10 Movies That Would Make Better TV Shows
7. Event Horizon (1997)
An unfairly maligned sci-fi horror with an absolutely gorgeous high concept (the experimental faster-than-light drive bolted onto the missing spaceship Event Horizon is supposed to generate an artificial singularity to connect two points in space, but sends the craft to Hell instead), Paul W.S. Anderson’s Event Horizon deserved a lot better than the reception it received.
Partly, it was the marriage of the science fiction and horror genres. Whereas films like Alien simply set a monster movie on a spacecraft (it could have been a submarine for all the difference it would have made), Anderson made a conscious effort to merge the two, delivering a speculative explanation for a normally supernatural event.
That was a brave move, but not one supported by the studio. Given six weeks to rush a workable cut into cinemas, the rough cut that Anderson was able to show executives was unfinished, overlong and far gorier than they’d anticipated. In came the scissors: and so the cut that arrived at theatres wasn’t the version of the film that the director had planned to screen.
And it wasn’t just the more graphic scenes: whole scenes expanding upon character relationships and the central premise of the film were cut.
That excised footage doesn’t exist in a saleable form any longer, so a director’s cut is impossible. What’s left is what many horror fans consider to be a flawed masterpiece, certainly Anderson’s best work. You can see what was intended, and the jaw-droppingly nasty moments that are left hint at the kind of harrowing movie we’ve lost to the cutting room floor.
And that story can still be told. Back in 1997, we didn’t have a cable TV industry in America primed and ready to tell stories like this… but we do now. Whether a remake or a sequel, Event Horizon could easily be brought to full, gruesome life in a manner similar to American Horror Story.
You could even expand on the premise: imagine the blueprints for the ship’s gravity drive reengineered for use as a terrestrial transport system: an initially incredibly expensive portal to… somewhere else, unwittingly opening with every cargo shipment, foreign dignitary, billionaire potentate or celebrity jetsetter.
Set the new event horizon of Hell on Earth, over a dozen terrifying episodes, and tell the story free from studio interference.