Event Horizon(1997)

R
Rated R for strong violence and gore, language and some nudity
1h 36m

Release Date: Aug 15, 1997 | Wide

D+
6.6

A rescue crew is tasked with investigating the mysterious reappearance of a spaceship that had been lost for seven years.

Releases

Original Release | Aug 15, 1997

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Box Office Results

Updated as of Jun 28, 2026 11:23 AM ET

Results

Opening Weekend US & Canada:
$9,511,915
Total US & Canada:
$26,673,242
Total International
$587
Total Worldwide:
$26,677,592

Current Showtimes

Your Location or

(U.S. Only)

Director & Top Cast

Paul W.S. Anderson
Director

Laurence Fishburne
Miller

Sam Neill
Weir

Kathleen Quinlan
Peters

Joely Richardson
Starck

Richard T. Jones
Cooper

Jack Noseworthy

Justin

Jason Isaacs

D.J.

Sean Pertwee

Smith

Peter Marinker

Kilpack

Holley Chant

Claire

Barclay Wright

Denny

Noah Huntley

Burning Man

Robert Jezek

Rescue Technician

Emily Booth

Girl on Monitor

Bharat Nalluri

Event Horizon Crew Member

Gary Sinyor

Event Horizon Crew Member

Technical Specifications

Sound Mix: Dolby Digital

Aspect Ratio: 2.35 : 1

Other Details

Country of Origin: United Kingdom,United States

Language: English,Latin

Summaries

Plot Summary

In the year 2040, Earth colonies have been established on the moon and Mars for several years. It is also the year that the experimental starship Event Horizon disappeared without a trace beyond Neptune on her maiden voyage; her loss was considered the worst space disaster on record. In 2047, the ship mysteriously reappears near Neptune.Dr. William Weir (Sam Neill), the Event Horizon's designer, lives by himself on a space station orbiting Earth where he has a hard time adapting to a life without his deceased wife Claire (Holley Chant). He is suddenly called upon to join the rescue ship 'Lewis and Clark', which is commanded by Capt. Miller (Laurence Fishburne). The crew is scrambling the ship in an apparent hurry, and when Weir tries to establish a rapport with them, he is told by Dr. D.J. (Jason Isaacs) that they need to go into stasis quickly: the ship will debark in 10 minutes using ion drives to get to Neptune, which will release 30 Gs of force, and the only way to survive that is by going into a water-filled gravity tank.56 days later, the Lewis and Clark reaches Neptune. Dr. Weir's gravity tank suddenly empties, and he seems to be the first to be awakened. He walks around the ship which appears to be empty, until he hears his name and finds someone sitting on the bridge. When he approaches, he is shocked to note that it is his wife Claire, sitting naked on a chair. When he turns the chair around toward him, she tells him how cold she is, and when she opens her eyes, it is clear that she no longer has eyes. Weir screams in terror and then wakes up inside his gravity tank, being the last one to be awakened.As soon as the rest of the crew is fully alert and the ship's position has been confirmed, Miller introduces Weir to the other six crew members, all the while making it clear that they were actually supposed to be on a well-deserved leave, but got called back into action at the last moment. Medical Tech Peters (Kathleen Quinlan) didn't even have time to see her own son, who is paraplegic and stays with her ex-husband. Weir explains that a signal was picked up on Earth coming from a decaying orbit around the planet Neptune, confirmed to be from the Event Horizon. The crew is incredulous, as the official story has always been that the ship blew up because its reactor went critical, but Weir reveals that the Event Horizon had actually been built to test a secret, experimental gravity drive. The drive creates an artificial black hole that bridges two points in space, allowing for instantaneous travel to places that would take conventional ships centuries to reach. The ship had been on its initial test flight, intended to reach Proxima Centauri; it subsequently vanished without a trace. The Lewis and Clark was dispatched to investigate the ship and bring it back.Weir plays to the crew the only signal received since the ship's reappearance. What they hear is a horrifying series of garbled screams and confusing shouts. Weir plays the same recording after filters isolated a human voice from it, uttering a Latin phrase which D.J. believes says "liberate me" ("save me"). An alarm sounds, signifying that the ship is approaching the Event Horizon. It takes a while too see it because it is completely shrouded in Neptune's thick clouds. Upon finding the drifting vessel, the Lewis and Clark does a fly-by, but there is no response coming from the ship, and no definitive trace of human life is found; inconclusive sensor readings lead Miller to dock with the Event Horizon and take Engineer Justin (Jack Noseworthy) and Peters inside with him to search for survivors. Inside, they find deep cold and stuff floating around because the