EVENT HORIZON: Occult Hollywood In Space

A 1997 Big Budget Box Office Bomb Has Unsettling Supernatural Resonance Today

When Event Horizon came out in 1997, it got panned by most critics, but the guy I assigned to review it for INsite Magazine said it was one of scariest movies he’d seen in years and gave it 3 stars. As Film Editor, I was dubious and went to see it myself, thinking I might overrule him and write the review instead. Nope. Paul W.S. Anderson’s well-acted and directed movie had disturbing moments and visuals that ended up lingering in my mind for years, like a bad dream.

[Originally published on MEDIUM 5May2021. Removed from MEDIUM 30June21]

Whenever a synchronistic thing happens involving Hollywood and the supernatural (or am I being redundant?), and especially if it integrates a movie I like and/or admire, I figure it’s a Sign O’ The Times. My esoterically inclined ego insists it’s up to me to write about it, and for you to figure out what you should do with it, if anything.

This brings me to a cordial exchange that took place this week in one of the so-called “secret” Facebook groups I belong to, instigated by a guy who claimed the big soulless globalist conglomerates that see humanity as cattle and want us either enslaved or dead are altering/editing/censoring older films to suit their crazy current spirit-crushing corporate narratives of foolhardy scientism and godless despair.

This guy alleged these corporatist control freaks are removing ideas the ruling class doesn’t want thought about, and adding modern malevolent demoralizing messaging as one element of their full-spectrum dominance and 24/7 psychic assault on the human condition and consciousness.

We’re talking about much more subversive revisions than just inserting brand identity placement visuals in movies that didn’t previously have them, which is bad and creatively blasphemous enough. But corporate scum are conditioning us to accept that foul first step already.

The past two weeks have seen a PR blitz of repetitious stories about an invasive new A.I. technology from the UK wankers at the annoyingly named Mirriad. Mirriad is yet another pretentiously branded digital marketing firm loaded with presumed hypocrites and frauds, who provide a big link on their homepage to women who work at Mirriad talking about how great it is to work at Mirriad. Their homepage also features a vanity collection of smug headshots that show Mirriad’s an agency where the top six executives are all aging White guys.

Gee, I wonder what inspires faceless women to work at a digital marketing company like Mirriad, run by six old White dudes whose whole business model is based on inserting things where they’re not wanted? [13OCT21 UPDATE: Mirriad has since removed all this tone deaf flotsam, LoL]

Forcing brand messaging into movies that didn’t have them is gross, but people who will whore anything for a buck (or yuan) nowadays are Legion, so of course Mirriad’s biggest client is Tencent, the super-shady Chinese video platform company that’s never met Art they couldn’t turn into dross.

This parasitical partnership makes it fair game to call Mirriad yet another link in the Chinazi Great Reset plan to flatten every beautiful and creative thing into mere commerce and chewed-over cud for consumer cattle. Of course Mirriad has been awarded for their dumbed-down degenerative development from the duds at Digiday, who’d backstab their own father-in-law and suck pretty much anybody’s dick for a dollar. “We’re All In This Together!”

Anyway, it was nice to get that off my chest, because advertising is a loathsome soulless business, a grotto of ghastly non-entities getting high on the fetid scent their own farts, so it’s fun to lift the veil on their circle jerk of venal vanity whenever the chance arises.

But the point the guy in the secret Facebook group was trying to make was much worse than sneaking bad new ads into great old movies. He was talking about actual content being altered, and gave examples, like so-called chemtrails inserted into the skies of old Westerns and other “Big Sky” type pictures to normalize our increasingly strange skies (didn’t the sun used to be yellow?), as well as divisive/racist/anti-Jew dialog that previously didn’t exist.

I was dubious but not fully disbelieving, because, hey, these people with all the money are obsessive manipulative psychopaths and I put nothing past them.

But then, as if on cosmic cue (queue? Q?), my son and I watched Paul W.S. Anderson’s disturbing, claustrophobic space horror film Event Horizon soon thereafter (his best movie, not even close, and don’t confuse him with There Will Be Blood’s Paul Thomas Anderson, even though Event Horizon is lotsa bloody). The digital video version of Event Horizon proved the secret Facebook group guy’s point.

If you’ve seen Event Horizon, you know it’s a scary af sci-fi/horror hybrid about a Search & Rescue team that’s sent out to the far reaches of the solar system in 2047, when the titular long-missing exploratory vessel pops up out of nowhere near Neptune’s orbit.

As it catastrophically turns out, the missing spaceship held a secret scientific breakthrough: An engine that could create a small black hole that would allow the ship to pass across space and time and transcend the speed of light to cross the galaxy (“Operation Warp Speed”?). Unfortunately, as everybody on the rescue team finds out the hard way, passing through inter-dimensional travel landed the Event Horizon literally in hell.

