The REEL Addict 

WARNING: Spoilers Below.

It’s been a recent resolution of mine to attempt to confront some of my fears, since most of them are fairly ridiculous (like my horror of feet). Before tackling my phobic Mt. Everests, however, I’ve decided to start with the smaller, sillier ones. In this case, movies that have frightened me, something I wrote about not too long ago.

It’s a quest that seems to have been eerily predicted by studios planning new editions of movies that have given me the heebie jeebies, what with PINNOCHIO getting the Disney Platinum Edition treatment in March ‘09, and EVENT HORIZON hitting Blu-Ray on December 30^th. Certainly if ever there was a non-subtle dare to immediately live up to my new resolution, EVENT HORIZON’s release date was the most daring bluff-caller. So, with lights dimmed, and pillow in arms, I popped the movie in to see how I would do.

Even though EVENT HORIZON is frightening enough in its unsettling atmosphere, what scared the crap out of me the first time I saw EVENT HORIZON were the horrific images of what happened to the previous crew thanks to the influence of a hell dimension, and what would happen to the current crew if the “bad guy” wins, is what made me nauseous to my stomach and gave me horrible nightmares the first time I saw it. After all, seeing people impaled through their mouths, sodomized, dismembered, infested with maggots, and eating each other (and then vomiting each other out) is not exactly the stuff of rainbows, unicorns, and candy fields. Worse, the images flash so quickly that my brain was only able to process small chunks (ew, an unfortunate, unintended pun), allowing my imagination to fill in the horrific blanks, making things only worse.

Watching EVENT HORIZON for a second time, I had a game plan. Call me a masochist, but not only was I intent on watching those horrible scenes again, this time I actually slowed things down and went frame by frame to fully see - in horrifying, high defintion detail - what I was actually looking at it. Yes, in many ways watching it that way was even more horrifying because there is some f***** up shit in those sequences, even things I didn’t see the first time. Somehow though because I was forcing myself to directly confront all of that without flinching, or having the benefit of non-lingering editing, the images lost their shock factor, and there was no room for my brain to fill in any blanks. Knowing for sure what I was seeing allowed me to realize “Okay, this is what I am dealing with. Now I can process it and move on.” So I did, and managed to enjoy the rest of the fun ride that is EVENT HORIZON instead of sitting there bugged eye and mentally possessed by those frightening arresting images like I was the first time.

What’s more, this time? No nightmares.