Sam Neill's 10/10 Sci-Fi Horror Is 'Evil Dead In Space'

Published Aug 25, 2026, 1:00 PM EDT

Ben Sherlock is a Tomatometer-approved film and TV critic who runs the massively underrated YouTube channel I Got Touched at the Cinema. Before working at Screen Rant, Ben wrote for Game Rant, Taste of Cinema, Comic Book Resources, and BabbleTop. He's also an indie filmmaker, a standup comedian, and an alumnus of the School of Rock.

Sign in to your ScreenRant account

On July 13, the great Sam Neill passed away at age 78. It’s always bittersweet when we lose a legend, but their passing leads to an outpouring of love from the fans they left behind, celebrating their incredible body of work. Very few actors have quite as many beloved and iconic roles to their name as Neill. Jurassic Park fans know him as Dr. Alan Grant. Peaky Blinders fans know him as Major Chester Campbell. He’s in renowned classics like The Piano and The Hunt for Red October, and underrated gems like In the Mouth of Madness and Hunt for the Wilderpeople.

Nearly three decades later, one of Neill’s best movies remains criminally underappreciated. Along with Zack Snyder and Michael Bay, Paul W.S. Anderson is a filmmaker who’s never really gelled with critics. But, much like Snyder and Bay, he’s capable of achieving his own kind of greatness every now and then. Anderson’s first three Resident Evil movies are solid action-horror fare, even if they bear little resemblance to their namesake video games, and Alien vs. Predator works pretty well as an old-school monster mash.

Anderson’s magnum opus stars Sam Neill alongside fellow screen icon Laurence Fishburne and an early-career Jason Isaacs, and it can best be described as “The Evil Dead in space.” Event Horizon opens a doorway to deadite-style demons at the edge of the universe.

Event Horizon Is One Of Sam Neill's Most Underrated Movies

On its initial release in 1997, Event Horizon was met with the same reception as most of Anderson’s movies: critics hated it. Even to this day, when all the retrospective reappraisals have been added to its Rotten Tomatoes tally to tip the scales, Event Horizon still has a dismal score of 36%. It didn’t even enjoy the box office success of a Mortal Kombat or a Resident Evil; it was a commercial disappointment.

But in the years since, Event Horizon has been reevaluated as a hidden masterpiece. It often appears on lists of the greatest horror films ever made, and it’s one of the first titles that comes up in naming the seminal works of the sci-fi horror subgenre (after due respect has been paid to Alien and The Thing, of course).

The plot of Event Horizon is pure sci-fi: in 2047, a rescue vessel called the Lewis and Clark is sent to investigate the reappearance of the Event Horizon, a spaceship that mysteriously vanished on its maiden voyage seven years ago. Fishburne plays the captain of the Lewis and Clark, while Neill plays the designer of the Event Horizon. Aboard the ship, they uncover the horrific aftereffects of its experimental gravity drive, which folds space-time for the purpose of faster-than-light travel. But all of that is there to set up the true horror: folding space-time opened a portal to Hell.

You think you’re watching cold, hard science fiction like Alien or Life or Pitch Black, where the only threat is tangible extraterrestrial life. But that portal opens the door to all kinds of nightmare fuel.

Event Horizon Is A Chilling Horror Mashup

Since all the good ideas have already been done, Hollywood has gotten a lot of great movies out of “X meets Y”-type pitches, combining two existing ideas into something entirely new. Freaky is a cross between Freaky Friday-style body-swap comedy and Friday the 13th-style slasher. Send Help is a cross between Lord of the Flies-style survival thriller and 9 to 5-style workplace revenge comedy.

Event Horizon has one of the best “X meets Y” combos I’ve ever seen: Evil Dead in space. It brings the hellish, demonic, twisted terror of The Evil Dead and The Exorcist to the isolated cosmic setting of Alien. There’s no other movie quite like it.