Paul W.S. Anderson on Event Horizon’s rushed edit and lost deleted scenes

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

Earlier this month, Scream Factory announced that they will be giving director Paul W.S. Anderson's 1997 sci-fi horror film EVENT HORIZON a Collector's Edition Blu-ray release on September 29th (copies can be pre-ordered at THIS LINK). In case you're not familiar with the film, here's the synopsis: 

The year is 2047. Years earlier, the pioneering research vessel Event Horizon vanished without a trace. Now a signal from it has been detected, and the United States Aerospace Command responds. Hurtling toward the signal’s source are a fearless captain, his elite crew and the lost ship’s designer. Their mission: find and salvage the state-of-the-art spacecraft. What they find is state-of-the-art interstellar terror.

Philip Eisner wrote the screenplay, and the cast includes Laurence Fishburne, Sam Neill, Kathleen Quinlan, Joely Richardson, Richard T. Jones, Jack Noseworthy, Jason Isaacs, and Sean Pertwee.

In their Blu-ray announcement, Scream Factory included the note: "As for any much-inquired-about additional footage (in addition to what's be presented on prior releases), we are looking into it as best we can. We welcome any leads you may have alongside our efforts." Fans of EVENT HORIZON have long been anxious to see the film's deleted scenes, as it's known that there was a 130 minute cut of the film that was whittled down to the theatrical running time of 96 minutes after a disastrous test screening. At one point, Paramount Pictures contacted Anderson about releasing a director's cut on home video… but then they discovered that the cut footage had been lost. Speaking with Entertainment Weekly, Anderson said, 

The idea came up of doing a restored version of the movie. But when they’d originally stored all the negative, most of it had been thrown away or it had been stored badly, or it had been stored for five years and then thrown away."

But there's still hope that it might be found somewhere, and Scream Factory is currently searching for it. As for what's contained in those missing minutes, some of it is more footage of the hellish experience the Event Horizon crew had, footage that Anderson and his crew shot on the weekends and recruited porn stars and amputees to appear in. As the director describes it, 

it was endless amounts of orgies and blood and intestines and big stakes shoved up people’s arses. I mean, it was really disturbing stuff and very sadomasochistic and very influenced by Hieronymus Bosch and Brueghel as well. So, there was a real beauty to it even though it was very disturbing."

Anderson admits that the 130 minute cut shown at the test screening was too long, but feels that too much was cut out on the way to the theatrical cut. That's because a test screening for the shorter cut was scheduled to happen just one week after the first test screening. 

If you only have a week, it’s very hard to make rational, well thought out, decisions. So, I think we went from one end of the spectrum, where the movie was too long undoubtedly, and then we cut it, and then I think it became too short. And then, the release of the film was looming and we ended up releasing that version of the movie and I think that was a big mistake because I felt there definitely were very good scenes that weren't quite reaching their potential but could have done if we’d had more time to work on them. But because the studio was adamant about releasing the movie on a certain date we just never had time to really fix the film."

Paramount was rushing EVENT HORIZON's post-production process because they wanted to get it into theatres on the summer date that had been reserved for James Cameron's TITANIC. TITANIC was running behind schedule and had to be delayed until December, so EVENT HORIZON became the studio's big summer release and Anderson was given just four weeks to edit the film. The result of this rush: a film that Anderson doesn't feel lives up to its full potential because too much was cut out of it, and disappointment at the box office.

The theatrical cut of EVENT HORIZON has won a lot of fans over the years, but it would be great to get the chance to see a longer cut that Anderson feels better about. Fingers crossed that the footage will turn up in a storage facility somewhere.