Some moments in horror film are so effectively creepy that it can sometimes save a film from crawling up its own ass in banal exposition or by the book scares. While others harness a strength that allows the viewer to forgive any assinine sequence of a film because that moment affected them so deeply.
This such case happens to be Event Horizon. More specifically, the scene in question being the ship's log. Now the movie itself has a few things wrong with it. Dialogue wise, and given the direction, Paul W.S. Anderson doesn't really have a distinct style that I like. Ever since this project, he has gone way off the deep end and has only affirmed my opinion of him as a bland director.
One blog, Bennett Media, pointed out that the creepiest moment in The Fog had to do with a residual voice playing on a tape recorder and the ambivalence and ominousness it provoked. The same sense of horror is achieved with the ship's log, although differentiating in the video replacing the audio only tape. Upon first viewing of the film, a part of me wanted to go frame by frame to see the detail of the video log. While at the same time the hesitation was caused by less about being scared but more about hindering the imaginative fury that scene had on the entire backstory of the Event Horizon. We are only given one body from the original crew, albeit a grisly, worn body. The rest we have to piece together in our head as to what type of hell the crew suffered. The effectiveness of this movie doesn't come from the jump scare. It comes from assembling a puzzle of grotesque imagery, only to have the movie tell us that the worst is yet to come.
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