What’s a “good-bad” movie? It’s the kind of flick that might have you cackling, hollering or groaning, one that is not necessarily great cinema but is great fun. It’s highly watchable even though — or maybe because — it’s memorably ridiculous. And it always has at least one element that pushes it into absurd territory.
James Cameron’s “Titanic” didn’t wait until December 1997 to sink a ship; months before its premiere, its delayed production helped claim an unlikely casualty: Paul W.S. Anderson’s “Event Horizon.”
The sci-fi horror — which borrows DNA from “The Shining,” “Hellraiser,” “Solaris” and “Alien” — was on track for an October release. But when Cameron told Paramount that “Titanic,” originally planned for July 4 weekend, would be bumped to December, it left a hole in the summer schedule.
So Paramount rushed “Event Horizon” into theaters, leaving little time to cut trailers, design posters or mount a successful marketing campaign. A movie that was supposed to be a Halloween-adjacent thrill instead landed with a thud in the August box office doldrums.
That was just one of the obstacles faced by “Event Horizon,” a commercial and critical flop that would go on to find redemption in the home-video market.
In 2022, Anderson recalled showing “Event Horizon” to Kurt Russell while filming 1998’s “Soldier”: “Paul, in 20 years time, that’s the movie you’re going to be really glad you made,” Russell told him. “He was right!”
What Makes It Good
Cosmic Body Horror Pioneer
Set in 2047, “Event Horizon” is a gothic, feverish, gory ride into the twisty reaches of space and the belly of hell — literally — with an impressive ensemble cast including Sam Neill, Laurence Fishburne and Kathleen Quinlan.
Neill plays Dr. Weir, a mad scientist brought on a secret rescue mission to find the Event Horizon, a spaceship he’d designed that was lost years earlier on its maiden voyage before mysteriously popping up near Neptune. Little does the crew know that the ship has been possessed by a malevolent, sentient force that will soon psychologically terrorize them.
While The New York Times critic wrote that Anderson “douses almost every scene with glitzy special effects in a futile attempt to cover up a paucity of thought,” it is exactly those special effects that have held up over the years, helping to create a visual language for cosmic horror.
Much of that is thanks to Richard Yuricich, the visual effects supervisor whose credits include “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “Blade Runner.”
Yuricich “always pushed to just do it for real,” Anderson said in 2022.
In “Event Horizon,” that meant some seriously grotesque transformations, especially for Neill, whose character goes from broken man to evil incarnate.
On a film festival panel in 2019, Neill talked about morphing into what he called a “monster.” “I was kind of naked, and I had all this stuff and blood and things on me,” he said. “It was eight hours for makeup and most of it standing up. That was an endurance test.”
The result — an eyeless, flayed nightmare — would become one of horror’s most indelible images.
What Makes It Bad
Brace for Interference
Aside from the rushed rollout, other studio demands resulted in something of an identity crisis for the film.
First was its catastrophic test screening, which has become the stuff of industry legend. Audiences members were repulsed by graphic depictions that included cannibalism and visions of hell; some were even said to have fainted in the theater. Paramount had imagined a film that could have mainstream appeal, like “The Abyss” or “Alien,” not something that skewed closer to art-house horror.
“We’re the studio that makes ‘Star Trek’!” Anderson recalled an executive shouting at him. “They weren’t only horrified by my movie; they felt I was besmirching ‘Star Trek’ somehow.”
He had to quickly cut about 30 minutes from the original 130-minute run time, mangling its pacing and saddling it with non sequiturs. (Though fans have long mythologized the director’s cut, Anderson confirmed the footage is permanently gone.)
Even reworked, summer moviegoers were still blindsided by the final product because the trailer downplayed the supernatural and occult elements, leading them to expect a generic space adventure — or at least one with a lot less self-mutilation.
What Makes It Good-Bad
High-Concept Vision Turned Slasher Flick
A little over halfway in, the narrative starts to come fully unglued. It drifts from a hallucinatory interrogation of guilt, grief and madness to a no-holds-barred bloodbath punctuated by nonstop screaming, ill-timed wisecracks, ’90s-style fistfights and a frenzy of Michael-Bay-esque explosions.
Still, the chaos is anchored by the committed performances of Neill and Fishburne. Combined, all these elements turn a deadly serious movie suddenly riotous and even silly.
And few lines have lingered in the annals of space horror like this one spoken by Weir, blinded and bloody, after he rotates slowly in a captain’s chair: “Where we’re going, we won’t need eyes to see.”
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