artificial gravity is off-line. Weir explains over the comm that the ship's forward compartment contains the bridge and medical bay, and it is separated from the gravity engine in the aft section by a long corridor. In an emergency, the corridor can be blown up and the forward section be used as an escape boat. The group splits up, with Miller checking out Medical and Peters going for the bridge. While checking for ship's logs, she discovers a frozen human corpse floating on the bridge, with both eyes gouged out. Justin enters the ship's gravity core, which consists of a large metal orb. Suddenly, the orb opens, and Justin sees a black, liquid-like substance inside; it sucks him inside as he touches it, and emits a large shock wave that rattles the entire ship. Rescue Tech Cooper (Richard T. Jones) boards the ship and manages to pull Justin out of the core by his tether. The shock wave also damage the Lewis and Clark by breaching its hull, leading to Miller ordering pilot Smith (Sean Pertwee) and XO Starck (Joely Richardson) to abandon it and enter the Horizon.Gravity and pressure are restored on the Event Horizon, allowing everyone to walk around without space suits. On the Horizon's bridge, the windows are lined with blood and bones, leaving little doubt as to the fate of the Horizon's other crew members. The antenna is disabled, so there is no way to call for help. The Horizon only has 20 hours of usable oxygen left, so Cooper and Smitty will start working on repairing the Lewis and Clark, which has a large gash along its hull. Justin is alive but appears to be completely catatonic. When hearing what happened to him, Weir states that the only possibility for Justin to disappear into the gravity drive like that is that the orb was activated, and opened a gateway to the Horizon's last position, which is impossible; most likely, gravitational distortions caused an optical illusion and damaged the Lewis and Clark. They go inspect the gravity drive which looks normal again, but for safety, Miller declares the area restricted for now, over Weir's objections.Peters is at Medical, trying to retrieve the ship's logs, when she hears strange noises. She goes to investigate, and finds her son Denny (Barclay Wright) sitting on a medical bed, with his legs covered in bloody lesions. When D.J. arrives, Denny has suddenly disappeared. Peters shows what she has been able to retrieve from the logs, which is a video made on the day of the ship's departure. Weir identifies the Horizon's captain, John Kilpack (Peter Marinker), introducing his crew just before they activate the gravity drive, signing off with the Latin phrase "Ave atque vale" ("Hail and farewell"). From there, the images become scrambled; however, the audio is quite clearly the same as the final transmission that Weir played earlier. Peters will try and clean it up, but then, there is a sudden power drain originating from the gravity core. Miller and Weir go to check it out, and Weir enters a maze of technical compartments, believing it is just a short-circuit. In Medical, Justin suddenly starts to convulse, and yells that "the dark is coming". Weir gets apprehensive when the lights go off and on again, and is frightened by the sudden appearance of his eyeless wife, who tells him to join her; in the core area, Miller sees a fire coming from a puddle of cooling fluid, from which a burning man slowly rises.Everyone gathers around to discuss what they just saw. Weir blames the manifestations on hallucinations from carbon dioxide poisoning coupled with emotional trauma, but suspiciously leaves out his own experiences. Smitty violently blames Weir for everything, saying that by breaking the laws of physics, they have created a ship that has killed its former crew, and now them. Smitty gets restrained, and Miller orders him to go out and fix the Lewis and Clark together with Cooper. Starck tells Miller that she thinks there is a connection between these hallucinations and the indeterminate life readings of the ship. She believes that the ship has brought something back which is now reacting to them by creating these manifestations. Miller has difficulty believing this, and leaves to oversee repairs of the Lewis and Clark outside.Peters is doing another round inside Medical, and discovers that Justin has awoken from his catatonia, and has disappeared. Suddenly, there is a loud banging heard throughout the ship. Peters, Starck, D.J. and Weir check out the bridge, and see the bridge door getting dented by an unseen force. Weir approaches the door with intent to open it, but he is stopped by Starck. When the banging stops, another alarm goes off. Justin is now standing inside the airlock, attempting to commit suicide by ejecting himself into space, saying that "the other place" showed him "the dark inside me", and he won't go back there. Miller makes his way from outside to the outer airlock as the crew tries to prevent the