While the holiday isn’t as culturally impactful as Halloween or Christmas, New Year’s has inspired its own share of horror movies. Some are better than others and one of the most intriguing was a Jamie Lee Curtis vehicle that came out at the start of the 1980s slasher boom. While the film is exploitative, it’s more interesting than most movies of its type because of its theming and twist ending.
Jamie Lee Curtis was in a New Year’s horror movie that mimicked ‘Halloween’
One of the most influential movies of the 1970s was John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978). After that movie became a box-office smash, everyone wanted to put out a slasher movie. Many Halloween rip-offs were set during holidays or special events. 1980 alone saw the release of Christmas Evil, Mother’s Day, Friday the 13th, and To All a Good Night.
Curtis rode the wave that Halloween started. In 1980, she appeared in three horror movies: Prom Night, The Fog (which reunited her with Carpenter), and Terror Train. The latter is the least famous of the three but it follows the Halloween formula most closely. Terror Train centers on a group of college co-eds having a New Year’s Eve costume party on a train while a masked killer stalks and attacks them. To keep his identity a secret, the killer dons the costumes of each of his victims. From The Texas Chain Saw Massacre onward, many slasher movies have had masked murderers, and Terror Train incorporates this trope in an intriguing way.
What sets ‘Terror Train’ apart from other New Year’s horror movies
As far as New Year’s horror movies go, Terror Train beats out the Evil Dead pastiche Bloody New Year and the recent horror comedy Y2K, which wastes a fun premise about the Y2K bug starting a technological apocalypse. Terror Train isn’t quite as good as New Year’s Evil, which came out the same year and flips slasher conventions by making the killer a main character. However, Terror Train is more artisan than critics seem to think.
While it’s not brilliant, the movie is memorable, which manifests in different ways throughout the movie because it’s all based on the theme of illusion. For example, Terror Train begins with a morbid prank before the main plot begins. Once our co-eds get on the train, they are entertained by an illusionist. Then, the killer starts ticking people with his disguises. It all leads to a striking twist ending you won’t want to miss.
What Jamie Lee Curtis was like on the set
Terror Train was helmed by future James Bond director Roger Spottiswoode. During a 2011 interview with The Terror Trap, he recalled working with Curtis. “She was great,” he opined. “Very nice, very grounded. Jamie was kind of a star at the time in this world. By that, I mean the teenage horror world. Those movies were making a lot of money for a lot of people.
“Jamie was that perfect combination of having grown up in the business and learning all the right lessons from it,” he continued. “She was talented, grounded, thoughtful, professional and generous to the other cast members. She wasn’t that much older than anyone … but she had far more film experience.
“And I remember how very sweet she was with the rest of the cast,” he added. “How she treated them. I would have understood how good she was if I’d had more to compare it to at the time. I thought she was great back then. But now, I look back and realize she was even … better.”
Spottiswoode, Curtis, and a little bit of magic made Terror Train some prime viewing for New Year’s Eve.
