As regular listeners to The Quietus’ Low Culture Podcast might be aware, our Luke Turner doesn’t really cope well with horror films. Having said that, John Doran loves them, as do many of our Subscribers, so we decided to do one this month in the form of a chat about Paul W. S. Anderson’s Event Horizon which, while deeply flawed, has gone on to have a bit of a cult following. The 1997 film narrates the story of a rescue mission to find out what has happened to the titular spaceship, able to travel faster than the speed of light by warping space using a radical new gravity drive invented by one Dr. William G. Weir, played by Sam Neil. The ship disappeared on its first mission and, when the crew of rescue vessel Lewis & Clark find the Event Horizon hanging out just above Neptune, it soon becomes clear that it has been somewhere very unpleasant indeed.
We discuss how the film is like a B-Movie that caught Hollywood in a time of transition in which the construction of huge sets gave way to computerised special effects, the debt of the original idea behind the film to the Alien series, and the half hour of extremely intense footage that the studio forced Anderson to cut for the final version, rushed into cinemas because Titanic was running late. This reflection on the nuts and bolts of the film leads your Quietus editors into thinking about the nature of consciousness, the bedrock of reality, and the nature of hell as both a place and a state of mind. Although Event Horizon isn’t the greatest cultural artefact we’ve discussed on the Low Culture Podcast, it is genuinely weird – as John puts it, more Paradise Lost than Scooby Do.
Before all that, they find the time to have a chat about French hurdy-gurdy-wielding troupe, France.
Thanks as ever to Alannah Chance for putting this together and to all our subscribers for funding our podcasts and wider editorial. We are 90% funded by subscribers and there’s always room on the broom for more – if you’re not yet a subscriber you can sign up via the link on the paywall below. Subscribers can now listen to this podcast on the site past the paywall, as well as through their podcast feeds. we’ll be back next month to have a look back on the year of 2024.
