Hell On Wheels

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This week our journey isn’t about where we’re going, my tireless travel companions, it’s how. 

I’m a train nerd, not quite what is somewhat derisively called a “foamer” (that is, someone who foams at the mouth at the sight of unique rolling stock) more like a casual trainspotter. My grandfather was an engineer on the Burlington Northern railway which is partially how my line ended up in Chicago. Maybe it’s in my blood. And on the subject of blood and trains, this week we’re talking about rail-based horror in a segment called Hell On Wheels. [play train noise ↓]

There’s a pretty compelling argument that one of the first films ever shown to an audience was horror. Or, at least, horrifying.  L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat, a 50 second strip of gelatin emulsion and silver halide captured by the French Lumière brothers in 1896, shows a steam-belching passenger train pulling in to a station. That’s it, but oh the sensation it caused. New to almost everyone in the attendance, this moving image, this picture literally in motion of a giant train engine heading straight at the audience caused fear, panic, and fleeing to the rear of the room. It’s been called the founding myth of cinema. And it may be just that, a myth, in the sense that it may not strictly speaking have happened, but it’s also mythic in that it has become the primordial, uncontaminated, visceral audience reaction that every filmmaker — especially makers of horror — longs to achieve. 

Trains were at the center of early innovation in spooky special effects. Just seven years after the Lumière boys’ train short an unknown filmmaker created its inverse, literally. The Ghost Train from 1903 shows a train coming around a curve and past a stationary camera, but the print is of the negative, a truly novel technique at the time. This spectral train is made even creepier by the insertion of a separate film of the sun and clouds, also in negative so looking like the moon, up in the corner. It’s a minute long, plotless like L’Arrivée, but it shows the beginnings of technical innovation in filmmaking for the express purpose of frightening viewers.

Even if we didn’t have these charming strips of turn-of-the-century transportation, it cannot be denied that filmmakers love trains. They add an aspect of dynamism, can travel through multiple settings in a short period of time, and offer a conveniently constrained storytelling and staging space for filmmakers to work with. More than one director has noted that trains are in fact metaphors for movies. In cinema, unlike literature, the viewer is not in control. The audience — at least in a theater — has to sit back and experience it until it reaches its destination. You may recall the opening moments of Lars Von Trier’s Europa where the visual similarity between the image of a train going over tracks (or overhead) and film running through a projector is made absolutely clear.

Trains were made for horror. Locomotives can be frightening simply because they are loud, powerful machines made of unforgiving metal — sometimes accompanied by fire, smoke, and sparks. Even better, there’s a whole type of train that only lives in dark, damp underground tunnels full of high voltage wires and rails and pizza-stealing rats. Trains often drag along all manner of characters readymade for horror films: drifters, bandits, late-night urban revelers, people brought together from very different walks of life. Even just the presence of trains can turn a place dark. The term “Hell On Wheels” was originally used to describe the shanty towns of sin that would pop up along the route of the workers as they laid the trans-continental railroad from Omaha to Sacramento. Violent, full of drunks and ne’er-do-wells, and temporary enough to be basically lawless these towns were ready-made to become ghost towns as soon as the rail line moved westward.

Travelers, it’s time to move into the main hall of the station, look towards the clacking of the departure flipboard, and review our options today. The rail yard is so full of train-based horror films we’re going to have to shunt most to sidings. Our departures here today will merely represent the breadth of destinations available in the sub-genre. All aboard! Let’s deadhead this itinerary.

Early experiments with film and trains notwithstanding, the genre mostly begins with Horror Express (1972). This is sci-fi horror with a similar premise to The Thing From Another World. An anthropologist brings the frozen body of an ancient human-like creature onto the Trans-Siberian Railway. Of course, it thaws and it’s … not pleased. Among those stalked aboard this express are Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, and Telly Savalas. Horror Express is a must-watch for your itinerary.

Also from 1972 and also starring Sir Christopher — with Donald Pleasance at the height of his career — is Death Line also known as Raw Meat. Turns out, a group of Victorian workers who built the London Underground subway were trapped by a cave-in in 1892 and their descendants still live down there by way of cannibalizing hapless commuters. The movie ends with the sound  of the cannibals echoing through the tunnels “Mind the gap!” What’s not to love about that? 

Maybe the most important stop on today’s journey is Terror Train (1980) featuring Jamie Lee Curtis in her post-Halloween screen queen bender. The premise is everything you’d want in an 80s slasher. A group of graduating college kids, all of whom participated in a prank-gone-horribly-wrong three years earlier, have a masquerade party on a train trip and are picked off one-by-one by a killer who changes into the costume of each of his latest victims. Look folks, this is the only film David Copperfield ever starred in not as himself. And he gets a sword through the head. Somehow this is pleasing. I have always loved the dynamic between the train staff (all adults) and the passengers (all college kids). Everything about this film works, especially its ending. If you liked Jamie Lee Curtis in a costume party on a train in Trading Places you’re gonna love this. Turns out, there is a sequel called Terror Train 2 made 42 years after the fact, which I have not seen. Travelers, should I get a ticket to ride?

Night Train to Terror (1985), which certainly sounds promising, is an anthology made from three unfinished films shot years earlier. The only thing that makes this a train film is that it is framed by a conversation between God and Satan discussing the fate of passengers on their way to Vegas. These My Dinner With Andre interstitials are accompanied by what can only be described as a pop music video happening on the train at the same time. It was 1985 after all and MTV reigned supreme. God and Satan chatting it up, sure. But everyone knows that passenger service to Vegas ended in 1971. C’mon, people. It is absolutely clear that the segments here were intended for longer run times. There are plot threads that go nowhere, leaving only gore and boobs. Which, maybe that’s your thing. I consider this movie pretty much a train wreck.

