31 Days of Streaming Horror: ‘Event Horizon’ is a Haunted House Movie in Space

Welcome to 31 Days of Streaming Horror. Every day this October, we’ll be highlighting a different streaming horror movie to help you get into the Halloween spirit. Today’s entry: Event Horizon (1997).

Event Horizon
Now Streaming on Hulu and Amazon Prime Video

Sub-Genre: Spaceship horror!

Best Setting to Watch It In: In space, obviously

How Scary Is It?: It’s pretty scary at times! Especially in its gory depictions of Hell

A blend of Hellraiser and Alien, Event Horizon is like a haunted house movie where the haunted house just happens to be a spaceship. In 2047, the starship Event Horizon suddenly appears near Neptune after vanishing for seven years. A crew aboard another ship, lead by  Captain Miller (Laurence Fishburne), and accompanied by a scientist (Sam Neill) who designed the Event Horizon, head out to investigate. They find the ship abandoned – and also potentially haunted. As it turns out, the Event Horizon was meant to travel vast distances by creating an artificial black hole, but it looks like when the original crew did that they opened a gateway to Hell. Whoops! I hate it when that happens.

Neill’s character, grieving the recent suicide of his wife, finds himself drawn to the haunted ship while the rest of the crew just wants to get the hell out of there, and understandably so. Paul W. S. Anderson helmed this film, and it’s without a doubt the best film of his entire shaky career. Anderson has directed horror films since this – in the Resident Evil franchise, for instance – but he’s never been able to capture the unnerving dread and nasty gore-filled scenarios that make Event Horizon so damn effective even after all these years.

Is it a bit derivative? Sure! But that’s okay. Anderson is borrowing from other space-set horror films, but he manages to put his own stamp on the material. It’s a pity that Anderson was forced to cut several gory scenes at the studio’s behest and that those deleted scenes are apparently lost forever, because fans of Event Horizon have been itching to see them for years. We’ll have to make do with what we have.

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