There Is No Escaping The Event Horizon

Event Horizon: Inferno #1 cover art by Christian Ward

Following the success of the prequel comic book miniseries Event Horizon: Dark Descent, IDW Publishing is returning to the universe of the 1997 cult sci-fi horror movie with an ongoing sequel series set two centuries later.

Event Horizon: Inferno is due in stores this April, penned by Dark Descent scribe Christian Ward with Rob Carey on art duties.

Courtesy of Collider we know that the synopsis on this new series is as follows:

"In 2040, the starship Event Horizon disappeared. Seven years later, it returned possessed by a demonic entity. After murdering its rescue crew, it was blown in half, with the front of the ship left yearning for its heart: a gravity drive designed for interdimensional travel.

"Two hundred years later, a billionaire brings his own private star fleet to the wreckage around Neptune. He’s heard stories of the Event Horizon and will gleefully sacrifice any number of employees to uncover its secrets!"

Cover art by Rob Carey

Cover art by Rod Reis

Annihilation (2018)

Three years ago, something alien crash landed in an isolated, swampy, region of southern America, creating an expanding field of energy known as The Shimmer.

While the government has been able to keep this classified so far, every expedition sent inside to investigate has failed to return.

That is, until special forces operative Kane (Oscar Isaac), the husband of biologist Lena (Natalie Portman), suddenly appears back at their house.

He is unable to tell her anything about where he has been, and quickly falls ill.

As they are being rushed to hospital, the government swoops in and Lena and her dying husband are taken to the Southern Reach, a top secret scientific outpost monitoring the growth of The Shimmer.

In an effort to help save her husband - and understand what happened to him - Lena agrees to accompany a new team venturing into the strange phenomenon.

As they enter, they quickly begin to grasp the extent of the mutative effects of the alien field, not just on the landscape and wildlife, but on themselves.

Released on Netflix today, Annihilation deserves a place amongst the rarefied Lovecraftian horrors of In The Mouth Of Madness, Event Horizon, The Thing et al that encapsulate the style and feel of HP Lovecraft's work without actually being based directly on anything he wrote.

That said, in part, it feels like an updated spin on the Lovecraft classic Colour Out Of Space, with a side order of 2001: A Space Odyssey for flavouring.

Written and directed by Alex Garland - adapted from the first volume of Jeff VanderMeer's critically-acclaimed Southern Reach Trilogy - Annihilation initially unfolds beautifully, dazzling with its blend of disorientating sci-fi and atmospheric horror.

From the get-go, it's obvious that this is not a horror film for everyone, it's a slow burn, not relying on jump scares, but rather on the audience imagining themselves in that predicament, as everything they think is true begins to unravel.

However, where the film disappoints is its climactic "kill it with fire" resolution to the unearthly situation, rather than anything more cerebral as one might have hoped after the build-up.

Although blurred - and missing - time is a factor within The Shimmer, towards the climax of Annihilation it's clear that the story has a pacing issue.

While it may not have been able to attract the big name stars, I came away from this eagerly-anticipated film thinking that it would have worked better as, say, a six-part mini-series.

That way we could have been drawn in to, and experienced, the strange goings-on of The Shimmer on a deeper level.

So, while I say it deserves to be counted amongst those other legendary Lovecraftian horror movies, Annihilation is sadly the 'also ran' of the group.

It feels as though Garland couldn't decide whether to go full gonzo - as the set-up deserves - or play it safe with a more commercial horror flick, and in the end settled on something that was a bit of both and a lot of neither.

Turns Out You Will Need Your Eyes After All... To Read The New Event Horizon Comic Book Prequel

Issue one cover art by Jeffrey Love

Underrated cult sci-fi horror flick Event Horizon is finally getting some well-deserved comic book love this August - 28 years after it began terrifying audiences.

IDW will be publishing a five-issue prequel miniseries, Event Horizon: Dark Descent, revealing the horrors that unfolded in the lead-up to the start of the movie.

