Dedicated horror fans look to the past to uncover forgotten chillers, or just to complete their lists of rare items unseen. For instance, although no release date has been given, we’re told that Kino Lorber will be giving us Victor Halperin’s 1933 film Supernatural, starring Carole Lombard. Although it hasn’t the best reputation, it’s one I’ve never seen, and its original poster is a beauty.
One happy discovery for many fans is 1972’s Horror Express (Pánico en el transiberiano), which circulated on double bills in the middle 1970s; I remember catching it at the old Fairfax Theater, with Larry Cohen’s It’s Alive. Fans looking to see everything by Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee found it a bright spot amid less rewarding attractions: Nothing but the Night, From Beyond the Grave. A hybrid Eurohorror, Pánico was produced by an ex-pat American and directed by an ambitious Spaniard. They cast their picture very smartly — Telly Savalas takes a showy role as a domineering Cossack soldier.
More than a few American actors and writers ended up in European production, sometimes to avoid the blacklist but more often because they found themselves to be more marketable in Rome or Madrid. Actor Mel Welles built a minor career as a director. When actor/writer Mickey Knox tried producing, he discovered a new world of shaky financing and unenforceable showbiz contracts. Years earlier, producer Sidney Pink relocated to Denmark to make a pair of fantasy films more cheaply than he could in Hollywood. Later in the decade he enjoyed a string of successes in Spain.
The blacklisted screenwriter Bernard Gordon worked in Spain as well, writing for producers Samuel Bronston and Philip Yordan. A decade later he produced a trio of films with Eugenio Martín, a competent director who had filmed second unit for Luis Buñuel on Tristana. Horror Express is the best remembered of the three. Gordon hired a fellow blacklistee, Julian Halevy, to help pen the script. Halevy’s real name was Julian Zimet, but the blacklist prevented him from using it when he wrote Edgar G. Ulmer’s The Naked Dawn, Henry Hathaway’s Circus World and Andrew Marton’s Crack in the World, films produced in Mexico, Spain and England. François Truffaut said that The Naked Dawn was the formative basis for his own Jules and Jim, but the kudos went to director Edgar Ulmer. Blacklistees faced cruel treatment in a frightened Hollywood, but once in Europe, some of them looked out for each other.
Horror Express is a lively and agreeable horror/sci-fi hybrid that also an interesting period picture. In China’s Szechuan Province in 1906, the stuffy Professor Sir Alexander Saxton (Christopher Lee) finds a fossilized ‘missing link,’ and packs it in a carefully locked crate for shipment West on the Transsiberian Express. A second Englishman taking the long, cold train ride is Dr. Wells (Peter Cushing), a genial fellow with an eye for the ladies. Other passengers of note are a Rasputin-like mad monk named Pujardov (Alberto de Mendoza), a Russian countess (Silvia Tortosa), a police inspector (Julio Peña) and an industrial spy, Natasha (Helga Liné). The general Pánico kicks in right at the outset when Saxton’s fossil proves to be very much alive and gets loose on the train. Passengers turn up dead, with their eyes burned white and bleeding. The monster is cornered and shot, but transfers its life-force to a new host, and the killings continue. A Cossack Captain named Kazan (Telly Savalas) comes aboard to put paid to the creature, only to see his troops transformed into a platoon of the Living Dead. Saxton and Wells maintain a proper British rationality, but find themselves at a loss for ideas to defeat the menace: just looking at one of the possessed demon-men is deadly.
Whether by accident or design, Bernard Gordon had a background in fantastic films. Back in the 1950s he labored for relative nickels and dimes grinding out scripts for Sam Katzman quickies like Zombies of Mora Tau and Hellcats of the Navy. Horror Express is eclectic to say the least. The monster fossil seems inspired by elements of Quatermass and the Pit and Attack of the Crab Monsters. The glowing-eyes and the horde of blind dead attackers are consistent with Spanish horror cinema of the time — tacky but effective. The clever notion to stage the drama on a claustrophobic train chugging through a snowbound landscape was dictated by production practicality — the producer had constructed an excellent train set for their previous movie. One very spooky detail is that the monster’s deadly eyes are only effective in the dark. Saxton and Wells make use of an oil lamp to neutralize their inhuman opponent.
Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing were reportedly happy to receive job offers that allowed them to play something other than monsters or fanatic scientists — Saxton and Wells are reasonable heroes, fussy gentlemen who even have a sense of humor. We’re told that Chris Lee persuaded Cushing to take the job to raise his spirits after the recent loss of his beloved wife. Peter Cushing’s pleasantly superficial Wells entertains a beautiful passenger in his room, makes petty jokes and even bribes a baggage man to peek into Saxton’s secret shipping container. Although there isn’t as much comedy relief as some reviewers seem to think, Saxton and Wells remind us superficially of Naughton Wayne and Basil Radford, the droll duo from Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes that worry about cricket matches back in England even as their lives are threatened. When a soldier suggests that Wells or Saxby could be hosting a body-hopping menace, Cushing’s Wells is deeply offended:
“Why, we’re British!”
Telly Savalas was given equal billing on American posters, but his Cossack Captain is an abbreviated guest star turn. Blundering onto the train with a dozen armed men, Captain Kazan assigns catching monsters a lower priority than enforcing his personal control and turning a profit. The moment a passenger accuses the priest Pujardov, Kazan is willing to have him shot:
“Aww, we’ve got plenty of priests.”
Did Gordon and Zimet model Kazan after a hypocritical Hollywood producer, or perhaps the exploitative Philip Yordan? Alternately, could the name be an allusion to another prominent blacklist figure? As it turns out, the passengers have much more to fear than just the monster. To resolve the crisis in an expedient manner, both Kazan and the Imperial Russian authorities are prepared to kill everybody on the train.
Horror Express benefits from its claustrophobic setting on board a moving train. The interior train sets are quite good. Most of the costumes are acceptable, although some of the Russians look altogether too Spanish. The original hairy horror-fossil from China is only adequate, although he does have a wicked clawed hand, and his one remaining glowing eye is unexpectedly creepy. Director Martín uses editing to create the monster’s ‘death gaze’ – he throws the image of a victim out of focus, cuts, and then refocuses on an altered makeup. The makeup effects are crude but jarring, especially views of various possessed monsters with glowing eyes. Some of the demonic possession cutaways appear to be second-unit work, using sculpted heads fitted with glowing orbs in place of eyes.
The show has great fun presenting its scientific notions, which are mostly silly-science. When Dr. Wells’ post-mortem opens up a victim’s skull, we’re told that the ‘smooth, featureless, blank’ brain inside indicates that all of the victim’s memory has been extracted. Later on, Wells extracts fluid from the dead creature’s grisly eye and examines it under a microscope. As in a View-Master presentation, Saxon immediately sees absurd latent images of dinosaurs and the Earth from space, that ‘prove’ that the original alien monster is an extraterrestrial that has been here for millions of years. It’s fun to see Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing and several other actors playing this hoary scene as if it were top quality Michael Crichton pseudo-science.
Actually, the crazy script’s fantastic details are rather consistent. As the creature absorbs human brains, its reserve of knowledge and special talents grows exponentially, just like Corman & Griffith’s atomic crab monsters. After a thief is killed, the beast knows how to pick locks with a bent nail. Presumably interested in returning to space, the disguised alien discovers that a civil engineer was a student of the Russian space scientist Konstantin Tsilkovsky, and adds him to his brain-harvest queue. Priest Pajardov is a thinly disguised Rasputin clone. Convinced that the powerful alien is The Devil, Pajardov switches allegiances and offers himself as a vessel for possession. The rather chilling final shot sees the Pajardov-alien driving a barreling locomotive through the Siberian night, his coal-red eyes staring through the frosty glass like a deranged Casey Jones.
Almost all of the exterior train views are miniatures, as well as a Siberian outpost. We’re told that all of the exterior train shots (except the station at the beginning) are miniatures, which I believe is entirely possible. The night scenes of the train certainly are models. Some daytime shots look good enough to be full-sized, but I think they’re very large miniatures — only the smokestack smoke betrays a hint of scale.
It’s all in the way the miniature trains are filmed. Low-angle shots with a real sky in the background look the best, while others taken from a bird’s-eye view make the large train model look like a toy. Still, they look far better than Antonio Margheriti’s miniature train work in the very expensive Duck You Sucker, which ranges from adequate to flatly unconvincing. Margheriti’s effects work in general has always been imaginative and colorful, but not often very realistic. The train effects he reportedly created for Enzo G. Castellari’s The Inglorious Bastards (1978) are somewhat better.
