‘Horizonte final’ (Event Horizon, 1997) is considered a cult film, but it had a very weak start. Theatrically released on August 15, 1997, it opened to mixed reviews and scored #4 at the box office.. It wasn’t until December 1998, when it was released in the still new DVD format, that it began to find a cult following. Now it can be found on Amazon Prime and is considered a classic of space terror.
Now director Paul WS Anderson has spoken to several media about his experience in what is considered his best film. His intention was to bring ‘The Shining’ and ‘The Haunted Mansion’ to the field of ‘Alien the Eighth Passenger’, but without being a copy, who solved that one with the key location of his movieaccording to Indiewire:
“I didn’t want it to be another wannabe crappy copy of ‘Alien.’ I felt like the way around that was to make it a gothic movie and base it on one of the greatest pieces of gothic architecture in the world, Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. So we scanned the cathedral into a computer, took it apart, and then built all the building blocks of the ‘Event Horizon’ ship from Notre Dame.”
During another retrospective chat with Variety, Anderson said that Paramount Pictures executives were shocked by what they saw.
“I think Paramount was shocked. It had all this grotesque horror and all these disturbing images. I don’t think anyone in the studio would have really seen that before because it was shooting in England. Generally, the people in the studio watch what the main unit shoots, but all the horror stuff was done in the second unit, directed by me on the weekends. I don’t think anyone in the studio would have seen the second unit footage, so they hadn’t seen all the impalement and all the other people gouging out their eyes and intestines. I had a lot of very tough goals.”
Its nightmarish images had a Paramount executive so concerned that Anderson was told the film could tarnish the brand ‘Star Trek’:
“Someone said to me, ‘We’re the studio that makes Star Trek!’ They weren’t just horrified by my movie; They felt like it was sullying ‘Star Trek’ in some way, because it was also in space and doing all these terrible things.”