I’m not the biggest fan of prequels. Too many of them fall into a trap of over explaining events that we know the outcome of, and don’t need everything fleshed out in order to appreciate where the story ends. So it was with some trepidation that I approached Event Horizon: Dark Descent #1; a prequel to one of Paul WS Anderson’s only decent movies, the intense sci-fi horror, Event Horizon.

In the movie, the setup is that the Event Horizon, a ship with an experimental drive that, essentially, punches a hole in space in order to travel otherwise far-too-vast distances, disappears on its maiden voyage, only to reappear several years later. Its crew are nowhere to be found when the Event Horizon is searched, but all manner of horrific events are revealed, including just where the ship ended up when it passed into the unknown.

It’s a brutally effective, bloody and scary movie, even more overtly a haunted house in space than Alien, one of Anderson’s favourite movies, is.

This prequel comic, Dark Descent, is the story of what happened to the crew; glimpsed only fleetingly in horribly unsettling, gruesome flashbacks, do we need to see everything we didn’t see in detail, rendered on the page?

On the basis of this first issue: no, we don’t. It’s a little disappointing to see how sparse the crew is; it feels as if we have a crew almost analogous to those in the movie who are sent to investigate the Event Horizon, but in flashbacks it feels like there are a lot more people who’ve passed into the weirdness beyond and been affected horrendously.

It’s also a little frustrating that it sets almost all of the crew up with haunted pasts, and that there’s a nasty incident unfolding even before the drive kicks them through to, well, if you’ve seen the movie, to you-know-where.

I wasn’t overly enamored with the Latin-speaking Brit either; the added touch of weird Latin being spoken via recordings of the crew in the movie just made it feel like the crew had absorbed some ancient evil, but it’s explained away here unnecessarily.

Despite it falling into just about every trap that make prequels really unsatisfying for me, I did enjoy the art, with its maudlin feel and muted colour scheme. That is, apart from the splashes of crimson, which we all know is going to make much more of an appearance as this series progresses.

Will I stick around to find out? Probably not, but it is interesting that IDW’s ‘Dark’ horror imprint (yes, the logo is just as terrible as the standard IDW redesign, looking even more like it says ‘In W’) is basically being led by a prequel to a film which wasn’t exactly widely appreciated on its original 1997 release.

I was always a fan though, having seen it on the big screen on its opening weekend, and one thing I never thought Event Horizon needed was a prequel. As atmospheric as it is, on the evidence of this first issue, I may have been right.

Hi! I’m Jason, and I write for midlifegamergeek.com, every single day. If you’re interested in supporting original, regularly published, human created content (which has never been plagiarised or otherwise copied from the hard work of other writers), you can donate and help me to keep this site running.

Not only do I earn no income from my writing here (though I may earn small fees from affiliate links posted on my pages; as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases from these links), but it seems that my work has, at times, been stolen and re-used by lazy, morally bankrupt idiots.

There’s no pressure of course, but I’d be truly grateful for any support that you could offer – and it’s easy to do so at either of these links: Ko-Fi.com/geekmid or PayPal.

Any donations are truly appreciated – and I also appreciate you taking the time to read my articles. Remember: this whole article was by Jason Brown, and appeared on midlifegamergeek.com. Take that, Skynet!