Outer Space (1999): cast, story & where to watch

Released in 1999, Outer Space is a horror film directed by Peter Tscherkassky, running about 10 minutes.

What it’s about. A premonition of a horror film, lurking danger: A house - at night, slightly tilted in the camera's view, eerily lit - surfaces from the pitch black, then sinks back into it again. A young woman begins to move slowly towards the building. She enters it. The film cuts crackle, the sound track grates, suppressed, smothered. Found footage from Hollywood forms the basis for the film. The figure who creeps through the images, who is thrown around by them and who attacks them is Barbara Hershey. Tscherkassky's dramatic frame by frame re-cycling, re-copying and new exposure of the material, folds the images and the rooms into each other. It removes the ground from under the viewer's feet and splits faces, like in a bad dream. From the off, from outer space, foreign bodies penetrate the images and cause the montage to become panic stricken. The outer edges of the film image, the empty perforations and the skeletons of the optical sound track rehearse an invasion...

Who’s in it. Outer Space stars Barbara Hershey as (archive footage) (uncredited).

How it landed. With an audience score of 6.4/10, Outer Space has drawn a solid, mixed-to-positive response.

Where to watch. In US you can stream it on MUBI and DocAlliance Films and rent or buy it from DocAlliance Films. See the full, country-by-country breakdown on our where to watch Outer Space page.

If you liked it. Fans of Outer Space tend to enjoy Psycho, The Silence of the Lambs, The Shining and Alien.