Final Destinations: The Case of Night Train to Terror

Art & Trash, episode 4
Final Destinations: The Case of Night Train to Terror
Stephen Broomer, February 25, 2021

Night Train to Terror tells three stories, each presented as the case of an individual who has been morally compromised because of their involvement with something evil: there is the case of an asylum for cruel experimentation, the case of a circle of death-obsessed thrill seekers, and the case of spiritual conflict between a satanic sect, an atheist, and the atheist’s god-fearing wife. These stories are framed by a wraparound segment in which God and Lucifer debate the final destination of the souls involved in these cases. The cases are, in fact, entire feature-length films that have been cut down and summarized. In Final Destinations, Stephen Broomer discusses the creation of authorship in these remixed segments, the roots of the stories in grindhouse subgenres such as the Naziploitation film and the women-in-prison film, and the impact that condensing these stories from their original length to a segment length have on their stylistic and narrative coherence.

Night Train to Terror was released on Blu-ray disc and DVD by Vinegar Syndrome on October 8, 2013. It can be purchased from them directly at https://vinegarsyndrome.com/products/night-train-to-terror.

SCRIPT:

Out of all of the dark fables to emerge from gothic literature, one with an uncommonly long reach and abiding influence is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the tale of a body fashioned from other bodies, animated as a blank slate. The creature is haunted not necessarily by the memory of its parts but by the gradual knowledge of its own unlikely existence, not as a man but as a creature in the image of man. It wrestles with its identity as a made monster, a mere thing, with no hope of changing its character.

Such questions of objecthood and purpose weigh heavily on Night Train to Terror, a film assembled in 1985 by director-producer Jay Schlossberg-Cohen. Night Train to Terror tells three stories, each presented as the case of an individual who has been morally compromised because of their involvement with something evil: there is the case of an asylum for cruel experimentation, the case of a circle of death-obsessed thrill seekers, and the case of spiritual conflict between a satanic sect, an atheist, and the atheist’s god-fearing wife. These stories are framed by a wraparound segment in which God and Lucifer debate the final destination of the souls involved in these cases; they engage in a philosophical conversation about free will and sin and their roles, and Lucifer’s past as a fallen angel. After each segment, they negotiate the salvation or damnation of the subjects at hand. Night Train to Terror is an anthology horror film, a genre with strong precedents such as Dead of Night, Tales from the Crypt, and The Torture Garden; it differs from these films in one significant way, that the cases which God and Lucifer debate are, in fact, entire feature-length films that have been cut down and summarized. In this sense, it is something of a remix. Schlossberg-Cohen’s contribution is the frame that ties these three tales together.

Each of Night Train to Terror’s individual segments originated as an exploitation film, and they bear premises and twists that would be at home in the pages of EC horror comics. The first segment, The Case of Harry Billings, was left unfinished in its original form, produced with the title Scream Your Head Off, and later re-edited and released as Marilyn Alive and Behind Bars. In it, a man is held in an insane asylum where he and other inmates are being tortured by black market organ harvesters. The title protagonist, Harry Billings, is hypnotized into seducing women for the harvesters. He does so as a smooth operator, meeting women in churches and bars before drugging them and bringing them to the asylum. He finally wakes from his hypnotism, setting in motion a fatal confrontation with his keepers.

The second segment, The Case of Greta Connors, was finished and released under the titles The Death Wish Club, The Dark Side of Love, Carnival of Fools, and Gretta; in it a pair of young lovers, Gretta and Glenn, become involved with a death cult, a group of elites whose boredom and decadence has led them to seek out gruesome deaths, for which they elect a victim from their own ranks using chance games of Russian roulette. One involves a rare, dangerous mosquito, another involves electrocution. The young lovers themselves are a curious pair: Gretta is a musician who has been coerced into appearing in pornography; Glenn becomes obsessed with her after seeing her on film at a frat party. Their courtship is limited to a few knowing glances in a cardboard vision of a nightclub. As they become more involved with the death cult, Gretta’s own behaviour becomes more grotesque, more gleeful at the site of death. Finally, the couple are forced against their will to participate in a final game of chance, and it ends, anticlimactically, with the death of a minor character.

