The endless train of nostalgia-driven remakes continues unabated, as Amazon, alongside Paramount Television, are developing an adaptation of Paul W.S. Anderson’s cult sci-fi horror film Event Horizon.
Panned at the box office, and making back less than half its budget, the original 1997 film nevertheless went on to sell very well on home video (which certainly dates it). Revolving around a missing spaceship whose experimental engine goes wrong and gets possessed by space ghosts, it is on the face of it perfect for late-night screenings by film geeks who prefer things straight-faced but silly.
Adam Wingard is attached as executive producer and director, otherwise known for the live-action version of Death Note, the utterly unnecessary reboot of The Blair Witch Project, and, in a departure from his usual horror territory, the upcoming Godzilla Vs. Kong. Joining him as executive producers are Jeremy Platt, Larry Gordon, and Lloyd Levin, the latter of whom produced the original film.
Paramount Television are probably the strongest note behind the cameras here – they are, after all, the studio behind Netflix’s incredibly well-received The Haunting Of Hill House, as well as the depressing-to-the-point-of-controversy 13 Reasons Why.
Although there’s remakes of old properties being thrown around left and right, this isn’t an unreasonable time to bring back Event Horizon. It hasn’t been long, after all, since a mass fan outcry prompted the hard sci-fi drama The Expanse to be saved from the chop (by Amazon, no less), and while Event Horizon is very different in tone, it’s in the same kind of speculative fiction pigeonhole.
1997, by contrast, may have been the wrong time for it. It was at the time, and even now, compared to Ridley Scott’s Alien, a franchise which had just that year turned out the shaky sequel Alien: Resurrection, when the main point of comparison is that both take place on spaceships. As overwrought as the “(x) in space” analogy might be, Total Film probably hit closer to the mark when they called it “The Shining in space“.
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