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ON THIS DAY IN HORROR - October 3rd

"TERROR TRAIN" released in 1980

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When the members of a college fraternity throw a costumed party on-board a locomotive, little do they know that someone from their past has boarded the train with them and is killing them all one by one, in the Jamie Lee Curtis chiller, Terror Train!

Deciding to host their costumed New Year's Eve party on a train, the students of the college pre-med fraternity, Sigma Phi, are helped aboard the locomotive by the train conductor, Carne (Ben Johnson). Amongst the party-goers are frat president Doc (Hart Bochner), his best friend Mo (Timothy Webber), and frat brothers Jackson (Anthony Sherwood) and Ed (Howard Busgang). Joining them is Mo's girlfriend, Alana (Jamie Lee Curtis) and her friend, and Doc's girlfriend, Mitchy (Sandee Currie). A three-person band and a Magician (David Copperfield) and his assistant are also on-board for the entertainment. As Jackson toasts the crowd to start the party, prankster Ed walks around with a sword through his stomach, causing the other students to laugh as they think its another one of his practical jokes. But he falls down after the people walk away to board the train and an unseen person takes Ed's Groucho Marx costume and rolls his dead body under the train tracks. As the train leaves the station, Doc is celebrating with his fellow frat brothers in the lounge car, when one of them asks about the now abolished "hog night" which Doc merely mentions that, "something bad happened". Overhearing, Alana enters and tells them that they "put a kid in the hospital" who had a nervous breakdown due to Doc's prank three years ago; a shy and awkward pledge Kenny Hampson (Derek MacKinnon) was lured into a darkened room by Alana for a sexual liaison, but, once in bed, found that Doc and the others had placed a woman's corpse in the bed. Kenny was severely traumatized by the prank and was sent to a psychiatric hospital. A little later, Mitchy sees 'Ed' and he follows her towards the sleeping berths. He nearly grabs her when Jackson appears, who is very inebriated and he offers 'Ed' a drink. In the nearby lavatory, the killer grabs Jackson, lifts up his mask for a second to let him see his face, and slams Jackson's head into the mirror. The killer then changes out of his Groucho Marx costume into Jackson's alien lizard costume and leaves the lavatory. Meanwhile, Alana becomes angry with Mo when she learns that the train party was Doc's idea after Mo told her that it was his, and leaves to watch the magic show - Mo later asks Doc where he found the magician, but Doc says that he did not hire a magician for the party and wonders who did. In another part of the train, the killer, disguised as 'Jackson', murders Mitchy in her sleeping berth. One by one, the killer murders all the others involved in the prank, including Ko and Doc. Carne discovers some bodies and sequesters the students in one car as the train begins its return journey. Alana recalls the prank, and, remembering that Kenny loved magic, suspects the magician is the killer. However the magician has disappeared, and is eventually found impaled inside his sword box. Carne has Alana sequestered in a locked compartment for her safety, but the killer still manages to slip inside to attack her. However, Alana manages to escape and the killer pursues her through the train to the baggage car, where the killer finally reveals himself in a final, and deadly, confrontation!

[talking about the prank from three years earlier]

Doc: Now I promised these dorks I was gonna come up with something truly special.

Alana: Yeah, really special. Put a kid in the hospital...Oh, I'm sorry. Did I ruin your punch line?

Top:   Alana (Jamie Lee Curtis) joins her boyfriend's fraternity party on-board a train;

Above:   Train conductor, Carne (Ben Johnson) eventually starts to believe all is not right on the locomotive.

The idea for Terror Train reportedly came from a dream that producer/writer Daniel Grodnik had one weekend night after seeing the films Halloween (1978) and Silver Streak (1976). Dan woke up and said to his wife, "What do you think about putting Halloween on a train?" His wife answered, "That's terrible". He jotted down "Terrible Train" on a piece of paper on his nightstand and in the morning, changed the title to Terror Train, wrote up 22 pages, and made a deal on it with Sandy Howard's company at 3:00 in the afternoon. Howard then brought the project to prolific Canadian film producer, Harold Greenberg; the two having worked together on another horror film the year before, Death Ship. The producer's hired screenwriter T.Y. Drake to complete the screenplay, which was was notable for a particular novelty story element gimmick whereby the villain puts on the costume of his last victim. As such, the killer in the film is constantly seen in different outfits throughout the movie. Drake later remarked, "We set out to make a ghoulishly scary thriller". Making his directorial debut was British-Canadian film editor, Roger Spottiswoode.

