Horror As Folk: Going Off the Rails on a Crazy Train with Amok Train (1989)

Back in 1974, Ovidio G. Assonitis released Beyond the Door, a film that ripped off The Exorcist so blatantly that it got hit with a successful lawsuit from Warner Bros. In proper Italian fashion, the success of Beyond the Door was followed by two completely unrelated movies which were made under other auspices and then renamed Beyond the Door 2 and 3 after the fact.

The first of these was Shock in 1977, Mario Bava’s last theatrical feature as director. The second was Amok Train (also known as Death Train), released some twelve years later as Beyond the Door 3. There’s not much to connect the three films, except for tenuous themes of possession and deviltry, and Amok Train here often has more in common with the Omen series of films than with The Exorcist – but that never stopped the Italian film industry, or their U.S. distributors!

Amok Train is a better title (and easier to write) than Beyond the Door 3, so that’s what I’m going to call it throughout this column. The history of the film actually links it more to The Curse, a notorious 1987 Lovecraft adaptation starring Wil Wheaton that is another Assonitis joint. Following The Curse, Assonitis’ production company started two more flicks with similar working titles – The Bite and The Train. The Bite became Curse 2: The Bite in 1989 and The Train, well, you can probably guess…

Screenwriter Sheila Goldberg was no stranger to this kind of material. A dialogue coach on Argento’s Phenomena (and several other movies), she has writing credits on such films as Michele Soavi’s StageFright, Zombie 5, and Ghosthouse – itself originally released as La Casa 3 in an attempt to tie it to Evil Dead, which was released in Italy as La Casa.

For Amok Train, she wanted to do a “horror version” of the 1985 Jon Voight flick Runaway Train. How this translated into a story about the bride of Satan onboard a steam locomotive in Serbia in the midst of a real-life civil war is something that you would have to ask the filmmakers, I suppose, but here we are.

Assonitis hired American director Jeff Kwitny, whose previous film, Iced, was a slasher at a ski resort. Kwitny didn’t direct many other movies after Amok Train, but he went on to have a (perhaps surprising) career as a writer for children’s cartoon shows, including credits on Animaniacs, Street Sharks, and Mummies Alive!

The plot concerns a group of American students who go on a field trip to the Balkans to witness a “Passion Play” that is older than Christ – a contradiction in terms that the students point out but which, like many things in the film, is never meaningfully explained. This brings them to a tiny village in Serbia, where they are promptly set upon by the locals, and make their escape by grabbing onto a passing train, thereby providing the setting for most of the picture.

We can infer, long before we are actually told, that the rest of the characters are mere collateral and that the real target of everything is shy, withdrawn Beverly (Mary Kohnert), who has been chosen since before she was born to be the bride of the Devil. All the nonsense with the train and the village and the field trip in the first place is just a method to bring her where she needs to be so that Satan can consummate their wedding night.

This is all stuff that has been extremely familiar since Rosemary’s Baby, and aside from the odd location, there is little enough new on the table in Amok Train. The road to get from point A to point B is mostly a lot of talking and shots of the train careening down the track, occasionally broken up by suitably gloppy kill scenes and gore effects, including a particularly memorable moment in which one character tears her own face off.

A lot of the effects scenes are second-unit stuff, especially a variety of miniatures of the train going off the tracks and plowing through the countryside. Meanwhile, the footage is eaten up by various civil engineers discussing (in unsubtitled Serbian, I assume) the problem of having a rogue train running around.

The real train apparently provided the filmmakers some problems, too. “We had a steam train that was at our disposal that we rented from the Yugoslavian government,” Kwitny later recalled. “The problem was that you’d have a scene where the real train was coming down the tracks, but then I’d need to have it back up to shoot another take, but it would take an hour, because to back up a train and get it going again would take about an hour.”

Nonetheless, the train setting is probably worth the trouble, as it helps the film stand out amidst a raft of similar contemporaries. As should perhaps come as no surprise to anyone who has seen some of the other films I mentioned in Sheila Goldberg’s CV, there’s not a lot in Amok Train that makes any sense. Beverly slits her wrists in one scene, only to have them completely healed and forgotten in the next – the only fob toward an explanation we are ever given being an earlier reassurance by the villain that she can’t die because she has been chosen. But, like a lot of these kinds of movies, if you can lean back and go with it, the nonsense is generally of the entertaining variety.

So, why am I writing about Amok Train in this column? It isn’t folk horror in any meaningful sense, unless every movie about the Devil is. But this wraps its Rosemary’s Baby by way of The Omen plotting in the aesthetics of folk horror, at least, from the fear of rural peoples to outsiders traveling in a foreign (and less “advanced”) country to the ritual surrounding the “Passion Play” that they’re all there to attend.

Much of this ritual is also nonsense, but it at least feels legitimate enough. There’s a particularly nice touch where the cultists are all clacking rocks together. The movie itself may be pure Satanic pablum, but the visuals of the village where the horror begins are prime folk horror, even if very little else is.

Perhaps the most interesting consequence of all this is the juxtaposition between this rural folk horror imagery and the more industrial imagery of the train itself and the place where the final ritual occurs, which may be strewn with Spanish moss and other organic matter but appears to take place inside some sort of abandoned industrial complex, as Satan himself rises from a huge block of Brutalist stone.

Also, spoilers I suppose, but this may be one of the only movies where fucking actually defeats the Devil and his followers. Talk about a change of pace!