A group of teenagers jams on a train, not realizing that they’re actually on the special train where God and Satan are debating theology and watching crappy short horror films. It can only be the classic Night Train To Terror.
It’s hard to fathom the thought process that went into Night Train To Terror, honestly. It seems as though the makers somehow ended up with three short horror films and decided to string them together in a kind of anthology - but the idea that God and Satan are watching these terrible exploitation films in order to decide which souls should go to Heaven and which to Hell? And that they’re doing this on a train which is going to crash at dawn, killing a train full of happy dancing teenagers? Kind of random.
But then each of the three horror films is also totally random. In the first, there’s a guy who’s driving with his new bride on their wedding night - and they get caught in the traditional wedding-night car accident. Somehow the guy ends up in a sanitarium, where he’s strapped to a table and given electro-shock therapy and hypnosis, until he’s brainwashed into going out and roofie-ing young women, so the sanitarium can slice them up and sell their body parts to hospitals. (The women, of course, are kept naked, strapped to tables for no particular reason.) Except that the sanitarium keeps people’s heads in jars, again for no particular reason. Oh, and at one point the guy goes to a church and puts a roofie in a girl’s communion wine, so he can (I guess) drag her out of church and slice her up. (We don’t see what happens after she drinks it.) Good plan, guy! The film is so badly edited, there’s a scene where he roofies an old guy, and later the old guy is poking around asking suspicious questions about the sanitarium where his young lady friend vanished - I think those scenes were supposed to be the other way around.
And the second film is about a busty carnival popcorn seller who befriends a nice guy, but she turns out to be part of a suicide cult, who tie themselves up under a pendulum, which falls and kills one of them. For fun. The third film, which you can glimpse above, is about a nice Catholic wife who dreams of crazy Nazis, and then it turns out she has to stop Satan from manifesting on Earth.
I have enough trouble understanding why I am watching these films. Why, in Heaven’s name, is God?
A version of this article originally appeared back in 2009.
Charlie Jane Anders is the author of All The Birds in the Sky, coming in January from Tor Books. Follow her on Twitter, and email her.