What if the movie Hostel but on a train? Well, that’s the premise of Train (2008), three years after Eli Roth’s film. Apparently this was originally intended to be a remake of Terror Train, but it became something utterly different — probably after it saw how much buzz torture porn was getting. The setup is a group of American high school wrestlers on their way to a match in Ukraine who board a train to Odessa. Little do they know that every other passenger on board is a patient awaiting an organ transplant of some kind and the tourists are being harvested for theirs. A jostling train may be fine for torture and dismemberment, but it probably is not great for transplant surgery which is why the third act takes place at the ruins of what looks like a medieval hospital along the route. This is a fun movie, utterly derivative, but suitably gory with a believable final girl played by Thora Birch.

The Midnight Meat Train (2009) is why you really don’t want to take the last train of the night on a line that doesn’t run 24 hours a day. Who knows where that thing ends up? This movie, based on a short story from Clive Barker, stars Bradley Cooper and Leslie Bibb. (Brooke Shields is also in it, for some reason.) Bradley is a photographer trying to solve the case of disappearances in the subway late at night. He eventually discovers that a butcher named Mahogany has been responsible for murdering passengers on the midnight train. And the fact that he is a butcher is important because it isn’t cannibal Victorians living down there, but something far more warped from the mind of Clive Barker. I won’t spoil the ending because I love this film and I hope you do too.

D-Railed (2018) contains so many of my favorite things in a horror movie. It’s set on Halloween. It takes place aboard a train, and it takes place underwater. Mr. Tour Guide, you must be thinking, that’s preposterous! Let me explain. The movie starts with a bunch of folks on one of those candlelight murder mystery outings aboard a train. Then it becomes a heist movie. Then the heist goes wrong and the train crashes into a river and is partially submerged. But see there’s a monster in the water, the bastard child of the Creature from the Black Lagoon and the Marvel symbiote Venom. The hapless passengers eventually make their way out of the sinking train car wherein the film becomes a cabin-in-the-woods slasher . And then in the last of too many acts to follow for an 80 minute movie it becomes a ghost story. However, the kills here are gory and 100% practical. Points for that. Points also for Lance Henriksen’s top-billing paycheck earned for about three minutes of screen time.

Let’s take a special spur line to talk for a moment about Asian train horror. It’s an exceptionally robust sub-sub-genre. My favorite zombie flick of all time has to be Train to Busan (2016) from South Korea. This is a great film, period; it just happens to talk place mostly on a train, in train stations, or in train tunnels. And, unlike many films discussed here, it uses the physical setting — rolling cars on tracks — as part of the plot, not just part of the setting. Like old time westerns where the roof of train cars allows cool chase and showdown vignettes, the actual train to Busan is used creatively and surprisingly. Train to Busan has spawned an animated prequel called Seoul Station, also excellent, and a standalone sequel called Peninsula which I have not seen. Junkrat Train (2021) from China is, well, about a train infested with rats. The more high-minded but no less fun Kisaragi Station (2022) from Japan takes an Internet meme about a fictional, supernatural train station and rolls with it.

When my family and I first moved to Denver we often heard a train whistle in the distance, especially late at night. But here’s the strange thing: there were no rail lines anywhere near where we lived in Denver. We searched for the source of this train whistle for months before eventually giving up and simply saying “well, there goes the ghost train again”. It became oddly comforting. If you like ghost trains too be similarly comforted in knowing that there are at least 19 films (most but not all of which are horror) with this name. 

There are loads of horror films that use trains only partially and to great effect — let’s call this intermodal train horror. For example, the final scene of Drag Me to Hell (2009) shows the cursed protagonist, Christine, as she falls onto the tracks ahead of an oncoming train. We’re meant to think that death-by-smooshing is the calamity headed for her, until she realizes in that very moment that her efforts to avoid hell were thwarted — and it comes clawing. Rabid, An American Werewolf in London, Friday the 13th VIII (the one which has 20 minutes in Manhattan), and the original Creep all have great sequences aboard rolling stock.

As noted this review of train-based horror barely makes a dent in the subgenre. Others worth exploring if you have a one-track mind include Beyond The Door III, Snakes on a Train, End of the Line, The Tunnel (reviewed on this show last April), and Ghost Track.

In 2007 I rode a magnetic levitation train called the Transrapid, the world’s first production-grade maglev for transit. It runs from the Shanghai airport to the edge of the city and reaches a maximum speed of 268 MPH. This may be the most scared I have ever been on a train. For one, I was the only passenger in my car, possibly the only passenger on the train. For another, when I worked my way up to the cab at the front of the first car and peered in through the dark glass as we broke 250 MPH, I saw the sole engineer enthusiastically reading a comic book not ever looking at her controls or out the windshield. WTF. But mostly it was the knowledge that a derailment (if that’s the term for magnetic de-coupling) at this speed would never be survivable. Especially so since the entire route is elevated a few stories above grade. A crash of this train would essentially be that of a slow-moving, low-flying airplane. It’s all I could think about. I enjoyed it, I suppose, in the same way that a roller coaster is enjoyable. Might be thrilling, might kill you even without a maniacal killer aboard. Who knows? And maybe that’s why there are so many films in this niche genre: the very thing you’re traveling on is a potential threat. 

OK, tourists, it’s the end of the line. Thank you for joining me on our search for the dark at the end of the tunnel. May your movie viewing always find you on the wrong side of the tracks.

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A full list of the movies mentioned above can be found at Letterboxd. Find out where to watch there.

The Terror Tourist is my occasional segment on the Heavy Leather Horror Show, a weekly podcast about all things horror out of Salem, Massachusetts. These segments are also available as an email newsletter. Sign up here, if interested. Here’s the episode containing “Hell On Wheels”: