Editorials
Happy 35th Anniversary to ‘Terror Train!’
“The boys and girls of Sigma Phi. Some will live. Some will die.” –Terror Train‘s tagline, aka the best tagline ever.
Saturday October 3rd marked the 35th anniversary to the Jamie Lee Curtis slasher Terror Train, and we thought we’d write a short piece to celebrate the film! It wasn’t my plan to write two tributes to the 1980 slasher film Terror Train in one year, but I couldn’t pass up an opportunity to celebrate the film’s 35th anniversary. Terror Train was the last original slasher film Jamie Lee Curtis would star in, and she went out on a high note. I realize I said back in December that I wasn’t Terror Train’s biggest fan, but I’ve watched the film twice since then and the more it sits with me, the more I like it.
Critically maligned upon its release, Terror Train still managed to earn back nearly twice it’s budget (it made $8 million domestically on a $4.2 million budget). This would probably come as a surprise to the late Roger Ebert, who wrote “The classic horror films of the 1930s appealed to the intelligence of its audiences, to their sense of humor and irony. Movies like “Terror Train,” and all of its sordid predecessors and its rip-offs still to come, just don’t care. They’re a series of sensations, strung together on a plot. Any plot will do. Just don’t forget the knife, and the girl, and the blood.” He was not alone in his sentiments.
I’m not sure why I like Terror Train so much. It’s certainly not a good movie, but it’s quite entertaining. Unlike many slashers at the time, Terror Train isn’t particularly gory. There are plenty of deaths sprinkled throughout the film, and the twist ending is equally clever and hilarious. That may not be what they were going for, but it is what it is.
The killer’s modus operandi of adorning his victim’s costumes after he kills them is also inspired. It’s not just a man in a mask, he could be anyone at the party. Adding to the tension is the fact that the entire movie takes place on a moving train. Sure, they could just stop the train, but what fun would that be? It takes an insanely long amount of time before the any bodies get discovered anyway.
Director Roger Spottiswoode, who would go on to direct films like Turner and Hooch and the 1997 James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies, of all things, does a fairly decent job filming in the tight spaces of the train cars as well. The claustrophobia he and cinematographer John Alcott is able to instill in his audience is remarkable. For being filmed in 1980, it also looks good.
Interesting to note is that there was no magician character in the original script. One of the producers just really liked David Copperfield, so they wrote a role for him. This wasn’t the wisest decision, as his sole purpose is to provide the film its main red herring, but other than that he is just there to do some magic tricks in some overly-long magic show sequences. His off-screen death doesn’t help matters either. It would be fun to see the original version of the script without the magician character.
Curtis also does serviceable work as the lead character, even if she is just the standard “good girl” until she gets to let loose in the final act. She is definitely the most memorable character among a cast of interchangeable characters. At this point in her career (and after reading Ebert’s blurb about her in his review), it’s understandable to see why she wanted out of the horror genre.
Of course, no discussion of Terror Train would be complete without a discussion of its ending. I won’t repeat myself to much here, but I love the last 30 minutes of the film. If the first hour seems too slow for some, the final act redeems it completely. It’s a suspenseful, extended chase sequence between the killer and Jamie Lee Curtis, and while the identity of the killer is completely obvious, Terror Train manages to provide some imagination with the way he is revealed.
Terror Train is not a brilliant film. But in the plethora of Halloween ripoffs that were happening in 1980, it truly is one of the better ones. Do yourself a favor and give this one a re-watch this weekend to celebrate its anniversary. It may just surprise you! Just for fun, here’s a modernized trailer for the film made by YouTube user theSupercasa which is pretty cool (and doesn’t spoil the film like most 80s trailers did):
Steven Spielberg has always been conversant in the cinematic language of the horror genre, despite relatively few credits in the genre. His contributions as a writer and producer on things like Poltergeist are legendary, and films like Duel and Jaws certainly wield the horror genre in remarkable, often chilling ways. He may not be a horror filmmaker, but he knows when he needs to scare us, and he has the tools to make that happen.
I didn’t go into Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s alien epic, expecting outright horror, and indeed the film leans much more into thrilling than frightening. This is not a horror film, but for a few minutes in the middle, much to my surprise, it became one.
Spielberg has filmed more than his fair share of scary scenes over the years, but with Disclosure Day, he directed a new contender for the scariest scene of his entire career.
SPOILERS AHEAD for Disclosure Day!
Josh O’Connor in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
Among the various alien secrets laced throughout Disclosure Day are a trio of palm-sized rods, the color of pencil graphite. These rods, originating from another planet, can be used for a number of things, but for the purposes of this scene, the most important is “diving,” gripping the rod in one bare hand and using its power to “dive” into the mind of another person.
