Event Horizon is near and dear to many horror fans. Director Paul W.S. Anderson’s space-set trip to hell was far from a hit in its day, but has since found a loving audience the world over. That much was proven when IDW made a prequel, Event Horizon: Dark Descent, which became a huge hit last year. Now? It’s sequel time, which is going full Aliens by with a bigger story that takes us far into the future, 200 years beyond the events of the movie.
Fango is proud to present a preview of IDW’s new comic book miniseries Event Horizon: Inferno, which you can check out below. That includes the first five pages of issue #1, as well as several pieces of cover art from the forthcoming series. We also had the fortune of speaking with the creative team who brought the sequel to life.
“I had a really clear idea almost immediately,” series writer Christian Ward told Fango. There is now a full Event Horizon trilogy that goes “comic, film, comic,” as Ward explained it.
When Ward came on board, Paramount and IDW determined that the first comic should be a prequel. That took the form of last year’s best-selling Event Horizon: Dark Descent. Fortunately, the words “best” and “selling” in conjunction meant that everyone wanted more. So, Ward got to write a proper sequel to the movie.
“I had to come up with a story and, in coming up with that story, what I found was a kind of larger worldbuilding situation,” Ward explained. “What I discovered was the story that I had in mind was far bigger than that prequel series.”
It was around the time that issue four of Dark Descent continued to be a massive success that the idea of a sequel truly came to be. “Then I kind of fleshed it out a bit more. Worked out, ‘What would the sequel be?’ That would both be a sequel to the comic but also of course to the film itself,” Ward said.
IDW gave it the green light in a hurry and it was off to the races. That brings us to Event Horizon: Inferno, which is described as Aliens meets Danet’s Inferno. That’s right! Space marines fighting monsters from hell. The synopsis for the sequel reads as follows:
“In 2040, the starship Event Horizon disappeared. Seven years later, it returned possessed by a demonic entity. After murdering its rescue crew, it was blown in half, with the front of the ship left yearning for its heart: a gravity drive designed for interdimensional travel. Two hundred years later, a billionaire brings his own private star fleet to the wreckage around Neptune. He’s heard stories of the Event Horizon and will gleefully sacrifice any number of employees to uncover its secrets!”
“It was a lot of stress working on a book like Event Horizon because it was something that everyone had high hopes for, but that ultimately was a comic based on a cult film that, truthfully, not a lot of people have seen,” said editor Nicolas Niño.
Fortunately, word of mouth proved to be tremendous and IDW’s handling of the property has been very well received. That word of mouth allowed this sequel to exist. If Dark Descent was Alien, then Inferno is Aliens, upping the stakes – and action. It’s different and it’s bigger.
“When me and Nic were talking about this book, we were very clear that we wanted this book to be very different from Dark Descent,” Ward said. “What I really wanted to do while I was writing Inferno, I didn’t want it to feel like Dark Descent 2. It had to feel like a very different book.”
“I was really leaning into the Aliens of it. In the same way that Alien and Aliens were very different, that’s what I wanted to do here,” Ward added. “Setting it 200 years from the first film, there were two reasons for that. One, was to give it a little bit of distance from the film but two, it was because we had Rob in mind for this book.”
“It was a bit daunting. [Artist] Tristan [Jones] is such a hard act to follow. He set such an incredible high standard with the art for the first one,” said artist Rob Carey. “I love the film. It’s far from flawless but it’s so unique. There’s no other film that looks like it. You can pause it at any frame and you know that’s fucking Event Horizon.”
“It was a canvas primed specifically for Rob,” Ward noted. “When I’m writing this, I am writing it for Rob.”
Ward treated the whole thing as a fan, thinking about what he’d like to see through Carey’s lens, including space marines killing loads of demons with “the biggest fucking guns you’ve ever seen.” They also wanted to challenge readers a bit more this time, going a bit more “comic book-y,” as Ward put it. The writer also noted that he grew up reading Dark Horse’s Aliens comics, which no doubt influenced his approach to this franchise.
“This isn’t happening in a vacuum,” Ward noted. “I’m working closely with Nic, and Nic is working closely with Paramount. And very specifically, Philip Eisner, who is the screenwriter of the original film. They have loved what we’re proposing here.”
While many fans out there would undoubtedly love to see a proper Event Horizon sequel on the big screen, using the medium of comics has its advantages. “Our only budget is Rob’s time,” Ward quipped. This is to say, they can write what would be a $200 million movie in comic book form. Ward made it clear that they took full advantage of that.
“We are going to some wild places. I mean, issue #1 is its own thing, but we ramp up incredibly fast. We do things that you couldn’t do in live-action, that you can only really do with comics. It’s pretty far out there.”
“There’s such a blank canvas there now,” Carey concluded. “There’s so much of the world and the universe that’s unexplored. There are no wrong decisions that we can make, because it’s all new. Every decision we are making, it’s from a place of respect and admiration for what has been before.”
“If we’re lucky enough to have a third one, I guess that makes the third one Alien 3,” Ward teased. That, however, depends on how well this sequel performs. If it goes as well as things went with Dark Descent, we likely haven’t seen the last of this franchise on the page.
Event Horizon: Inferno #1 hits shelves on April 22.
