Terror Train, like so many other horror films of its era, was drowned out by a genre cacophony. The film hit theaters just a few months after Friday the 13th in 1980, at the dawn of the post-Halloween slasher boom, and despite the presence of budding scream queen Jamie Lee Curtis (Prom Night, also starring Curtis, came out the same year), it simply didn’t find its audience. 

To say that a lot has changed in the ensuing 46 years is an understatement. Today, slasher devotees hail Terror Train as an early forward thinker in the subgenre, a film that plays within the established rules of the game while also daring to try new things with the form at a time when that form was still being set in stone. Many cult films stay cult films even as they find a bigger audience, but others find a more mainstream following when curious viewers realize that they missed something special. Thanks to a new 4K from Kino Lorber Studio Classics, Terror Train seems destined to find its permanent place among the best slashers of the golden age. 

As film historians Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and Josh Nelson point out early in their excellent commentary, one of two on the disc – on the film, Terror Train stands out for a lot of reasons, but one of the most important is the presence of cinematographer John Alcott. Alcott spent the late 1960s and early 1970s building a reputation as one of the most gifted DPs of his era, thanks to several films with the legendary Stanley Kubrick, including A Clockwork Orange and The Shining, and he brought all of that legendary talent to bear on Terror Train.

Working with director Roger Spottiswoode, Alcott imbues the film with often stunning beauty, painting shadows in among the firelight of the prologue sequence and the bright lights of a party train traveling by night across the Canadian landscape. His knack for shooting horror and framing slasher kills is on full display in this new restoration. The colors pop, the costumes are glossy and exciting, the expressiveness of the characters comes through, and yet the film loses none of its gritty, low-budget charm. As Nelson and Heller-Nicholas point out, the film was rushed through production in a matter of weeks in order to get tax credits lined up, giving it a seat-of-your-pants energy that’s buoyed by Alcott’s consummate professionalism and artistry. 

Terror Train is also, I was pleased to find upon rewatching this disc, a wonderfully mean-spirited slasher at a time when the subgenre was still all over the place, finding its footing amid rising box office demand. Like fellow Canadian classic Black Christmas before it, the film goes for the throat from the very beginning, putting its characters in absolutely merciless situations that are made all the more dread-inducing by the theatricality of the party on board the title train. Like My Bloody Valentine, which would arrive from Canada in early 1981, it’s a film that balances tremendous mirth and showmanship with pure brutality, from the opening prank to the final kill.

This new restoration highlights all of that and more, revealing a film that seems destined to reveal more depth with each new generation of fans. 

There’s so much potential exploration in this restoration, in fact, that I came away wishing the disc offered a little more in the way of behind-the-scenes flair. The features we do have, including both commentary tracks, are excellent, but I wanted to go deeper, and the features just aren’t there.

Maybe another future box set will shine an even brighter light on Terror Train‘s intricacies and the way this rushed, frantic production managed to deliver such a compelling piece of Canuxsploitation. As it is, though, this is a gorgeous restoration ornamented with solid special features, and it deserves a place on every slasher fan’s shelf. 

Terror Train is available now in 4K UHD from Kino Lorber.