanic. That’s right—James Cameron’s grand, watery love-letter to hubris and iceberg awareness was supposed to come out on July 4th, 1997. But production delays, ballooning budgets, and Leo’s hair extensions meant the film got nudged to Christmas. Which left Paramount with a hole in their summer release schedule, a slot that needed filling. And what did they slot in?Not The Saint. Not Face/Off. No, they chose Event Horizon—a grim, gothic, gore-soaked space horror being shepherded into being by Paul W.S. Anderson, fresh off his surprisingly solid Mortal Kombat adaptation. Anderson pitched it as “The Shining in space.” They greenlit it as “we need something now.” A $60 million budget, a ticking clock, and the unholy mandate to get it done in just four months. Under the impression they were getting a "Darker take on Star Trek", work began in earnest. It did not continue in that manner.

The shoot at Pinewood Studios was relentless. El Niño scrapped any chance of outdoor work, forcing everything onto sound stages. The crew were sweating through gothic steel corridors and mechanical cathedrals that looked like H.R. Giger’s panic attack diary. The production designer, Joseph Bennett, had never worked on a feature film before. Apparently no one told him “moderation” was an option. The titular Event Horizon ship looked like a cathedral had married a torture device and had horrible, rusted children. Meanwhile, the actors were suffering in their own ways. Laurence Fishburne wore a 65-pound space suit he nicknamed “Doris.” Joely Richardson admitted, with admirable honesty, that no one quite understood the script. It was full of wormholes, quantum physics, and the kind of metaphysical horror that only really makes sense after your second whisky and an existential crisis.

At one point, two of the leads were knocked unconscious during a console explosion. Another scene nearly crushed Richardson under a hydraulic steel door. All of this to sell the idea that space itself wasn’t empty—it was possessed. And then came the edit.

Anderson’s original cut ran 140 minutes and included things we now whisper about on horror forums: longer hallucinations, richer character arcs, and a deeply unpleasant montage known affectionately (and accurately) as “the blood orgy.”

It was gruesome. It was Hellraiser-in-zero-G. Paramount executives freaked out when test audiences started fainting or walking out. They’d asked for a scary movie, yes, but not a gateway to the abyss.So they told Anderson to cut. And cut. And cut some more. Out went the fleshed-out backstories. Out went the character development. What remained was a tight, 96-minute slice of atmospheric dread, but it was missing the connective tissue. It was a skeleton of something far bigger and weirder. A husk, albeit a beautifully designed one.

Critics hated it. Audiences shrugged. Roger Ebert gave it two stars and wondered aloud why people were vomiting black blood. Rotten Tomatoes has it still floating around the 30% mark. Most thought it was a poor man’s Alien. A shouty, incoherent mess that couldn’t decide if it wanted to be 2001 or Hellraiser. But the thing about cult classics is they don’t need to land. They need to linger.

And linger it did.

Over time, people started whispering about Event Horizon again. Gamers noticed the spiritual DNA in Dead Space. Horror nerds applauded its industrial-gothic design. Academics (the fun ones) started writing about its themes of metaphysical guilt and interdimensional sin.

Even Kurt Russell, Anderson’s leading man on Soldier, saw an early cut and gave him this chestnut:

“Forget about what this movie’s doing now. In fifteen years, this is going to be the movie you’re glad you made.”

Of course, the obvious question: could we ever get the fabled director’s cut? The answer, tragically, is no. The footage was lost. And not just “lost in a vault” lost—no, this is “stored in a Romanian salt mine and left to rot” lost. A VHS workprint surfaced in 2012, grainy and sad, but it was never released. Anderson himself has mourned the loss, noting that the movie came out just before DVDs started expecting deleted scenes and bonus features. Another question is "Should we get the cut". I honestly don't think so, as the film we got is a taunt, well paced affair and slowing down for more on-screen horror is unneeded compared to the less -is-more quick shots we see.

It’s almost poetic. Event Horizon is a film about reaching into the unknown and finding something horrible—and now the film itself is haunted by what’s missing. It’s a cinematic ghost ship, adrift in fandom, dragging its myth behind it. It’s no surprise that Event Horizon is often whispered about in the same breath as Warhammer 40,000. The film practically feels like a lost piece of Imperial propaganda—a cautionary tale about what happens when you stare too long into the Warp. The titular ship’s gravity drive, a rotating sphere of ominous spikes and ancient symbols, could’ve been lifted straight out of a Chaos war engine. Its catastrophic maiden voyage? Textbook Warp corruption. And the crew’s descent into madness, mutilation, and daemonic possession feels like a low-key Black Crusade. While the filmmakers never officially cited 40K as an influence, the thematic parallels are uncanny: gothic futurism, hostile dimensions beyond human comprehension, and the terrifying possibility that the true horrors of space are not aliens—but the echoes of humanity’s own sins, amplified through a warp-rent hell. Frankly, Event Horizon might be the best Warhammer 40K movie we’ll never get—just without the bolters. Scriptwriter Phillip Eisner is a massive tabletop player. All creative minds soak in information and return it in different forms. Whilst there is no official connection, the strands of Event Horizon can easily connect to various other franchises and films with very little effort.

There’s a version of Event Horizon that could have stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Alien and The Thing. We’ll probably never see it. What we do have is a strange, aggressive, bold misfire that dared to be more than just another monster movie in space. It aimed for terror, for theology, for the unbearable weight of cosmic guilt.

Sometimes a film’s greatness lies not in what it achieved—but in the scars it left behind. And sometimes, just sometimes, the worst journey is the one that sticks with you.