The third and most substantial segment, The Case of Claire Hanson, was released in full under the titles Cataclysm, The Nightmare Never Ends, and Satan’s Supper. This case follows a satanic conspiracy involving a crusty detective, a Jewish mystic named Papini, an immortal Nazi officer now patronizing California discos and opera houses, an outspoken atheist philosopher and the atheist’s wife, the title character, Claire Hanson. Claire Hanson is haunted by menacing visions, and for much of the segment, she serves as a witness to the omens of what is ultimately revealed to be an apocalyptic satanic scheme; her role is relatively minor until it is revealed that she has been chosen by god to put an end to all of this evil, and she is instructed to do so by containing the immortal Nazi’s heart in a box fashioned from a piece of the true cross. This proves to be a final, grotesque deception, as doing so simply makes her into the devil’s accomplice.

The content of these segments is made more bizarre by the appearance, in segments two and three, of clay animation. And of all the incidental comic relief of the film, perhaps the strangest is the appearance in the first and third segment of character actor Richard Moll, best known for his role as childlike bailiff Bull on Night Court, who appears in the first as a hulking monosyllabic brute, and in the third as erudite, proto-Dawkinsian public intellectual Dr. Hanson. These accidental ‘dual roles’ give such stark contrast as to provide the film with a bizarre comic backbone. But more than these superficial resemblances, the films share common traits in a more fundamental aspect of their production. All three, in their original form, were written by Philip Yordan, a writer best remembered for acting as a front for other writers when the red scare had left them blacklisted. And two of the films, The Death Wish Club and Scream Your Head Off, were directed by John Carr. Carr and Yordan’s influence gives the stories their thematic coherence, a tragic trilogy of moral compromise; Yordan’s lingering authorship is also what distinguishes these stories, abandoning genre tropes to embrace esoteric influences and cruel ironies.

The segments are distinct in their links to subgenres of exploitation cinema - The Case of Harry Billings is essentially a variation on the women-in-prison genre; The Case of Claire Hanson, for all of its advanced mystic-philosophical religious horror, fits into the Nazisploitation genre. Both are at home in the exploitation cinemas of the 1970s; in this only the case of Gretta Connors is something of an outlier, a complicated mystery film, complicated in that its mystery has little to do with the Death Cult’s pursuits but with mysteries of the heart. In a sense, what God and Lucifer examine through their train voyage are such mysteries and tricks, of the mind, of the heart, of the body. These themes overlap, but they’re present in recurrent the role of hypnosis and lobotomy in the first; the unknowable, fickle motives of Gretta in the second; and the pliability of the body in the third, the body eternal, but also, the body that metamorphoses and the body that transcends space and time.

The wraparound segment primarily serves as a frame for exposition. The train they ride, which is journeying through the cosmos, is occupied by a group of musicians and dancers who seem to be producing a music video, unaware that they are riding to the afterlife. The only person they interact with is an aged conductor/porter, a ferryman on this cosmic styx. The song they dance to is, in itself, a limbo hex: a recurring lyric seems to mirror the suspension in which these dancers exist: “everybody’s got something to do, everybody but you.” Indeed, the question of having something - or nothing - to do is evident in the film’s crude remix. As narrative is shorn away, leaving behind rapidly advancing sequences, entire secondary storylines are condensed to ellipses. Meanwhile, atmosphere is retained, ironically, through prolonged sequences, in anticipation of shocks and thrills. This is most apparent in The Case of Gretta Connors, where narrative drifts continuously forward but slows to a standstill in scenes of the death cult’s ‘games’, and in The Case of Claire Hansen, when the film is at its most mystically contemplative.

At the end of Frankenstein, the creature drifts away on an ice raft, lost in darkness and distance, never to be seen again. Night Train to Terror offers three such creatures, cut up and refashioned, resurrected to stand judgment.