May 17, 2017

Ah, the directing career of Paul W.S. Anderson is something else, isn’t it? Hey, he launched the RESIDENT EVIL franchise, and people really seem to dig those flicks. But arguably, we can all agree that his 1997 flick EVENT HORIZON is “the good one” from his filmography, right? It’s been years since I’ve seen it, but I recall it being pretty darned scary and excellent. I think it’s time to revisit it, because sadly, the released version appears to be the only one we’ll ever get to see.

For years, there were rumors of much more footage that was excised from the final film. In the day and age of “director’s cuts” and “extended” versions of movies on Blu-Ray, what are the odds we’ll finally get a longer version of EVENT HORIZON?

In a recent live Facebook chat, Anderson explained why his director’s cut is probably long gone.

“There was a lot more that was shot that isn’t in the movie. But you’ll never see the messed up version because we made EVENT before the kind of DVD revolution. You know, DVD ushered in this era when you had to have additional footage, deleted scenes, things like that. There was no call for that back when we were just doing VHS cassettes and LaserDiscs.”

“So the material just wasn’t archived very well, and since the movie became a big cult classic, Paramount have asked us to come back in and do different versions and we looked for the material, and it just doesn’t exist. ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, they discovered a whole new cut of it in some shoeboxes somewhere, so you know, maybe…”

Has he ever considered a sequel? Or TV series continuing the story? “The things that kind of handicapped us the first time around, the fact that the movie isn’t tied up with a neat little bow, it left things open… at the time it was a handicap. I think maybe if it had all been really neat and there had been some monster running around killing everyone it probably would have done bigger business. But I think people still talk about it because it’s a movie that invites conversation afterwards, because we don’t tell you exactly what’s going on and what to think. And I think that’s become one of its strengths, and I think the danger of returning to that world is you don’t want to overexplain things. Not that I’m comparing my movie to 2001 [A Space Odyssey], but there’s 2001, amazing, and then there’s 2010, that explains everything. You wondered what that thing was? Well then, here’s the explanation. And you don’t need that.”

Special thanks to regular Blumhouse.com contributor William Bibbiani over at Crave for bringing this to our attention!