In the year 2040, the starship Event Horizon went missing near Neptune after the crew activated an experimental new “Gravity Drive” designed to create wormholes. In 2047, the ship reappears and sends out a distress signal.
Once the rescue crew boards the Event Horizon, they find the crew dead and the logs indicate that, after activating the Gravity Drive, they opened a gateway to Hell which brought the ship to life and drove the crew mad, resulting in them killing each other. Soon, the same fate befalls the rescue crew, though a few survivors manage to escape in the front half of the Event Horizon, while the rear half is destroyed along with the Gravity Drive.
That was the sequence of events in the 1997 sci-fi horror thriller Event Horizon, a movie that flopped when it came out, but went on to become a cult classic. It’s become so beloved that IDW comics published a five-issue prequel, Event Horizon: Dark Descent, last year detailing the events of the Event Horizon’s original crew.
This year, IDW launched a sequel comic set 200 years after the events of the film as another ship explores the ruins of the Event Horizon under the command of tech-bro-like CEO Daniel Durante.
Event Horizon: Inferno is a five-issue limited series written by Christian Ward, who also wrote Event Horizon: Dark Descent, so Polygon caught up with Ward to find out why Event Horizon has had such a lasting legacy, why he felt the need to blow up the titular spaceship in his prequel story, and what to expect from the sequel.
Before getting into the comics, I’m curious why you think the film Event Horizon still endures.
There are a couple of things that resonate. One is the production value is really, really good. It’s a very handsome film. It’s clearly very well-made and it doesn’t look like anything else either, before or since. The Event Horizon ship itself is like a cathedral to terror. It doesn’t really make sense that it’s a spaceship because it has these gothic arches in very industrial places.
The film has this kind of gothic grandeur to it and it’s very much a cosmic horror story. I can’t even think of a cosmic horror that comes close to it in terms of encapsulating what cosmic horror is, be it the idea of the unknown being terrifying, and the idea that humans can’t perceive something because it’s beyond our comprehension.
Even though you can tell there are things missing and it feels a bit disjointed in places, none of that detracts from it and in some ways it enhances it. Because it has these holes, they actually add to that mystery. It taps into that fear that you get with cosmic horror.
Can you explain how you found the story for the sequel?
I always felt like the film was almost Star Trek-y in a way. You’ve got this intergalactic spaceship and each member of the crew is from a different country. It was like industrial Star Trek and I thought it’d be interesting to explore that a little bit more.
Then with space travel today, with the Elon Musks of the world, they want to go and do their billionaire version of Star Trek, so I thought that was an interesting thing to explore. What does that version of Star Trek look like?
I’m also very much tipping my hat to Aliens because I felt like, with Dark Descent, it’s like Alien. It’s dark, it’s full of dread, it’s slow, and it builds and builds. Then speaking with Nick Nino, my editor, we both decided that this one needed to feel almost like an action film, so I decided to wink at Aliens. So we’ve got these space Marines, but how does that work? Can you kill these cosmic horror demon entities with bullets? I don’t think so, but that’s the story.
In Dark Descent, you made the demon Paimon the villain, but this has a different villain. Can you talk about why?
With the first one, it was the story of where the ship went, but that wasn’t really the story I was telling. My story was, “Why is the ship alive?” At the end of the five issues, I blow up the ship and that was the only note I got, “You can’t blow it up because it gets blown up in the film.” I was just like, “No, we have to blow it up. We’ve got to kill the ship so the Piamon, a demon who is associated with resurrection, can resurrect the ship and then that’s how it’s alive.”
But the entity in Event Horizon: Inferno is Samael, a fallen angel who has a very different deal that is not really revealed until the last issue. At the moment, all he does is whisper into people’s ears and influence them. That’s his thing. He’s literally like the devil on your shoulder.
May I ask what the role of the original filmmakers has been with this project?
We’ve had to run everything past them, but they haven’t had an active role beyond being really supportive, especially Philip Eisner, who’s the scriptwriter of the original film. I will say, they’re even more excited about Inferno than they were about Dark Descent because it goes to so many different kinds of crazy places.
Issue #1 of Event Horizon: Inferno is out now and issue #2 arrives on June 3. Available at your local comic shop.