ejection, but they are unable to stop the procedure. Justin snaps out of his trance just before he is ejected out into space, suffering significant decompression trauma. Miller succeeds in pushing him back in, and the crew tends to the bloodied Justin.Justin is placed in one of the Horizon's gravity tanks; D.J. confirms that he is stable, but his injuries will result in serious scarring. Starck mentions that the Horizon will have only four more hours of breathable air. Miller orders Peters to decode the logs to find out what happened to the other crew before the same happens to them. He demands an explanation from Weir for those sudden sounds and Justin's suicide attempt, but Weir can only come up with some vague technical theories about the ship's hull expanding due to temperature changes. Miller wants to know where the gravity drive has taken the ship all those seven years, but again, Weir has no clue. Miller leaves, but then hears a man screaming for help, telling him not to leave him.Miller goes to see D.J., telling him that the man he saw and the voice he heard belonged to a young bosun named Eddie Corrick (Noah Huntley), with whom he served on the Goliath. When an oxygen tank on that ship ruptured, Miller was able to get himself and two others into an escape boat, but he was forced to abandon Corrick when the fire broke out and overtook him. Miller is certain that the Event Horizon is tormenting him with his secrets and fears. D.J. admits that he listened to the recording again, and believes that he misheard the Latin phrase: what the human voice really says is "Liberate tutamet ex Inferis": "save yourself from Hell". He believes that the ship may have been beyond the boundaries of the known universe, and brought something back from a place that is best described as "Hell".Cooper calls in, saying that repairs on the Lewis and Clark are almost finished. As they prep to leave, Peters finishes cleaning up the Event Horizon's video log: it shows the original crew engaging in a horrible frenzy of torture, self-mutilation, cannibalism and sodomy; the captain is seen uttering the phrase "Liberate tutamet ex Inferis" while holding his own ripped-out eyes in his hands. Miller says that they are going to abandon the ship, but Weir protests, saying that their orders are to save the crew and salvage the ship. Miller responds that the ship killed its original crew, and that he plans to use the Lewis and Clark's missiles to destroy the Horizon, much to Weir's anger. There is another power drain, and Miller orders anyone to leave the ship immediately. Weir ominously states that the ship won't let them leave; when Miller threatens not to take him home, Weir responds that he is already home, and walks away.Smitty and Peters are collecting CO2 filters at the gravity core to use aboard the Lewis and Clarke, but Peters gets distracted again by a manifestation of her son. She follows it, but is led to her death when she plummets down a shaft. Weir discovers her body, and then finds himself in a hallucination of his home. He is forced to watch a vision of his wife Claire committing suicide, since he was always working and she could no longer bear the loneliness. Filled with deep remorse, Claire's reanimated form comforts him and tells him she has wonderful things to show him, compelling Weir to tear out his own eyes.Back on the Lewis and Clark, Smitty hears a noise and can just see Weir leaving the ship. He contacts Miller, who notices that one of the self-destruct explosives from the central corridor is missing. Miller orders him to leave, but Smitty, who has just fixed the ship, decides to search for the bomb to save his vessel. He finds it just before it explodes, killing him and destroying the Lewis and Clark, while Cooper, who was still outside inspecting the repairs, gets hurdled into space on a piece of debris. However, he manages to use his oxygen tank as a crude propulsion device to get back to the Horizon.Miller contacts D.J., telling him that their ship is destroyed, and Cooper and Smitty are dead. He orders him to kill Weir if he sees him, but Weir suddenly gets the drop on D.J.. Miller rushes to Medical to save him, but finds D.J.'s corpse gutted and suspended over a slab, with his entrails lying on it. Miller arms himself with a portable nail gun, and searches for Weir on the bridge. He finds Starck lying unconsciously on the floor, but is startled to find Weir sitting in one of the bridge chairs. Seemingly possessed by the presence on board, Weir threatens Miller and Starck with the nail gun, saying that the Horizon tore a gateway in space-time to another dimension outside the known universe, a dimension of "pure chaos, pure evil". The ship is now alive, and Weir activates the ship's gravity drive, beginning a ten-minute countdown after which the Event Horizon will take her new crew back to the chaos dimension where she has been the last seven years. Cooper, having used his