“She tore a hole in our universe”: Event Horizon and the Monstrous-Feminine Kristine Larsen Presented at the 2024 Southwest Popular/American Culture Conference, Albuquerque, NM, 2/23/2024 In the 1997 space horror film Event Horizon, the crew of the rescue ship Lewis and Clark comes face to face with a dimension of evil and chaos – perhaps even hell itself – through the black hole generating experimental gravity drive of the eponymous ghost ship. While the film was a box office bust, this “grizzly and deranged masterpiece” afterwards became a cult classic, largely due to its extreme body horror and the fact that 25% of the original film had been cut due to adverse reactions from the studio and test audiences (Gerian 2022). This includes particularly gruesome footage of murderous sexual orgies involving the ship’s original crew, driven mad by their experiences with the other dimension. [Full shot of the Event Horizon, highlighting its cruciform shape] Freudian influences reverberate throughout the film. While director Paul W.S. Anderson has consistently explained the overall shape of the Event Horizon as cruciform and based on the architecture of Notre Dame Cathedral (Magid 2020), as Matthew Chabin points out, “the starship is an immense phallus” (2018, 83). The phallic energy of the ship is emphasized when the Lewis and Clark first encounters it, emerging from the opaque haze of Neptune’s atmosphere. The crew is visibly impressed with its size, as its creator, scientist Dr. William Weir (Sam Neill) proudly announces “There she is.” Captain Miller (Laurence Fishburne), the clear alpha male of the crew, acknowledges “Very impressive ship, Doctor.” Weir responds with a smirk and purposeful “Thank you.” A phallic appearing docking tunnel is extended by the Lewis and Clark, interestingly called the “umbilicus” by the crew, the term having clear maternal connotations. This blurring of the boundaries between the male and female is one of many transgressions of boundaries within the mythology of the film.