Deadly Pleasures: THE MIDNIGHT MEAT TRAIN (2008)

[Originally appeared in the February 2015 issue of DEADLY Magazine.] I had survived. There were hundreds more to come, but I had made it through that dreaded first one. Arriving home on a weekday afternoon after earning an “A” on my first college test, I was looking to celebrate. So what if I would have failed without the massive grading curve my professor threw out as a life preserver for the class? An “A” was an “A”, and with the rigid time structure of high school in the rearview mirror, I had the entire afternoon to celebrate my first higher education victory (if you could call it that). I knew exactly where to go for the proper party, a destination that didn’t even require getting off the couch: the “Free Movies” menu on Xfinity.

Recently, I had been steadily devouring episodes of Post Mortem with Mick Garris on Xfinity, but on that day I was looking to watch a horror film. With a slippery (at best) grasp on my chemistry equations, the way I looked at it, I could sacrifice a little study time for some solid on-screen scares. Scrolling through the horror section on Xfinity, I saw it: The Midnight Meat Train. I stopped searching. This was the movie I’d been hearing about. The one that received a limited theatrical release that I missed out on. The one that starred a rising actor by the name of Bradley Cooper. The one from the mind of Clive Barker. Realizing this was the film based on the horror master’s short story of the same name, I pressed "play," and my blood-spattered chemistry test celebration commenced.

Jason Voorhees wields a machete, Freddy Krueger uses customized claws, and Mahogany, the imposing antagonist of The Midnight Meat Train, packs a bone-crunching wallop with his meat cleaver. Brought to life with a silent menace by Vinnie Jones, Mahogany kills unsuspecting travelers on the New York City subway—a sinister secret stumbled upon by freelance photographer Leon Kaufman (Bradley Cooper), whose initial curiosity with the hulking butcher steadily grows into a stalking obsession. “I followed him into the subway,” Leon tells his girlfriend, Maya (Leslie Bibb). “It’s always a late train. Probably the same one each time. He waits for it to empty out, and then he kills them. He butchers them like cattle.”

Naturally, like the police, Maya thinks Leon has been spending a little too much time in the dark room, but that only pushes the starving artist further into catching Mahogany red-handed with blood, and boy, are there buckets of the crimson stuff, as director Ryûhei Kitamura doesn't hold back when it comes to showing just how messy Mahogany's macabre job really is.

The calculated murders in The Midnight Meat Train are scary to watch because of their slice-and-dice brutality (Mahogany seems to view humans as cattle made to slaughter, and he treats them as such) but even more unsettling is where the violence takes place: on a subway in one of the busiest cities in the world. People aren’t getting decapitated in the isolated woods under the stars in this film, they’re having their heads bashed in underneath the harsh fluorescent lights of a public space. But timing is everything, and Mahogany is scary because he’s smart and cunning, cornering his prey in the dead of night with calculated care and ruthless efficiency. The subway becomes a horror haven that may remind some viewers of the similar setting of John Skipp and Craig Spector's seminal splatterpunk novel, The Light at the End (originally published two years after Barker’s “The Midnight Meat Train” short story).

Capturing Mahogany’s reign of terror with style is director Kitamura, who keeps the camera trained on the grisly gore, consistently and cleverly taking interesting angles on unspeakable acts. In several instances, he forces viewers to see the carnage from the point of view of the victims, in one instance even rolling the lens with the severed head of one poor soul, making us feel as though we're the ones trapped in Mahogany's mobile slaughter chute. In another scene we hang upside down with Leon’s dream self, staring at his reflection in a growing pool of blood below... quite possibly seeing our own wide, startled eyes looking back at us from the crimson puddle. The inventiveness and sheer energy of Kitamura’s direction instills a creative confidence in the film that couples nicely with the top-notch acting across the board (ranking right up there with Wet Hot American Summer as my favorite Cooper performance).

Though not as well-known as other movies based on Clive Barker's creations, The Midnight Meat Train is one of my favorite adaptations of the great imaginer's work. It’s the best kind of adaptation, one that has its own personality and expands on the source material, while ultimately still arriving at the same destination (and in this case, it’s quite a shocking final stop before the end credits roll). The film has cult status written all over it, and in the years since I experienced it for the first time (after which chemistry equations were the furthest thing from my mind), its popularity seems to have grown, slowly bringing it out of the subway tunnels and into the light. If you get the chance to climb aboard The Midnight Meat Train, don’t hesitate—it’s well worth the ride.