This now brings me to the modern studio edit of Event Horizon. The single most terrifying and disturbing moment of the film when I saw it in the theater as Film Editor for INsite Magazine in 1997 comes late, when the ship’s stalwart Captain (played by the reliably terrific Lawrence Fishburne, see below) is confronted by a demon on the ship, who gives the Captain a deeply upsetting vision of hell.

Lawrence Fishburne deserves a couple Oscars, one in each Best Actor category, for King of New York and What’s Love Got To Do With It, and he’ll go down in history as Morpheus from The Matrix trilogy. But my favorite role for him is Captain Miller in Event Horizon: Smart, disciplined, dependable & a man of action who holds his crew to high professional standards yet they know he’s always got their back. The best moment in the film is the cliché shattering sequence when Miller & his team see the deciphered video of the Event Horizon crew’s horrific final moments. In most horror films, the dumb response would be to keep searching around to figure things out. Miller’s response: “We’re leaving.”

One of the hellish visuals Fishburne’s Captain Miller sees is a long tracking shot of an endless field of crucifixions, people writhing in agony, nailed to crosses, for as far as the eye can see, with the camera finally swooping down into a despairing closeup of a man’s contorted face screaming in ghastly agony and then into his open mouth, cut to black.

Holy shit that freaked me out back in the day, and I remember it vividly to right now. It was the single most disturbing image in a scary movie full of them, BUT NOW IT’S GONE. There’s still the evil visionary sequence of hell projected into the mind of the film’s primary protagonist, but it’s a blinding series of rapid cuts; images of intense gore and violence to be sure, but impossible to much discern without slowing down frame-by-frame (no thanks).

I managed to track down Stephen Hunter’s 24-year old film review from The Washington Post that notes the mass crucifixion scene in Event Horizon, just so you know I wasn’t hallucinating it personally instead of Larry Fishburne. Here’s the link; let’s see if the satanic CIA types at WaPost spike it now. [Still there as of 12OCT2021]

But….WHY? The theatrical release of Event Horizon had already been notoriously hacked to pieces — from its original 130 minute cut that was so violent it reportedly made test audiences physically ill — to its current 97 minutes (33 minutes removed, hmmmm). It’s amazing it stands as good of a movie as it does, with only two clumsy scenes that suggest a choppy edit, solid character development overall, and several exciting and memorable action and horror sequences.

But Event Horizon was such a big budget flop when it came out that the studio didn’t work hard to preserve the deleted material. Thus, when Event Horizon became a cult hit on DVD release years later and fans started clamoring for the director’s cut, it was discovered that the old film stock was irretrievably decayed because — and this sounds so unbelievable it may not be true, sorry if I’m so cynical about Hollywood legends — it was stored deep underground in a Transylvania salt mine.

There’s a good rundown of the deleted material here, some of it character development stuff that I would’ve liked to see from the excellent cast (which includes versatile British weirdos Sam Neill and Jason Isaacs + unfairly mostly forgotten Joely Richardson), and some horrific segments of torture and suffering in a satanic “blood orgy” that I’m glad I didn’t see.

By. The. Way: The Black Hole engine that propels the Event Horizon into interdimensional travel has a bunch of lights and spikes that makes it resemble a certain virus that’s been in the news constantly for the past year. Gifted cinematographer Adrian Biddle (Aliens, V for Vendetta, Thelma & Louise, etc.) said he was going for a ‘techno-medieval aesthetic,’ which is interesting, because that’s exactly the type of new Dark Age our psychopathic technocratic fascist oligarchs seem to be striving towards.

But the thing that jumps out at me most from the Den of Geek article linked in the prior paragraph (and now here), is this line: “[D]irector [Paul W.S. Anderson] realized most [of the ultra-violent footage] probably wouldn’t be used, but he filmed it regardless.”

Again: WHY? Why film a bunch of horribly violent scenes that you know will never be used because it will get your intended big budget Hollywood multiplex horror film a NC-17 rating, which means the vast majority of multiplexes will never show it?

While contemplating the answer to that question, it made me think of another movie that had a “blood orgy” sequence cut out of it: Alan Parker’s equally disturbing dark occult 1987 detective thriller Angel Heart, starring Mickey Rourke in his prime and Lisa Bonet in the role that forever changed her career, arguably not for the better (even if you liked seeing her naked, cuz boy, with somnambulant sex-crazed Cliff Huxtable hindsight, that voodoo priestess role sure carries different subtext now, eh?).

In the book Angel Heart was adapted from, “Falling Angel,” there is a pivotal segment where the detective (anti)hero descends deep below ground into an abandoned New York City subway station and witnesses a dark occult blood orgy that climaxes with the stabbing sacrifice of a newborn infant.

