Event Horizon, the 1997 sci-fi horror flick about a spaceship that rips the space-time continuum straight to Hell, had a hellish initial entry. It only made$27 million off a $60 million production budget. It has a scant28% on Rotten Tomatoes. ItsCinemascore grade is a whopping D+. And yet,Paul W.S. Anderson’s work of phantasmagorical (emphasis on “gorical”) horror found a second life on the home video circuit, and a new critical evaluation. It’s now considered a fascinating, well-made, and aggressively scary B-movie masterpiece, with tremendous, practical production design, well-worn performances, and simply brutal blood splatter. And yet… some people want more.
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Shortened Post-Production Schedule
Part of the mystique surroundingEvent Horizonrevolves around the possible existence of a longer, even more ultraviolent director’s cut. According to several interviews and making-of documentaries on the recent Shout Factory Blu-ray, Paramount Pictures contracted Anderson to directEvent Horizonafter the smash success of hisMortal Kombatadaptation, then smashed an impossible circumstance upon him, thanks to a cinematic jerk by the name ofJames Cameron. The studio was banking heavily on a little Cameron film calledTitanicto come out the summer of ‘97, butas Cameron’s production was falling apart, so too did Paramount’s scheduling plans. Thus, with a giant summer blockbuster-shaped hole on their hands — ironically, also about a doomed ship — Paramount asked Anderson to cut the post-production time ofEvent Horizonfrom the traditional 10 weeks to a compressed six weeks to make an August ‘97 release date. But with Anderson’s production running into its own logistical hurdles, not to mention Anderson’s insistence on directing second-unit footage himself, the editing process began to collide with the photography process, leaving Anderson and editorMartin Hunteronly four weeks in the editing bay to try and hastily assemble together a first cut.
The Studio Was Disgusted
And this first cut left quite the impression. Paramount began the production by watching dailies, quickly printed footage shot each day to ensure everything’s going well, but when they kept seeing footage they liked, they eventually stopped watching. So Anderson and Hunter’s initial cut, running over two hours, came as a shock to the system. Some of the most startling moments in the film come from the images we see from the initial Event Horizon crew as they destroy themselves (as Anderson put it bluntly, they “fuck themselves to death” in a kind of “blood orgy”), and then from the similar “visions of Hell” jammed intoLaurence Fishburne’s brain by a corruptedSam Neill. Paramount had stopped watching dailies by the time these were constructed by Anderson and his team. And they balked, hard, at the horrific, gruesome, surreal images being foisted upon them. How on earth could this graphic, explicit horror show be a summer blockbuster taking the place of friggin’Titanicfor Paramount?
The studio’s revulsion, combined with some displeased test screenings, combined with the relentlessly rushed post-production period led to Anderson and Hunter making the necessary concessions and dramatic chops to result in the 96 minute cut we all know and love today (emphasis on “today,” as nobody really loved it much “then”). But the desire of a truer director’s cut, filled with more of this carnal carnage, remains floating not just within the fandom, but within many of the creators’ imaginations. Anderson, who comes across as a genial, soft-spoken man in these disc’s special features, speaks reverently about the attempts at “beauty” in these vignettes of mayhem, citing painters like Hieronymus Bosch as being integral to the conception and execution of these hellscapes. They play in a series of nearly-subliminal flashes in the current cut, and it’s striking to watch fellow crew members like producerJeremy Boltand set decoratorCrispian Salliswish vividly for a chance to reinstate some of this footage more wholly to find the superior, unrushed cut of Paul W.S. Anderson’sEvent Horizon(conversely, second unit directorRobin Vidgeon, responsible for many of the most graphic sequences, admits he still hasn’t seen the final product).
But a Director’s Cut Is Not Likely to Happen
But theEvent Horizondirector’s cut has not happened, not even for this Shout Factory collector’s edition Blu-ray. And it likely never will, for largely practical reasons. As Anderson explains, the afterlife ofEvent Horizonoccurred just before the DVD revolution meant a viable market for deleted scenes and unrated director’s cuts. Thus, the originally shot footage left on the cutting room floor is likely lost forever, save for a few scant glimpses on sub-VHS quality videotape (some of which is available on the Blu-ray). Rumors are still abound of the full, first cut existing in this VHS-or-worse quality somewhere — a cut, it should be noted, that does not represent what Anderson believes is the best version of the film, and one that is missing visual effects, proper sound mixing, and other foundational elements to a watchable final product. But I believe, based on many of the comments made on this disc’s special features, especially from the mouth of Anderson himself, that the footage simply does not exist to #ReleaseTheAndersonCut.
