Event Horizon Star Recalls "Definitely Illegal" Scenes Cut From the Movie

Paul W.S. Anderson's 1997 film Event Horizon has a passionate following among horror fans, thanks to the way in which it blended together sci-fi concepts with cosmic horror, but the movie failed to establish much of a legacy with audiences at large, with one factor being that Anderson was mandated to make substantial cuts to the experience for a lighter affair. Star Jason Isaacs recently noted how some of the sequences being filmed that never made the theatrical cut were so grotesque, they would have been considered "definitely illegal" to have filmed in the first place, even given today's standards of intense imagery.

"I don't know about this director's cut," Isaacs recently shared with Yahoo UK. "If you watch the film it does occasionally flash -- literally flash frames -- to what happened to the ship when it went to hell and there's all kinds of what looks like, 'Is it an orgy? Is it a massacre? What's going on?'"

He added, "They shot it on a soundstage next to us, and there are things that are definitely illegal to do now, probably illegal to do then, with a whole bunch of people with certain things wrong with their body or their mind."

The film follows a crew aboard a spaceship that comes across a seemingly abandoned vessel. As they investigate the ship, they learn that the ship was attempting to explore how to use the power of a black hole to transport through time and space faster than ever. The exploring crew witnesses horrifying footage of the vanished researchers containing violent and grotesque imagery, implying the ship had somehow traveled into Hell itself.

"Paul's best mate was shooting the second unit, and he kept coming back to our stage going, 'You will not believe what I saw this morning,'" the actor shared. "And I don't think putting more of that in there will make it work, and I don't think more people's visions make it work. Maybe Paul's got some footage somewhere. I don't think so, he's never mentioned it to me. I think it's a bit of a myth this director's cut, that's the film. But I might be wrong, I didn't direct it."

In addition to the film being toned down from Anderson's original vision, a number of elements were rushed to make a release date as its debut was pushed ahead by months in order to compensate for delays related to Titanic's lengthy post-production process. Whereas a number of other projects have earned subsequent director's cuts, Anderson has often confirmed that the nature of the filming process means the footage is just completely lost and he wouldn't be able to reconstruct a version of the movie that reflects his true vision.

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