The Godzilla vs. Kong Director Is Remaking Event Horizon , With a Twist
Another day, another tech giant announcing an expensive new TV show. This one's more intriguing than usual, though, because Amazon announced that horror darling Adam Wingard is turning Event Horizon into a TV series.
Event Horizon, for what it's worth, is a perfect movie to turn into a TV show. Not only are the implications of the universe it builds good for exploring across plenty of seasons, but the 1997 film itself... kind of sucked. It's bloody and absolutely off-the-wall, but Paul W.S. Anderson (Resident Evil, Resident Evil: The Final Chapter) is a limited director, and the effects sadly do not hold up.
In the right hands, though, Event Horizon could be a brilliant horror/sci-fi story: it follows the disappearance of a spaceship in the near future, only for it to suddenly reappear, having briefly traveled to a different dimension. That dimension? Hell. Naturally, the astronauts who go to investigate the ship don't have a "quiet one."
About those "right hands": Wingard is on board as a producer, and will likely direct at least the first episode, as the big-name filmmakers attached to TV shows often do. Wingard came onto the scene with You're Next, a clever and satisfyingly bloody twist on the "home invasion" horror trope that, even just six years later, has been copied by plenty of other horrors since. His next film, The Guest, is, in my opinion, an underrated masterpiece starring Dan Stevens as a mysterious war vet who shows up on a grieving family's doorstep, claiming to be a former colleague of their dead son. It evokes everything from '80s paranoia films to grindhouse, and the silly big swings it takes make it one of the best and most giddily enjoyable original genre films of the decade.
But it's not all good news. Wingard has a, shall we say, difficult history when it comes to handling other people's work. His surprise franchise movie, 2016's Blair Witch, is a little underrated, but still not much to write home about. The less said about his English-language adaptation of Death Note for Netflix, the better. Still, he's proven to be a capable and subversive storyteller who can be as witty as he is scary. Since the Event Horizon fandom isn't exactly on the level of The Blair Witch Project, one of the most important films in history, or Death Note, one of the most popular animes in history, he might just feel a little more confident in taking this great concept and making it his own. I can't wait.
Originally Appeared on GQ
