If there’s one thing I’ve learned from doing Horrorfest this year, it’s how well so many sci-fi horror movies age. Movies like Alien, The Thing, and Event Horizon really prove that while CGI can do some wonderful things, it’s hard to beat great makeup artists and a good practical effects team. Event Horizon is one of those movies that shows off what great practical effects can do to create disturbing horror that stays with you decades later.
This 1997 movie made my space horror week list for two reasons: its stellar cast and the fact that so many of the space horror games I love can be traced back to it (and to Alien, of course). Sam Neill, Laurence Fishburne, Kathleen Quinlan, Jason Isaacs, and Richard T. Jones all come together to give us a memorable cast of characters for this space journey. The plot is beautifully sci-fi: In the future, a group of astronauts are pulled onto a mission to retrieve the titular Event Horizon, a spaceship that had been used in a top-secret government experiment to use black holes to jump through space-time, enabling space travel never before thought possible. When they reach the ship, however, it seems as though something killed its crew and is now controlling the spacecraft, and the team has to figure out a way to stop it and get home several light years away.
There are movies that instantly come to mind when I think of horror subgenres. Slasher movies, I think of Halloween. Visual horror, I think of The Thing. When it comes to psychological horror, I think of Event Horizon. The deep, disturbing mystery of space offers a terrific setting for weird and unsettling horror to take over the movie. Each character undergoes some kind of terrifying psychological journey, and the paranoia and insanity that Event Horizon portrays has become a hallmark of space horror over the years across mediums. Games like Dead Space, Observation, and SOMA have taken ideas like space psychosis and desolate ship exploration from Event Horizon and turned them into immersive adventures through the horror of the unknown. Event Horizon really holds up, and for fans of space horror it feels like a tour through some of your favorite settings just a few years before they were conceived.
Last but not least, it’s very accessible! Event Horizon is available on both Hulu and Amazon Prime to stream! Go get scared!
