Editorials
Celebrate the New Year With ‘Terror Train’!
Happy New Year everyone! I hope all of you have a fantastic holiday and are ready to dive right in to 2015! I’ve been pretty sick all week so I’ve just been watching some horror classics, rather than out partying with the cool kids. This year I thought I would revisit (and pseudo review) an old classic that just happens to be set on New Year’s Eve: Terror Train.
For those of you who don’t know, Terror Train is about a group of fraternity and sorority students who are stalked on a train one New Year’s Eve by a masked figure. They quickly figure out that the only people being killed were involved in a prank played on a fellow student three years earlier. The prank involved making Kenny (the aforementioned shy kid) think he was going to hook up with Jamie Lee Curtis’ character, Alana, only to have a fake(?) corpse be in the bed. Kenny then proceeds to freak out and spin around in circles on the bed before the screen cuts to black.
It’s a pretty simple plot, and the characters would be completely indistinguishable if they weren’t wearing costumes (other than Jamie Lee Curtis and David Copperfield). Most of the male characters are unlikable and all of the females (sans Curtis) come across as bimbos. Terror Train does use the costumes in a pretty cool way in that the killer dons the costume of each of his subsequent victims after he murders them.
It’s been a few years since I’ve watched Terror Train but I completely forgot about how much the first hour is a bit of a snooze. If I’m being completely honest, I’m not the biggest fan of Terror Train. I think it’s alright, but I think since I saw it after all of the classics (Halloween, Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, etc.) it just wasn’t as interesting to me. Most of the film consists of watching a college party that you can’t be a part of. Sure there is some drama like Curtis’ beef with resident douchebag Doc, but other than that there’s really not much going on here. I found myself frequently pressing the display button on my remote to see how much time had passed.
The mystery itself isn’t all that engaging either, since we pretty much know from the beginning that it’s Kenny who is murdering everyone. Upon re-watching it this week, I realized how much the last 30 minutes completely redeem everything that came before it. The climax of the film is spectacular. Jamie Lee Curtis’ chase scene through the train is incredibly suspenseful and when she locks herself in the cage (forgive me for not knowing the exact term for this location in a train car) it’s pretty intense.
The absolute best part comes from the reveal that Kenny had disguised himself as the magician’s assistant for the entire film, and was occasionally sneaking off to kill the pranksters in the group. It’s a reveal that come completely out of left field. I wouldn’t be surprised if this twist had inspired the writers of Sleepaway Camp, although they took it a bit further. I admit to being surprised, because it had been so long since I had seen the film. I remember Kenny being the murderer, but that magician’s assistant bit took me completely off guard. It’s hilarious. Then of course you have Kenny’s ridiculous spinning come back into play:
Overall, I’d say Terror Train is a decent entry into the slasher genre, though I can certainly see why Curtis wanted to get out of the genre at this point in her career. It’s certainly not as good as Halloween and The Fog. I do think it’s better than Prom Night, but that’s debatable. You can’t deny they went all out for than ending though.
So yeah, that was how I spent my New Year’s! Did you do something more exciting than I did? Or maybe you like to watch horror movies on New Year’s to celebrate as well. Let me know in the comments below!
The trailer for Ti West’s upcoming adaptation of A Christmas Carol raised a lot of eyebrows when it dropped earlier this week. While plenty of folks initially dismissed Ebenezer as a derivative project meant to cash in on the recent wave of unnecessary prequels that expand the backstory of beloved characters (such as 2023’s Wonka), Charles Dickens’ original novel already made a point of exploring Ebenezer Scrooge’s origins in detail – meaning that this new film is likely just a particularly faithful adaptation of the source material under a different name.
Couple that with the fact that the movie is being helmed by a genuine horror auteur and I think it’s safe to say that the latest iteration of the first modern ghost story is in good hands.
That being said, one detail that immediately jumped out at me during the brief teaser (other than a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it nod to Johnny Depp’s iconic bedroom death scene from the original A Nightmare on Elm Street) is the fact that many of Ebenezer’s ghosts appear to have been directly lifted from the iconic John Leech illustrations that accompanied the first edition of Dickens’ novel.
Here are a couple of stills from the trailer compared to the original artwork:
The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
The Phantoms in ‘A Christmas Carol’ and ‘Ebenezer’
Marley’s Ghost in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
Mainly working with old-school wood and steel engravings that would later be transferred to print, Leech was instrumental in crafting the iconic look of history’s most influential phantoms – especially since Dickens is said to have been deeply involved with the creation of these so-called “comic illustrations.”
And since the novel is commonly said to have popularized spiritualism in Victorian England, much of the ghostly iconography that we still see in genre media to this very day (including some of Ti West’s previous films) can be traced back to the author’s partnership with Leech.
Ebenezer won’t be the first A Christmas Carol adaptation to borrow heavily from these designs, but I can appreciate how Ti West is incorporating an important part of horror history into his latest film.
Ebenezer will be available in theaters starting November 13.
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