Horror, as a genre, seems to creep into other genres perhaps more successfully than others. There’s already a fantasy element to it when there’s something supernatural involved. Comedies can lend themselves well to the bizarre and horrifying. Romance turned tragic can be a big factor. All that horror really needs is a strong sense of danger for the characters that can effectively show up after building maximum tension to startle and scare the audience. If anything, the rarest form of horror combos is when horror mixes and matches with sci-fi, not counting all the times a long running franchise will just send the killer into space for some reason.
Point is, I watched Event Horizon recently, a movie that perhaps wanted to do the haunted-house-on-a-spaceship thing more literally than the original Alien did.
Sometime during its maiden voyage to leave the solar system, the Event Horizon disappeared somewhere around Neptune. Now, in the year 2047, seven years after it disappeared, it’s back. On a special search-and-rescue mission is the tired and overworked crew of the Lewis and Clark. This sort of thing is their bag, but they were hoping for leave before this came up, and learning what exactly they are going to search for doesn’t really change their minds. Along for the ride is Dr. William Weir (Sam Neill), the man who designed the Event Horizon and came up for a system by which the ship could bypass Einstein’s laws and travel faster than light. The Lewis and Clark crew, under the leadership of the stoic Captain Miller (Laurence Fishburne) just want to retrieve the ship and any survivors and go home.
However, the Event Horizon appears to be empty. There’s a lot of loose items floating around in zero gravity, and the gravity drive is rather eerie in its own right. What evidence of the crew there suggests they all died violently, but they are nowhere to be found. To make matters worse, the Weir and the Lewis and Clark crew start to hallucinate about things that haunt them the most. Weir sees a wife who killed herself. Miller sees a former crewmate who he failed to save from the vacuum of space. Another sees her young son covered in injuries. What is causing these illusions? Can they be overcome? Are they real? And, most importantly, where did the Event Horizon go when it disappeared?
On the surface, this is actually a good premise for a sci-fi movie. The idea that the Event Horizon is somehow alive and hostile or just possessed by some evil thing hasn’t really been done much in any movies I’ve seen. Even the aforementioned Alien still had a very mortal creature with some unusual skills doing all the killing. This seems to be an actual ghost or demon or something, and while I am sure such stories exist, combing those factors with what looks like a decent grasp of how to get around Einstein’s laws for faster-than-light travel can make for an intriguing film. Add in good performances from the cast, particularly Fishburne and Neill, and there’s some promise here.
Unfortunately, that promise does not extend to the actual execution of the movie. I have read there’s a director’s cut that runs a bit over two hours. The version I saw ran closer to 90, and the editing was a bit jumpy in places. I also wondered if this was supposed to be in 3D as much as things just seemed to float towards the screen. But the biggest problem is the movie isn’t all that scary. It relies largely on jumpscares, and those are never good for more than the second it takes for them to happen. The special effects have also aged poorly in places. I suspect the problem there was early CGI. I’ll overlook so-so practical effects a lot faster than I will poorly aged CGI. Ultimately, this was a movie with a lot of potential that just couldn’t pull it off in the end.
Grade: C+
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