Ghost Ship (2002) vs. Event Horizon (1997)

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Close the curtains, turn off the lights, crank up the sound. Event Horizon is more lightly to make you s”*# your pants. This gets my vote.

Saw it in a theater in '97 and must confess that it did give a scare.


Whoever made a greater sacrifice than Captain S.J. Miller?



I vote Event Horizon even though it could've been so much more.
Event Horizon...The concept of a long lost star ship reappearing after it had mysteriously disappeared into a black hole apparently having traveled to another dimension, which might be Hell...and then, bringing something back from that dark evil place, is a cool idea!

But I wish they would have explored the concept of what Hell was like and how it manifested itself on the ship in more detail. This could have had some deep existential ideas and explored some unique concepts. Instead we get a fun-horror-gore movie with people dying in gruesome ways. Event Horizon could have been so much more...



But I wish they would have explored the concept of what Hell was like and how it manifested itself on the ship in more detail. This could have had some deep existential ideas and explored some unique concepts

Tonight on COSMOS. Hell. What would it really mean? What would it really be like? Join our round table discussion with Stephen Hawking, Michio Kaku, Lawrence Kraus, and Neil deGrasse Tyson.


Or as a church bulletin once put it in the notices read just after services -- "Please join us next Sunday for Pastor Johnson's sermon, Do you know what hell is? Come and listen to the organist play after church."



Tonight on COSMOS. Hell. What would it really mean? What would it really be like? Join our round table discussion with Stephen Hawking, Michio Kaku, Lawrence Kraus, and Neil deGrasse Tyson.
I like that. If Event Horizon had done a kinda COSMOS type Carl Sagan imagining of Hell as another dimension, we might've had an early version of Sunshine or so I could hope.


Or as a church bulletin once put it in the notices read just after services -- "Please join us next Sunday for Pastor Johnson's sermon, Do you know what hell is? Come and listen to the organist play after church."
That's probably more what the film makers would've came up with if they delved more into Hell. Easy, traditional and boring as film makers often go for low hanging fruit.

I like this: the crew of the Event Horizon went bonkers because during their visit to Hell they seen a truth there that drove them to murderous rampage.



The concept of Event Horizon is probably worthy of being revisited, but this time put in the hands of someone who isn't as ostentatiously awful as Anderson. Considering all of the reboots they do that are completely unnecessary since the originals are good enough to stand on their own, doing one for Event Horizon would actually make sense. Just make it less sucky and it should be raring to go.



Easy, traditional and boring as film makers often go for low hanging fruit.

I like this: the crew of the Event Horizon went bonkers because during their visit to Hell they seen a truth there that drove them to murderous rampage.

That sort of thing. is hard to write and even harder to capture as visceral horror. What truth could we learn which would provoke such a response in our crew? A vision of Season 8 of Game of Thrones?



That sort of thing. is hard to write and even harder to capture as visceral horror. What truth could we learn which would provoke such a response in our crew? A vision of Season 8 of Game of Thrones?
Agreed it's hard to show and capture on the screen grandiose conceptual ideas. So if I was the producer/director I'd follow what Sunshine did with the existential scenes regarding the mystery in sunlight and adapt that to 'the other dimension & or Hell'. To keep the mystery I would definitely not call it Hell. I might even elude to the fact that the crew of the ship caught a glimpse of celestial Heaven. I'd elude to alot show little, saves on sets!

***Haven't seen Game of Thrones, so can't comment.



***Haven't seen Game of Thrones, so can't comment.



It's tough. If you go too cerebral, you're making Solaris. Horror is not rational. Horror is an assault on rationality.



It is the revenge of the R-complex, the idea that anything could be lurking just beyond the light of the campfire. The fire of our rationality now burns so brightly (in terms of our self-assurance at having explained, in principle, almost everything), that this film defeats us by having us imagine that something dark could be on the other side of the boundary of our epistemic reality (the outside of the Event Horizon) -- the illumination of our best explanations. That's what I liked about Event Horizon--it was a kind of Eldritch Horror thing in the sense that it suggested that there may be horrors in the cosmos older than time and vaster than space, that there may still be a deep unknown out there.