Event Horizon (1997)

In 2047, a distress signal arrives from the Event Horizon, a research ship that vanished seven years earlier on its first voyage, and has now reappeared in orbit around Neptune. The rescue ship Lewis and Clark, captained by Miller, is sent to investigate. With them is Dr. William Weir, who designed the Event Horizon and its experimental gravity drive, which creates an artificial black hole to fold space and travel instantly across the galaxy.

Aboard the silent ship, the crew finds frozen bodies and signs of a massacre. The gravity drive suddenly activates and pulls engineer Justin into it. He returns in a trance, and later tries to kill himself in an airlock. A shock wave from the ship badly damages the Lewis and Clark, leaving the crew stranded on board the Event Horizon.

Each crew member begins to see hallucinations of their worst fears and regrets. Peters sees her young son with bloody legs. Miller sees a crewman he left to die. Weir sees his wife, who killed herself, urging him to join her. Rescue technician Starck and engineer Cooper work to repair the ship while doctor D.J. translates the garbled Latin in the distress signal.

The ship's video log shows the original crew in an orgy of violence and self-mutilation, and the captain holding up his own gouged-out eyes. The Latin message means "Save yourself from Hell." The ship's drive did not just fold space: it opened a doorway to another dimension of pure chaos and evil, and the ship has come back alive.

Peters falls to her death chasing a vision of her son. Weir, now possessed by the ship, gouges out his own eyes, kills D.J., and blows up the Lewis and Clark, killing Smith. He starts the gravity drive to take the ship back to the hellish dimension, with everyone on board. Miller fights him and, as the drive starts, sets off explosives to split the ship in two. The front section, with Starck, Cooper and the injured Justin in stasis, is blown clear, while Miller and Weir are pulled into the black hole with the back half.

Seventy-two days later, a rescue team finds the survivors. As a rescuer opens Starck's stasis pod, she sees Weir and screams, then wakes up, still in her pod. The rescue is real, but the horror has left its mark.

Where did the Event Horizon go? When the gravity drive opened a doorway to the other side of the galaxy, it instead passed through another dimension, a place of pure chaos and evil that the film strongly suggests is Hell.

What does the Latin message mean? The distress call says "Liberate tutemet ex inferis", meaning "Save yourself from Hell". At first, the crew mishears it as "Liberate me", or "Save me".

What happened to the original crew? The video log shows that, once the ship crossed into the other dimension, the crew went mad, killing and mutilating each other and themselves.

Is the ship alive? Yes. It came back changed, able to read minds and use people's guilt against them. It wants to return to the hellish dimension and take a new crew with it.

What happens at the end? Miller splits the ship, sacrificing himself to take Weir and the back half into the dimension. Starck, Cooper and Justin survive in stasis and are rescued. Starck's final vision of Weir is a nightmare, showing that the experience will haunt her forever.