Horror Express

For the last few years, I have used October to give myself a viewing assignment: a different horror film each day. Now that I have escaped the real life horror of New Zealand’s public service, I intend to write a piece inspired by each film.

My seventh film is Eugenio Martin’s Horror Express (1972).

Vincent Price may be a bit of a protagonist for my viewing this month but I’ve managed to make room for a couple of other mid-Century horror icons. Horror Express has been recommended to me enough times that I had to watch it regardless but I still noted quite a bit of overlap with my thematic viewing: an interesting approach to adaptation, geopolitical paranoia, even a few scenes in early 20th Century China.

A Spanish production starring British scream kings Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, Horror Express is an adaptation of John Campbell’s Who Goes There? That’s the same book that provided the inspiration for canonical horror films The Thing from Another World (stay tuned for more 50s sci-fi later in the month) and John Carpenter’s The Thing. While those films are set in the Arctic and Antarctic respectively, Martin’s puts the defrosted alien on a train going from Shanghai to Moscow in 1906.

Lee plays Professor Sir Alexander Saxton, an uncompromising man of science who has found the frozen body of a prehistoric hominid in Manchuria. Transporting it home will enable him to finally prove the theory of evolution. Cushing is Dr. Wells, Saxton’s academic rival and foil. They are joined by an international cast of characters including Chinese workers, Polish aristocrats, Russian troops, American tourists and a mad Orthodox Monk. Naturally, the cargo contains more secrets than even Saxton can dream of.

The setting is straight out of Agatha Christie and the film’s greatest strength. The premise of all of Campbell’s adaptations is that everyone suspects one another of harbouring the monster. In the two Thing movies, especially Carpenter’s, this paranoia is heightened by an isolated setting filled with macho men with similar professional backgrounds. By setting it on a train with a diverse cast of men and women, it becomes more of a classic whodunnit—the rivalries are based on external factors like geopolitical intrigue and professional disagreements within and between science and religion. For each of the alien’s victims, it absorbs their subject matter expertise along with their appearance.

Lee and Cushing are supported by a deep cast of characters played by actors having a lot of fun. Special shout-out to Telly Savalas (most famous for playing Bond villain extraordinaire Ernst Blofeld) who joins the journey part way through. Savalas plays Cossack Captain Kazan, outperforming everyone else onboard as a hilarious pre-revolution Russian stereotype.

As a horror film, it probably isn’t in the same league as either Thing but it’s definitely got a lot going for it.