Was Event Horizon accidentally the first Warhammer 40k movie? Sure it wasn’t licensed by Games Workshop but the similarities are a bit uncanny.
It is 1997, a very strong year for cinema, with the release of well-known classics such as Men in Black, The Fifth Element, and Titanic.
A certain sci-fi horror movie starring Lawrence Fishburne and Sam Neill released during it’s summer that would later become notable in the niche community of tabletop gaming, specifically Warhammer, for a few odd, but strong coincidences in its storyline.
To preface this, of course, there will be spoilers for the 20 year-old flick.
Directed by Paul W.S. Anderson, Event Horizon tells the story of the titular ship reappearing after vanishing for several years, and a small team, including one the of the ship’s designers, going to investigate its odd re-appearance. With its entire crew not responding, suspicions arise, and the mystery rises as the crew is found massacred and shredded in horrid manners, and it all begins to go downhill from there.
The designer, played by Jurassic Park’s Sam Neill, reveals the ship used an experimental travel engine: technology involving black holes to traverse extreme lengths in space. To go through the wormholes, the investigating crew discovers the wormhole leads the ship through what can only be described, in simple terms, as Hell. Of course, this leads to its occupants going insane, murdering one another, sewing their eyes shut, self-harming, going on by saying they’d seen a world that was “a place of chaos”.
Now, how does this relate to the world of Space Marines, Orks, and Eldar? Warp travel in 40k is achieved by crossing into a hellish, nightmare-filled dimension filled with Daemons and Chaos Gods, called the Warp, to achieve faster-than-light travel. The big difference being that ships using this travel have what is called a Gellar Field: an advanced minor force field that holds the Warp at bay from breaching the walls and affecting the crew in negative ways.
What happens when it fails, however, is basically what happened to the original crew of the Event Horizon: insanity, hallucinations, Daemonic possession, and even a Daemonic incursion can occur. When a ship is rendered irreparable, its crew all dead, or taken over by Daemons, Tyranids, or some other manner of less-than-enjoyable status, the ship floats about in space, or the warp, becoming a husk of its past self. Sometimes, when colliding with other ships, or asteroids, or even space stations, they become what is known as a Space Hulk.
The Event Horizon, simply put, is the world’s first Space Hulk, or at least the beginning of one. Travelling through the warp with no Gellar Shield to prevent the atrocities of the dimension to pour through, its crew seeing hallucinations, haunted by their own mind or even what seem to be Daemons, its crew experiences close to what a damaged ship of the Imperial Navy might when entering the dangerous Daemonic dimension. Although the 1997 film’s story is more grounded than our grimdark sci-fi counterpart’s lore, the beats are oddly in sync, and when watching the film after becoming familiar with 40k and its lore, some people might have quite the interesting, even amusing new outlook when experiencing the classic 1997 story.
Try checking out the film with this in mind. Even if it might not be the best out there, the movie is still very enjoyable, and worth seeing with the 40k parallels in mind.
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