Moreover, I do not believe, creatively, that a cut ofEvent Horizonjammed with more blood and guts would make it a more successful film. In fact, I believe the desire for more of this explicit footage is antithetical to what the film uses as a generator of terror, and antithetical to what many of its key participants say they were trying to achieve in making the film.Event Horizonis fundamentally a psychological thriller punched up by detours into the visceral, largely in its third act. The first chunk of the picture plays in long, patient, widely-composed shots that favor atmosphere, performance, and sustained dread over soaked frames of unvarnished mayhem. Even in its examination of corrupted, surreal, hellish space-architecture, Anderson’s cinematic techniques are very, very varnished and very, very intentional. Despite its welcomely tight 96-minute pacing, Anderson isn’t afraid to slow-play his hand, reveling in agonizing detail the psychological tortures the ship is willing and wanting to instill upon its unwitting inhabitants. Guilt, trauma, the burden of sin — these are the elements of horror that will sink our protagonists, not just the explicit, gore-drenched visions of hell that eventually explode as the only possible finish line to these psychological sprints. Put it another way: I overuse exclamation points in my emails in a way I’m sure many find annoying. Here, Anderson understands that an exclamation point is better solely when you mean it!
Event Horizonis in dialogue with the works ofHP Lovecraft, the influential if problematic horror writer whose tales of unfathomable, mind-melting horror have infiltrated so many visual works of genre, despite the point of so many of his works being that we cannot visually comprehend what we’re seeing. The film, its screenplay byPhilip Eisner, applies this idea of brain-melting, undefinable horror to the function of the Event Horizon, a spaceship that will send its crew through the gates of Hell. But, as Neill reminds us, “Hell is only a word. The reality is much much worse.” Whatever your conception of “Hell” is does not compare to what Hell actually is. As such, nothing Anderson can film, even in these flashes of grisly flesh and blood and bone and torture-fucking, will ever truly capture the horror “seen” and experienced by these characters.
Thus, much of the film’s intrigue comes from watching our crew try and interpret snatches and clues of what could’ve happened, and what will eventually happen. A corrupted audio filesoundslike it’s moaning and gnashing and pleading in Latin… a corrupted video filelookslike it’s full of human beings bloodily torturing each other… a corrupted brainwantsyou to think you’re seeing a loved one you let die. But the truth of what’s happening… well, the “truth” of what’s happening is less important than the scrambling of the receptors that make concepts like “truth” have any meaning. In its current state, I feel like an active participant in the horrors ofEvent Horizon. I attempt to unscramble the clues of reality and the loss thereof alongside the characters, and my brain fills in the rest of the blanks with its best take on “horrors that not even a human brain can reproduce.” To be blunt about it: Why, in a horror film that constantly reminds us of the unimportance of seeing things, of eyeballs, to the point where a giant scare comes from a guy who’s literally ripped out his own eyeballs, would we want to see more?
In conceiving of his take on the material, Anderson routinely brings up two touchstones of classic horror:Stanley Kubrick’sThe ShiningandRobert Wise’sThe Haunting. In describing what he loves about those films, he states, “They don’t show you the monster, they don’t show you the ghost, they don’t show you the creature… I wanted something less specific.”Event Horizon, as it stands, is the perfect mixture of this level of purposeful ambiguity, of activation from the viewers, of Lovecraftian mind-melting terror with just the right dash of out-and-out Boschian gore as a seasoning on top. To mess with this alchemy with a longer, more violent cut — even if that heralded footage is ever restored in a meaningful way — would negate all of the wonderful intentions of this wonderful cult film.
I’ll leave you withwhatJason Isaacstold our own Liz Shannon Millerabout the existence, and non-necessity, of a longerEvent Horizoncut:
“Any more of it, I think, would not have made the film better. I don’t know that he was asked to trim it down by the studio. I don’t remember those discussions at the time. I’m pretty sure it didn’t happen, but I might be wrong… Anybody who’s thinking there is a more definitive version of Event Horizon, concentrate on that rather than 5G [conspiracy theories], but you’re wasting your time.”
