Event Horizon/Nightmare Fuel

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Where we're going, we won't need eyes to see.

Event Horizon is about a ship that goes To Hell and Back. By the time it's over, audiences feel the same.


  • Aside from the Eye Scream and Squick elements that keep cropping up over and over, there's the part where we finally see the deciphered message, and it's just blurry enough to make you wonder if you really saw the unspeakably horrible thing you thought you saw the various crewmembers of the titular ship doing to each other under the influence of the dimension they had passed through, or if it was just your imagination.... and the only way to find out is to watch that sequence again. It's not often one is willing to put the remote down and walk away rather than go back and confirm an image, but Event Horizon pulled it off.
  • Wanna know something worse? A significant amount of footage was deleted from those unspeakably horrible sequences in the final cut of the film. The original version was more explicit.
  • Fun fact: It's considered semi-canon for the Nightmare Fuelerrific Warhammer 40,000 setting.
  • The worst part of Event Horizon? The Big Bad is Dr. Alan Grant.
  • The only thing matching the ship's log would be the visions of Hell that Weir projects into Captain Miller's head, where we see the crewmembers' bodies wrapped in barbed wire, disemboweled, or impaled on spikes with their bodies crawling with maggots. Since each scene lasts only a fraction of a second, it leaves the viewer thinking "what the hell did I just SEE!!??"
  • A comparatively little one: when they're first exploring the bridge, lightning from the storm below their orbit briefly lights up the walls near the windows...which are splattered with blood, tendons, and what look like they might be bones. It's only for a split moment, but it makes you stop and have to wonder what the hell happened?! Given what we later see of the crew's log...ick is a bit of an understatement.
  • The more lingering part of the film is that Dr. Weir is set up as a Woobie, with Captain Miller being the Jerkass. The poor man goes through so much pain that you feel bad that he becomes a Cenobite, and you nearly end up Rooting for the Empire - til Weir goes way past the Moral Event Horizon (see what I did there?). Then it just becomes painful, because you realize it could happen to anyone.
    • This makes the 40k parallels much more interesting, if you consider it a portrayal of Chaos possessing Weir, using his memories and emotions as tools in his sanity breaking down and giving himself over to the daemons.
  • The ending. It's a bit more subtle than the rest of the movie, but there's a dream sequence fade out followed by the real ending (which is a pull back shot of the ship) -- the doors seem to be closing on their own. It's as if there's still evil in the part of the ship that's left.
    • "They're with us. They're with us. You're with us."
  • The set itself was nightmare fuel. The ship was designed with a kind of "techno-medieval" kind of feel, looking something like a cross between a futuristic spaceship and a gothic cathedral. When the lights are out and things are going wrong, the place looks distinctly like some kind of dungeon or torture chamber. Many of the cast members refused to stay on set longer than absolutely necessary.

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