Movie about haunted space station
Unused stock exists in various forms of decay: at the time of release DVD extras weren’t a particular consideration and Paramount had little inclination to retain unused footage from the commercially unsuccessful film. A great deal of footage was shot for what, in the final cut, amounted to about twenty seconds worth of glimpses. They last for frames at a time, and portray an apparent orgy of rape, mutilation, cannibalism, impalement, maggots and other such niceties. The most enduring of these are the scattering of ‘visions’ unleashed by the ship upon the characters, giving impressions of its journey. This leads to a mounting atmosphere of permanent unease, with shock moments liberally thrown in to escalate it. Some of this was to simulate the disorientating impression of freefall, but the sum effect was a kinetic-feeling environment that it’s impossible to assemble a mental shape of. Cinematographer Adrian Biddle’s cameras spend much of their time literally prowling in circles round the characters, or swooping in lopsided arcs around the Event Horizon’s innards (which resemble a kind of art-deco mortuary).
#Movie about haunted space station movie#
But rather than functioning as a one-off set-piece shot, this visual style becomes a motif as the movie progresses. The reveal of the Daylight space station near the beginning – where we pull back from a window and spiral outwards into space – has a literally dizzying power. Coupled with this was the director’s keenness on ‘circularity’. Perhaps in homage to acknowledged influence The Haunting - where the demonic house was all off-kilter angles and asymmetry – Event Horizon’s interiors were complex multi-levelled constructions, many of the walls and surfaces curved (the iconic ‘First Containment’ passage in fact rotating).
#Movie about haunted space station windows#
Its crucifix-like shapes, dark, slitted windows and looming turrets present a gothic malevolence difficult to misinterpret, but inside Anderson seemed intent on creating a much less graspable environment.
We’ve routinely been launching spacecraft into the celluloid cosmos for decades, but how many as visually striking as the Event Horizon? From the movie’s vertiginous opening shot where we pitch down towards it – with the gas giant Neptune churning immensely (and silently) in the background – it makes for a more than imposing precedent for what’s to follow. The Event Horizon spacecraft was shaped to resemble an altar, and in design was allegedly a composite of scanned photographs of the Notre Dame Cathedral, reconfigured like lego blocks and then rendered in metal. Anderson takes this kind of reverence about as far as is possible. In the earlier film, the black hole plays centre stage in a funeral ritual, receiving the coffin of a dead sentry. Through the cinematic lens we’re returned at once to old myths of the sea dropping off the edge of the world, and to reflections from the void of whichever religious archetypes we choose to project in place of our understanding. They are "the most destructive force in the universe", warns Event Horizon’s lieutenant Starck (played solemnly by Joely Richardson), and – as far as our knowledge goes – great wells into oblivion. In that earlier film (30 years old this year), Joseph Bottoms glances through a porthole at an unnerving triumph of seventies special effects, and observes "Every time I see one of those things I expect to see some guy in red with horns and a pitchfork." Both films harvest the metaphysical import that we attribute to these enigmatic space phenomena.
It has since developed a cult following, but remains cruelly overlooked for the milestone that it is – in terms of its aesthetic, its accomplished synthesis of elements, and in how well it has aged over the years.Ībout an unaccountably derelict star ship mysteriously returned from a seven year voyage through a black hole, the movie’s heritage can be traced back most definitively to the Disney classic The Black Hole. It was a commercial and – to a large extent – critical, misfire, succeeded by a string of deserving flops and franchise tie-ins (think Soldier, Alien Vs Predator, the Resident Evil series). Anderson’s 1997 ‘haunted-house-in-space’ opus that, judging by evidence, knocked the ascendant director’s career from orbit. "Hell", explains a sinister Sam Neill – thesping firmly from that latter side of the canon – "is just a word. One of the most entertaining of these old ideas is Hell. Other stories foresee how future experience will affirm entrenched ideas with cosmic impact. A number of stories attempt to explore how we and our preconceptions change as our experience broadens. On a basic level, there are perhaps two major regions of the science fiction landscape.