That sequence was apparently filmed for Angel Heart but didn’t make the final cut, other than a few quick flashes of writhing naked bloody bodies in a vision the detective has. Again, at the time, reports were that the original cut of Angel Heart would have earned the dreaded NC-17 rating.

Unlike the missing crucifixion scene and blood orgy sequence from Event Horizon, I can no longer find any reference to the missing sequence in Angel Heart. You’ll have to take my word for it (or don’t; I don’t really care) that I remember reading about it back in the day. Not even sure if the visionary flashes of Rourke’s detective character exist nowadays in the digital video version — I saw that movie twice in the theater, not sure I’d ever want to see it again (though it is a very good and effective film that does what it sets out to do).

So why were these blood orgy sequences filmed, if they weren’t going to make final cut? Well, if you’ve read Theodore Roszak’s superb novel “Flicker,” you might come away thinking there are a whole lotta well-known movies that have secret special versions that only a few people get to see. People with a lot of money. People with a lot of money who finance films. People with a lot of money who finance films and might really get off on seeing a blood orgy/infant murder enacted on screen.

[ATROCIOUS ASIDE: Of course, if you’ve seen Dark Occult Auteur Darren Aronofsky’s brilliant/repellent “mother!” you know that onscreen sacrificial infant murder doesn’t even need to be kept hidden from the masses anymore, nor does it get a NC-17 rating (fortunately, at least it doesn’t make any money, but maybe it’s not about money)].

Beyond the, uh, limited audience for such things, we can understand why a blood orgy/baby sacrifice was edited out of these films to eliminate the NC-17 rating. Yet the mass crucifixion excision from Event Horizon obviously didn’t cross the line in 1997, because it existed in the motion picture’s original R-rated version when I saw it in the theater.

So why is it gone now? As a Christian, I have a theory.

What if Paul W.S. Anderson got a little too close to the Truth? What if eternal mass crucifixion torture IS one of the circles of hell, reserved for those who not only reject but mock Jesus Christ and his agonizing blood sacrifice? What if those who finance these fucked-up movies and pay for their digital transformation found that horrific image struck a little too close to home?

You ever see Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ? What a grueling experience, but a work of indisputable genius. Beyond tough to take, probably the roughest movie-going I’ve ever sat through without walking out. But worth considering, if you’re considering what level of suffering might be needed to cleanse a fallen species of sentient beings who live in perpetual sin on an inherently flawed planet that dysfunctionally runs on a blood sacrifice O.S. Just sayin’.

PSYCH! I don’t actually believe “Hell is a landscape of endless crucifixions,” though it’s an intriguing premise. My real guess is: The Hollywood/entertainment biz types simply don’t want you thinking about Jesus AT ALL. Anything that might make you consider Jesus Christ and his holy sacrifice is anathema to them. So a depiction of crucifixion and suffering is off limits. Can’t have anybody thinking about what an awe-inspiring sacrifice the Messiah made on your behalf, especially if you’ve spent a whole career avoiding it!

Also, and this is a much broader subject for another column that I’ll probably never write: I’m not convinced hell exists. I tend to lean towards the annihilation of the soul when you lose it, and after your soul and spirit are lost, that’s it. When your physical body finally runs out of gas, you’re done. No afterlife of any kind. Soul-death. The Anti-Life. Kaput.

But hey: I could be wrong. There are a lot of particulars about Christianity, its Hebrew roots, and Faith that I’m unclear about. But big decision and big picture wise, I know the rock my character arc stands upon in this 3D movie with a 5D director nudging players about upon a 4D stage. Do you?

In Astrophysics, an “Event Horizon” is described as “a boundary beyond which occurrences cannot affect an observer.” It is a term most often used to explain cosmic influence of and reactions to a Black Hole, because the escape velocity of a Black Hole is greater than the speed of light, though I’m no astrophysicist so I have no fucking clue what that actually means. Still: Some occultists I’ve talked to in the past couple years have said the astronomical/astrological Big Secret is that the Milky Way galaxy generally and Earth particularly is getting sucked towards a Black Hole, which is speeding up our sense of Time, and we’re all materially doomed in the reasonably near future. But some of us are more doomed, Big Picture, than others, which is why there’s been such a relentless push to break your spirit and suck out your soul, because misery loves company and the Ruling Class are nothing if not miserable. I mean, does prophecy need to come from the mouths of babes that “Something really bad is going to happen”? And isn’t every single red light indicator in your being screaming that some kind of major Event is on the Horizon? On the other hand, I’ve also been told all this bad stuff can be stopped if we’d just get our shit together. Who knows? I know nothing. Other than Lawrence Fishburne deserves an Oscar, LOL.