leading from
A popular point of discussion is how the Paul Anderson sci-fi horror movie "Event Horizon" (released in 1997) was inspired by Alien. However when Philip Eisner wrote the script for Event Horizon, he wanted to avoid comparisons between it and of course Alien which deals with the investigation of a derelict ship, he talked about how he tried to take inspiration from horror movie such as The Shining and The Haunting which are both classic movies, yet his script includes the lone corpse of one of the crew found aboard the ship and the disappearance of the other members of the crew which is something found in Alien as well, but they both share this trope with the novel Dracula by Bram Stoker publshed in 1897. Still both Event Horizon and Alien have an inhuman sounding distress signal as part of the scenario which became mistranslated from a distress call to a warning. The spacecraft surrounded in the clouds is supposed to be reminiscent of a haunted house surrounded by mist. How much of what we have seen was written by Phil Eisner and how much was rewritten and what by Andrew Kevin Walker making it more derivatine is another question.
b) Alien and Event Horizon discussed by director.
Despite Paul Anderson's attempt to make Event Horizon a movie different from a movie such as Alien, he found himself talking away in interviews about Alien and Event Horizon as if they were interrelated subjects. He wanted to stress a comparison with Solaris, and also how the ship itself as a conscious entity is to be compared to the creature from Alien in that you never know what it is going to do to do next while it plays mind games with its victims. But when it came to the production of the film, they freely thought about the run down dirtiness of the Nostromo when they created the human's ship Lewis and Clarke, and each of the human's bunks were decorated with photos of family and nude girls in a similar way to Alien, by the actors. It also so happened that Alien's editor Terry Rawlings came along to give advice and suggestions for two weeks leading to shots such as the jump cut from Sam Neil using a razor to window blinds opening which was the first big visual jump in the picture.
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| A trope borrowed from Alien or Dracula? "..A BODY floating at the helm, the face illuminated by Peters' helmet lights. His swollen tongue clogs his gaping, screaming mouth. His cracked and crystallized skin is crossed by a network of bloated veins. He has no eyes. Just like Weir's dream." - Event Horizon Script by Philip Eisner |
c) Echoes of Hellraiser
However as a basic concept, Event Horizon began to sound like Hellraiser in Space which sounded like what Bill Malone's original premise for the film originally called "Dead Star" aimed to be with the devil unleashed aboard a space craft and the development of that project was brought to a halt by the end of 1990 and later the film project was transformed into something else quite different when Walter Hill later got his hands on the script and turned it into the film "Supernova" released in 2000. Paul Anderson and his producer were inspired by the transforming nature of the Lament Configuration Cube. The ship through vision of the dead wife of Sam Neil's character Doctor William Weir "I have such wonderful things to show you" before gouging out his eyes, echoes Pinhead from Hellraiser's utterance to those who have just solved the lament configuration and opened the portal, "We have such sights to show you" and this for many making the connection between the two films transformed Event Horizon into something highly derivative.
d) Visual comparisons to Alien
The final Event Horizon as with Alien presented a movie where the remains of a dead pilot are
found and the rest of the crew have disappeared, however it's only a question asked in Alien about what happened to the rest of the crew, there is no evidence that there must have been any others aboard. However both of the movies contain a mysterious roughly spherical chamber with a large inspiring centrepiece contraption, (in Alien, the Space Jockey seat, and in Event Horizon the Gravity Drive that in flashbacks transforms into a torturing machine). The superb oddity of the "techno medieval" set decoration that the director talks about giving the feeling of "being in a dungeon somewhere, underneath a castle in some catacomb," as different as it might be does inspire people to have discussions about comparisons between this film and Alien.
Source Quotes
- Paul Anderson: It's very frightening. not the way Alien is, - there's no specific monster. It's more psychological. When the film comes out, people are going to want something extreme. And there will be nothing as extreme as this. (Neon, p22, 1997)
- Paul Anderson: For me, what makes the movie really original is that you're expecting another monster movie, another variation of ALIEN, and that's not what you get at all. Instead, you get a very scary psychological horror movie. (Starlog / September 1997, p42)
- Paul Anderson: If you say SF-Horror, immediately people think ALIEN, which this isn't. SF ghost story is closer to the mark. If you took Solaris and turned it into an American action movie, you may end up with Event Horizon. There are many similarities between these two films, but we're not three and a half hours long and we have much better FX. (Starlog / September 1997, p42)
- Paul Anderson: We wanted to come up with something original, rather than ALIEN and Blade Runner rolled into one, which is what many movies look like to me. The design concept we came up with was what we called techno-medieval. When the lights are on in the spaceship, it looks very technological, very kind of 2001: A Space Odyssey. When the lights are off, you feel like you're in a dungeon somewhere, underneath a castle in some catacomb. (Starlog / September 1997, p42)
- Paul Anderson: Once you know the monster, you cease to be afraid of it. The great thing about Alien is that the monster kept on changing. It started as this creature on your face and then it burst out of your stomach and then it became this huge beast. So when you first went to see that movie, your never knew what to expect. Event Horizon is an attempt to return to that, because you're expecting a monster, but you never know what the ship is going to do to you next, and not being able to anticipate it makes it much more scary. (Starlog / September 1997, p44)
- Joseph Bennet: I thought it was an incredible exciting script, and talking to Paul, I felt the design aspect could be very interesting and challenging. But also there was a great scientific background to it. I was trained as a scientist, so it was the pure physics aspect of it that interested me to an extent. But it was also the psychological aspect - the way that there was a kind of warping of space and time which warps (the protagonists') heads, so that it became an internal game, an Alien film without the alien. (SFX # 29, September 1997, p30)
- The main problem, Phil Eisner says, was trying to avoid comparisons with other such movies of the genre, especially those like Alien, which deal with the investigation of a mysterious derelict ship. (SFX # 29, September 1997, p53)
- Phil Eisner : My reference wasn't really Alien, because the film is less an SF film than a pure horror film, in the sense of something like The Shining and The Haunting. (SFX # 29, September 1997, p53)
- Phil Eisner: One of the things I've always loved about movies like Alien or Independence Day is when you go into a room and it's like nothing you've ever seen before. One thing Event Horizon provides is that sense of exploration. (SFX # 29, September 1997, p54)
- Paul Anderson: Martin Hunter cut nearly all the picture but we had Terry Rawlings who's a fabulous British editor, he came in and gave us a few pointers, he just gave us a couple of weeks and he came with this cut, which was cutting from Sam Neil's razor to the window blinds opening, which was the first really big jump that we got in the picture. (DVD commentary)
- Jeremy Bolt: You know I also like the fact that the whites in the ship, they're a little bit dirty and smudged, it's not completely pristine, it's kinda like the ship in Alien. (DVD commentary)
- Paul Anderson:Yeah, we were obviously very influenced by the look of the Nostromo when it came to designing this, you know, like that grubby realistic view of the future and we gave the actors a chance to personalise all of their bunks, so when you see erm, you know, all the, all the clippings and all the nude girls and everything like that, stuck inside the bunks, that was all the work of the actors. (DVD commentary)
- Paul Anderson: I'm really happy with the, the mixture of characters and actors we have in this movie. It was one of the things again, I mean obviously we were very inspired by Alien, but I think it was one of the genius things that, er, Ridley did in Alien was have very very distinct different character types and that's something we were definitely, you know, striving for here. (DVD commentary)
- Jeremy Bolt: We were quite inspired by the cube in Hellraiser and the way that it realligned itself and reshapes itself. (DVD commentary)