The person holding the rod in this scene is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), head of shadowy cybersecurity firm Wordex, who is hellbent on keeping human knowledge of extraterrestrials secret from the general public. Scanlon’s trying to find whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who’s got all of those alien secrets tucked in a backpack while he’s on the run, and while Daniel’s more experienced mind is protected from diving, his girlfriend Jane’s (Eve Hewson) is not. So, monitored by medical personnel at Wordex headquarters (diving is dangerous), Scanlon pushes his way into Jane’s mind to find the location of Daniel’s safe house.
A telepathic invasion is scary enough on its own, but Spielberg doesn’t stop there. When Scanlon dives into Eve’s mind, he appears to her to be sitting across the kitchen table, like he’s in the room. Her bright blue eyes turn Scanlon’s dark brown, and she loses much of her control over her own body, not to mention her mind. Moments before, Daniel finally shared with her the secrets in his backpack, so Jane is shocked, conflicted, deeply vulnerable when Scanlon slips inside her head. This is not just telepathy. This is possession.
Spielberg underscores this not just through the visual language of the scene, as Jane breaks out in a sweat and struggles to sit upright as Scanlon invades her mind, but through Jane’s background. As she revealed to Daniel earlier in the film, Jane is a former novitiate nun who left her convent when she began to question her calling. She still believes firmly in God and, more importantly, believes that perhaps proof of alien life should be kept secret from the public because, in her eyes, it would upset the entire balance of faith in the world. God is a defining factor for humankind, Jane argues, and showing humanity proof of creatures from the stars would undercut that in dangerous ways.
This context, combined with the crucifix necklace Jane’s holding in her hand at the time of the dive, makes this scene the closest thing Spielberg will ever shoot to something out of The Exorcist. It’s not just a battle of wills, but a battle of faith. As an amoral technocrat worms his way into her memories, her beliefs, her faith, Jane turns the crucifix into a weapon, squeezing it until her hand bleeds when she discovers that a pain response can momentarily push Scanlon out of her head.
Of course, when you put a crucifix and a bloody hand together, it conjures images of stigmata. Screenwriter David Koepp pushes the allusion further by having Scanlon quote Christ on the cross to Jane by way of convincing her that she must be the one to stop Daniel by any means necessary.
It’s easy to see why this is scary, right?
On a very basic level, you have a powerful, wealthy man subduing and assaulting an innocent young woman, which is frightening enough. Then, the layers of the scene kick in. Scanlon doesn’t just assault Jane, but possesses her, seizes her memories, her knowledge, and finally her own free will, all while Jane literally clings to her faith in an effort to fight back. Disclosure Day is, among other things, a story about who has a right to the truth, and Scanlon believes that he should be the arbiter of that truth. Not just the truth as he sees it, but the truth as Jane sees it as well. If they don’t see eye to eye, he’ll make her.
But the possession, as it turns out, cuts both ways. Using the rod to dive is, for a normal human being, an intensely strenuous process. Scanlon admits that previous attempts almost killed him, and for some members of his time, so much as touching the rod results in a near-death experience. Even accessing an unprepared mind like Jane’s takes a lot of Scanlon, and when she kicks him out by squeezing the crucifix – again, so much meaning embedded in the details here – his team holds him back and tries to offer medical intervention. But Scanlon persists, pushing them away, and keeps diving back in.
This means that Jane can’t escape him because he just won’t stop pushing back through her defenses, but it also means that each time Scanlon enters her mind, and thus the safe house, he looks more monstrous. By the end, through a combination of lighting and makeup, Firth barely looks human, conjuring up images of the possessed Father Karras at the end of The Exorcist.
Colin Firth (center, standing) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
On a pure, visceral craft level, all of this is quite frightening, but the real trick to making this scene into Spielberg’s most terrifying lies in the more existential horror surrounding all of this. Disclosure Day is a film about the battle for the truth over extraterrestrials, but it’s also about a fight against an impossibly powerful surveillance state, the devaluing of human and alien lives in favor of some nebulous collection of assets, and the value of the individual in a world that increasingly lumps people into demographic boxes and writes them off.
In this scene, the surveillance state becomes supernatural, a human life is worth less than a piece of information, and an extragovernmental technocrat would rather sacrifice his own humanity than see reason. In 2026, few things could be more terrifying than that. Spielberg knows this and wields it mightily, proving once again that, while he’s not a strictly horror filmmaker, he can direct horror with the best of them.
Disclosure Day is in theaters now.
Eve Hewson (second from left) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
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