[Doc calmly calls out to Alana as she angrily walks away]

Doc: You're always trying to leave one of my parties. Well, this time... you can't.

Top:   Frat president, Doc (Hart Bochner) and his girlfriend Mitchy (Sandee Currie), have no idea that a killer (Above) is already on-board, disguised in the Groucho Marx costume of his earlier victim!

Producer's cast future "Scream Queen" Jamie Lee Curtis in the starring role of Alana Maxwell. Curtis, who first appeared in John Carpenter's Halloween only two years earlier, had subsequently starred in Carpenter's next movie, The Fog, and was already in Toronto shooting Prom Night before heading over to Montreal to begin filming on Terror Train. Curtis once said of her character in this film: "There are certain things a heroine in a thriller has to be. She has to be vulnerable, so that the audience identifies with her and is rooting for her. But she also has to have an enormous inner strength to overcome the evil, or terror, that is pursuing her. I play the same kind of character as I did in other films. But Alana - the girl I play - is stronger and more defined". Veteran actor Ben Johnson agreed to play the role of the Carne, the Train Conductor, without even reading the script, as he had enjoyed working with Spottiswoode when he was editing Sam Peckinpah's The Getaway (1972). The two struck up a friendship on that film, with Johnson later stating, "I had enormous admiration for his work on the [Sam] Peckinpah films, and I knew he'd make one helluva fine director". The killer was played by Derek McKinnon, a Canadian-Nova Scotia stage actor who appears in eleven scenes total throughout the movie and in each scene, he appears wearing a different mask or costume as well as his character Kenny Hampson, including outfits for a bird, monk, witch, alien lizard and movie star Groucho Marx (and in drag as the Magician's Assistant - played by real life magician David Copperfield). Hart Bochner, Sandee Currie, Timothy Webber, Anthony Sherwood round out the cast, as well as the feature debut of glamour model and actress - and future Vanity 6 singer - Vanity (credited as D.D. Winters).

Shot over a short period of 25-days between November and December 1979, with all of the train scenes having to be scheduled at night - beginning at 6 pm at night and continue through to the early hours of the morning. This was because the environs of the gigantic Montreal warehouse which housed the train was too active and noisy during the day. The production got around half a day behind in its shooting schedule and frugal producer Sandy Howard wanted to take out five pages of the script according to director Roger Spottiswoode. As such, reportedly, creative differences arose between producer Howard and director Spottiswoode. However, producer Harold Greenberg settled the dispute and came to the rescue by writing out a check for $25,000 to cover the over-run. The fifth, and final week, of filming was spent shooting the train exterior scenes. The locomotive was steamed up and taken out for shooting of such sequences as those seen of train with a snowbound backdrop, with the temperature getting so cold one evening that a filming camera got completely frozen out on that night. The opening prologue of the college bonfire was the very last scene of the movie to be filmed. It was added during post-production around one month after principal filming ended as a tie-in to the origins of the character Kenny Hampson.

Kenny Hampson: I watched you tonight.

[Referring to the magician]

Kenny Hampson: You liked him.

Alana Maxwell: No. Kenny, you're better than he is. I'm sure you're better than he is.

Kenny Hampson: I am. He didn't know how to cut a woman into pieces.

Top:   The killer, now dressed in a witch's costume, tracks Alana down in the baggage car;

Above:   Alana finally confronts the killer is his last costume, having murdered the train porter and taken his uniform

By the time Terror Train was ready to premiere, star Curtis had by then already earned the title of "Scream Queen", with Terror Train being the fourth horror film in two years she had starred in (ironically, after filming in the icy cold temperatures of Montreal, Curtis' next film location was in the dry, hot and dusty Nullabor Plains of Australia for the horror/thriller, Road Games). The movie was picked up for theatrical release in the United States by 20th Century Fox - who reportedly spent an estimated $5 million on advertising - where it enjoyed a mild success, eventually grossing $8 million at the box office. Reviews of Terror Train were mostly negative at the time, with Roger Ebert giving the film one out of four stars, writing "The classic horror films of the 1930's 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." However, he also conceded that "it's not a rock-bottom-budget, schlock exploitation film."  Time Out London however called it "better than most of its kind", which Leonard Maltin concurred, claiming that the "stylish photography and the novelty of the killer donning the costume of each successive victim lift this slightly above most in this disreputable genre".

ROTTEN TOMATOES SCORE:   36%

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