Sphere and Loathing in Outer Space

"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown." - H.P. Lovecraft

This week, we board two late nineties sci-fi thrillers that dare to ask: what happens when human curiosity reaches beyond the edge of the known universe? We're watching Paul W. S. Anderson's Event Horizon (1997) and Barry Levinson's Sphere (1998), two films that take cosmic horror to its most claustrophobic extremes.

We look at how Event Horizon transforms a deep space rescue mission into a gory, hellish nightmare, while Sphere plunges deep beneath the…