space suit's oxygen to propel him back to the ship, arrives just in time outside the bridge window, causing Weir to shoot it. This decompresses the bridge, sucking everything out and ejecting Weir into space towards his apparent death. Miller manages to haul himself and Starck outside the bridge before the doors close to prevent full decompression. They reunite with Cooper who re-enters the ship through the airlock.Since they can no longer shut down the gravity drive from the destroyed bridge and have no idea how to do it from the core itself, the three survivors decide to detonate the explosives installed on the Event Horizon's central corridor to split the ship in two. The forward compartment will take them back to Earth while in stasis, in the hope of getting picked up by a rescue team. While Miller goes out to the corridor to activate the explosives, Cooper notices that the gravity tank fluid is filling with blood, and he and Starck are nearly drowned in a sudden wave of blood. After Miller is finished arming all of the explosives and recovering the detonator for them, he is confronted by a burning manifestation of Eddie Corrick again, who shoots fire at him. He is forced to escape into the ship's gravity compartment, dropping the detonator as he leaps inside.The gravity drive area is now a burning inferno, with the countdown going into the last 2 minutes. Miller again sees Corrick, who then changes into a scarred Dr. Weir with eyes restored. Weir explains that the ship brought him back, as she won't let anyone leave; everyone will have to come to this unimaginable place which Miller calls "Hell", but Weir responds that it is much, much worse than his idea of Hell; he grabs Miller's head, and shows him images of the Lewis and Clark's remaining crew members being hideously tortured and mutilated. Miller escapes Weir's grasp and beats him with a CO2 filter, but Weir is significantly stronger, and viciously beats him up. In a desperate attempt, Miller offers his life in exchange for the others, but Weir says there is no escape, and everyone has to come. As the gateway is starting to open, Miller makes one final desperate reach to the detonator while Weir keeps projecting horrible images into his head, while repeatedly saying "Do you see?" With his last power, Miller sacrifices himself by triggering the detonator, as Weir screams for being denied the surviving crew. The ship's corridor violently explodes, splitting the ship in two. As the remaining forward compartment safely drifts away, the gravity drive activates, creating a wormhole that pulls the aft section into it. Starck and Cooper watch wistfully from a distance, and then join a comatose Justin into stasis.Weeks later, the remains of the Event Horizon are found by a rescue team, who enter the gravity tank section and find Starck, Cooper and Justin still alive. One of them revives Starck, and she asks where the others are. The rescue worker tells her "they are with us", and while removing his mask, he reveals himself to be a mutilated Dr. Weir. Starck screams and wakes up in a distraught state, revealing this to be a nightmare while a real rescue team provides assistance. Cooper restrains Starck, as one of the rescuers calls for a sedative. As the camera zooms out, the automated hatch leading to the stasis chamber suddenly seals shut behind the rescuers, implying the supernatural force is inherent to the ship and still present...

Storyline

In the year 2047, a group of astronauts are sent to investigate and salvage the long-lost starship Event Horizon. The ship mysteriously disappeared seven years ago on its maiden voyage, and with its return comes even more mystery as the crew of the Lewis and Clark discover the real truth behind its disappearance and something even more terrifying. — Losman <losman@express-news.net> It is the year 2047. Seven years have passed since the mysterious disappearance of Event Horizon, a spaceship that was sent to explore the outer limits of our solar system. Now, it is the time for a rescue mission that will find the ship and bring back the survivors, if any. — Chris Makrozahopoulos <makzax@hotmail.com> The year is 2047 and a ship named the Event Horizon has re-appeared after disappearing seven years prior, in experiments for faster-than-light travel. A rescue vessel hastily speeds to the returned vessel after a transmission is picked up from the ship, garbled but vaguely resembling a human voice. As the crew reaches the ship and spends longer on it, it appears that someone or something is toying with them, and more, the question is what has the Event Horizon become? — Russell Miles <zeus_gb@hotmail.com> A rescue crew in space comes to investigate and if possible, rescue a government spaceship gone missing for seven years. When they board the ship, they learn that the ship has been somewhere beyond space and brought something back with it that is an unspeakable evil. — Mystic80