10 Best Horror Movies That Take Place On A Train
3. Terror Train - 1980
Terror Train was made a time when Jamie Lee Curtis was THE Scream Queen, being fresh from Halloween, The Fog, and Prom Night (with Halloween 2 coming out the next year.) In this film, she plays a medical student who is part of a New Year's Eve costume party taking place on a train.
The plot involves, as so many '80s slashers did, an anonymous killer seeking revenge on a group who wronged him. In this case, the killer was the victim of a prank involving the corpse of a young woman that so traumatized him he was hospitalized. Three years later he escapes and plans to liven up the moving party.
The film is more layered than most generic slashers of the era; the fact that there is a costume party involved allows the killer to keep switching disguises and moving among the party guests and the train, racketing up the tension. The killer's final disguise also tackles, in a very early way, issues of gender identity thirty years before that concept would begin to be seriously considered in Hollywood.
Curtis plays a great flawed Final Girl who is now paying for a mistake she made when younger and the movie ends on an ambiguous note as to the killer's fate.
The movie clearly is of its era (David Copperfield is in it!) but it holds up as a classic slasher to this day.