This really does feel like one last hurrah of a particular kind of horror movie, the quaintly lurid and darkly humorous sort that typified the genre in the fifties and sixties. Horror Express has many of the stylistic hallmarks of those films, not the least of which being that it’s a period piece that stars Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing—it even has a science fiction conceit that also feels of the previous era (it was produced by Bernard Gordon, who had a major hand in Earth vs. The Flying Saucers and Day of the Triffids). The early seventies was basically the transition point from these sorts of movies (which had mostly been dominated by Hammer Productions, and mostly starred Lee and Cushing) to more contemporary and hard-edged ones—this came out the same year as Last House on the Left (…and also Frogs), and a year before The Exorcist. It’s pretty clear that something like this wasn’t the kind of terror people were looking for in the theatre. Still, you probably couldn’t have asked for a better send-off than this, which is entertaining and stylish, all the more impressive because Spanish director Eugenio Martin had no previous experience in horror.
Part of the joy of the movie comes from seeing Lee and Cushing onscreen together, playing mystery-solving partners but also petty rivals constantly sniping at and irritating each other in their low-key Englishman way. Lee plays a no-nonsense scientist in 1906 who has just discovered a two-million-year-old hominid fossil frozen in the mountains of China, which he is transporting via the Trans-Siberian express back to Europe—by pure happenstance, his nosy colleague played by Cushing is on the same train alongside his microbiologist assistant. Like any good movie set on a train, we are quickly introduced to a group of characters from varied backgrounds: the police inspector, the Polish count and countess who are transporting an experimental metal, an engineer, a Rapsutin-looking monk, and a woman who is secretly a spy going after the experimental metal. They also establish that there is something seriously wrong with the fossil: a thief tries to break into the crate and dies after looking in, his eyes bleeding and turning an eerie white. The first part of the movie gradually builds to us seeing the monster get out of the box, with other characters (especially Cushing) trying to find some way to sneak a peek, while Lee gets increasingly aggravated by everyone except the Polish countess, who takes a liking to him. Soon enough, though, everyone on the train is united when the fossil springs to life after killing a porter who drills a hole in the box (by Cushing’s secret request) and then picking its own lock.
The unfrozen ape-man wanders around in the shadows (the darkness makes the costume extra effective) and kills a few more people with its glowing red eyes, including the lady spy. Cushing performs some autopsies on the victims’ brains (this is a well-supplied train) and finds that they are completely smooth, because something has absorbed all their memories—is it silly? Yes. Is it still a cool idea and visual? Also yes. The inspector ends up confronting the ape-man and shoots it dead, but not before it does something to him—we soon discover that the inspector has now become possessed by whatever was controlling the ape-man. After that, he becomes determined to kill off most of the principle cast because they took the ape’s eyeball and, using fake science to explain the already fake science of optography, see images of dinosaurs and Earth as seen from space. This is where the science fiction angle comes in: the monster is actually an extraterrestrial energy being that was accidentally left on this planet before the dawn of life, and has been waiting in the bodies of Earth organisms to find a way to leave. It has the ability to absorb and accumulate the memories of other creatures (it was able to pick the lock thanks to the thief’s memories), and aside from using it to protect itself, it also realizes that it can use the skills of the engineer and the formula to the count’s metal to build a rocket outta that joint. The rest of the film follows Lee and Cushing as they discover the attributes of the creature, realizing that anyone on the train could be it in disguise, while the alien-possessed inspector tries to find ways to corner them. Yes, it’s “Who Goes There?”/The Thing set on a train (although with none of the mystery, because the audience already knows who the alien is), which might be one of the best settings for that story other than Antarctica. Nothing supplies paranoia better than a closed, moving space full of strangers.
Aside from the banter between Lee and Cushing, the smartest thing about the story is the characterization of the alien. First, there is something fun about the way it subverts expectations: this could have been a movie about an unfrozen caveman on a train, or about an alien possessing people, but that it does both and then has more on top of that shows a surprising amount of imagination. Plus, this isn’t some brainless monster killing people left and right—it has a concrete, understandable plan (and it could almost be seen as sympathetic, even with all the murdering—it’s just trying to go home!), and behaves in a logical way, even when the other characters throw it curveballs.
One of the most important of those curveballs is the monk, who after seeing it do its thing, decides the alien is actually Satan and pledges his undying loyalty to it, despite the alien repeatedly saying that it has no use for him. The idea of a person deciding to worship some otherworldly entity is something I’ve seen before (namely, the “Killdozer” novella), and I find that it adds some delightfully cynical commentary, especially in this case where the entity doesn’t want to be worshipped and finds its new follower to be a nuisance. This movie is pretty mean to religion in general—although Lee can sometimes seem like the cold scientist stereotype (he says the first couple deaths that happen don’t matter much to him, and he is completely obsessed with keeping his discovery a secret), the monk is repeatedly dunked on by the count and countess, proclaims evolution to be evil right before Lee finds irrefutable evidence for evolution (when the countess sees the images in the eye, she calls the monk over to have a look, just to rub his wrongness in his face), and despite being a man of God, he immediately worships a demonic force when he sees its power. Even the monster gets to burn the monk by telling him “there is nothing in your mind worth taking.” Ouch! The monk is the exact kind of nutty character that makes these movies go ’round, and the dynamic between him and the others (especially the alien) is both interesting and amusing.
Another one of those characters appears near the end of the movie: a Cossack captain played by Telly Savalas, who is there for around fifteen minutes and is just having the time of his life bossing people around as he tries to solve the murder mystery by force. Given how little time he has, Savalas gets as much out of his presence as he can, rivalling even Lee and Cushing. This borderline cameo appearance would almost be a complete detour, but at least the scene is used to allow Lee and Cushing to figure out that the inspector is the alien. This leads to the final sequence, where the alien is forced to take over the monk’s body, kill the Cossack soldiers, and then bring them back to life as zombie cannon fodder for some last minute action set pieces. By most standards, this is the least interesting part of the movie, but as the last fifteen minutes of a ninety minute movie, it’s a perfectly acceptable climax.
Although relatively unknown when it released (it ended up in the public domain—that’s how “relatively unknown” were talking about), there is a reason why Horror Express has developed a cult following: it’s an inventive and well-executed genre mash-up from a time when all the genres involved were falling out of favour. The age where thrillers were mostly about understated British intellectuals discussing bloody monster murder in well-dressed rooms was at an end, but at least this one includes all the good things the older movies had, including prominent roles for the always-entertaining duo of Lee and Cushing. They only made so many movies together, so let’s cherish what we have, especially when they’re as good as this.
A Scrapbook of Infinite Noise 