The comic is written by Batman: City of Madness's Christian Ward with Alien: Defiance's Tristan Jones on art duties.

According to IDW:

Embracing the hard-R rating of the shocking movie, Event Horizon: Dark Descent #1 (of 5 issues) will lightspeed jump into comic shops this August.

Taking place before the events of the film and completely accessible to new readers, this is the unbelievable story of the final fate of the original Event Horizon crew.

What really happened to Captain Kilpack and the first crew as their ship journeyed across a nightmarish realm of torments beyond imagining?

Abandon all hope as demonic forces - led by Paimon, the eyeless King of Hell - unleash agony and pure evil upon the crew in a gripping story.

I'm low-key obsessed with Event Horizon, so much so that several years ago - when contemplating an ALIEN RPG campaign - I wove it into my headcanon for the near-future Alien Universe.

Once again, it's also one of those Lovecraft-inspired horrors that isn't based upon any particular part of his mythos but feels like it is.

Christian Ward's variant cover artwork for issue one

Apollo 18 (2011)

As we all know 1972's Apollo 17 was NASA's last manned mission to the Moon (to date).

Or so we were led to believe.

My latest bargain Blu-Ray purchase, Apollo 18, posits a top secret mission in December 1973 to plant Cold War listening devices on The Moon, but something went wrong and that's why the Americans have never been back.

Then apparently in 2011, a whistleblower dumped 80 hours of video footage from the mission online, from which this 'found footage' style, faux documentary, was assembled.

Now, I thought I was over the 'found footage' craze shortly after the market was saturated with ill-conceived Blair Witch Project knock-offs, but recently I've stumbled upon a couple (this and the superb As Above, So Below) that have made me reconsider my prejudices.

One thing Apollo 18 gets right straight off the bat is that it doesn't hang around. Within minutes of introducing the three astronauts we're going to be following they're in space and then on The Moon.

And the speeding train doesn't slow down. It's not long after they've landed that the weird shit starts happening and, given the speed with which events unfold, you find yourself wondering how director Gonzalo López-Gallego is going to keep Brian Miller's script running for the film's 75-minute duration (it's listed as 86-minutes, but the balance is just the closing credits).

But fear not. The pacing is superb throughout, and, barring a couple of lukewarm jump scares (one's played for laughs anyway), the story is somewhere between a modern Doctor Who and Event Horizon in its atmosphere.

In fact, I would make an argument for Apollo 18's possible inclusion in an unofficial headcanon of the Alien film franchise timeline.

After all, it manages to keep the incident (except for the 2011 'leak') under wraps, with only the Department of Defence being in the know, and takes a very measured approach to the possibility of an extraterrestrial lifeform.

Already plagued by communications interference, the astronauts of Apollo 18 discover evidence of a heretofore unknown Soviet mission to The Moon, but then begin to suspect that there's also something 'inhuman' up there with them as well.

The film's footage looks, for the most part, as though it's aged, period stock, encapsulating López-Gallego's eye for authenticity that - to an untrained, unscientific eye like my own - feels as though the 'found footage' could have been genuine.

Except for the unfortunate fact that - and this is no reflection at all on the actors, who are all wholly convincing - I recognised the men playing the three lead characters: Capt. Ben Anderson (Warren Christie, from Alphas, Batwoman etc), Lt Col John Grey (Ryan Robbins, from Riverdale, Arrow etc) and Commander Nathan Walker (Lloyd Owen, from The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones).

But, let's be honest, the story is ultimately so far into tinfoil hat conspiracy theory land that no one is really going to believe it's real.

That said, it appears to have been convincing enough that NASA felt the need to put out a disclaimer.

Apollo 18 does a smashing job of maintaining its verisimilitude, right up to the denouement where we get the "official" explanation of what happened to the three men.

Within the context of the story, I bought the reason for NASA never returning to The Moon one hundred percent.

If you can accept the movie's premise, of being 'lost footage' from a classified American space mission, then you should love this.