Download Midnight Meat Train
Gemma Harkrider
Leon presents his photos to the police, but Detective Hadley disbelieves him. Leon's involvement quickly turns into a dark obsession, upsetting his girlfriend Maya, who is also disbelieving of his story. Leon follows Mahogany onto the last subway train of the night, only to witness a bloodbath. The butcher kills several passengers and hangs their bodies on meat hooks. After a brief scuffle with Mahogany, Leon passes out on the train. He awakes the next morning in a slaughterhouse with strange markings carved into his chest.
A concerned Maya and her friend Jurgis examine Leon's photos of Mahogany, leading them to the killer's apartment. After breaking in, Jurgis is captured, though Maya escapes with timetables that record over a hundred years of murders on the subway. She goes to the police but finds Hadley still skeptical. When Hadley presses Maya to return the timetables, she demands answers. At gunpoint, Hadley directs her to take the midnight train to find Jurgis. Leon heads to a hidden subway entrance in the slaughterhouse, arming himself with several knives.
Leon boards the train as Mahogany completes his nightly massacre and corners Maya. Leon attacks the butcher with a knife, and the two fight in between the swinging human flesh. Human body parts are ripped, thrown, and used as weapons. Jurgis, hung from a meat hook, dies when he is gutted. The train reaches its final stop, a cavernous abandoned station filled with skulls and decomposing bodies. The conductor appears, and asks Leon and Maya to "please step away from the meat." The true purpose of the abandoned station is revealed, as reptilian creatures enter the car and start eating the bodies of the murdered passengers. Leon and Maya flee into the cavern. Mahogany, battered, fights to the death with Leon, who stabs a broken femur through Mahogany's throat. Mahogany grins in his dying throes, saying, "Welcome!"
Detective Hadley hands the train schedule to the new butcher, who wears a ring with the symbol of the group that feeds the creatures. The killer walks onto the midnight train and reveals himself as Leon.
Barker was angry with Lionsgate's treatment, believing the studio's president Joe Drake to be shortchanging other people's films to focus more attention on films like The Strangers, where he received a producing credit: "The politics that are being visited upon it have nothing to do with the movie at all. This is all about ego, and though I mourn the fact that The Midnight Meat Train was never given its chance in theaters, it's a beautifully stylish, scary movie, and it isn't going anywhere. People will find it, and whether they find it in midnight shows or they find it on DVD, they'll find it, and in the end the Joe Drakes of the world will disappear."[11]
Scott Weinberg of Cinematical called the film "easily the best Clive Barker adaptation since the first Hellraiser film," saying that "screenwriter Jeff Buhler manages to maintain the sly sense of dread that permeates the best of Barker's horror tales."[16]
Director Ryûhei Kitamura and director of photography Jonathan Sela give the film a gritty and polished look that reminded me a lot of Se7en. I especially enjoyed the blue lightning during the subway and meat packing plant scenes. They had a very Ninth Circle of Hell feel to them that I thought was disturbing.
And if you want lots of gore in your horror film Kitamura serves up plenty of that as well. Mahogany puts all of his killing utensils to great use, especially his big meat hammer. Heads are caved in, hearts and tongues are ripped out, eyes pop out of sockets, and bodies are bled dry and hung up on hooks. Make no mistake the film lives up to its title for sure.
As the Meat Train rolls through its secret tunnels, the well dressed murderer smooths off the lipstick from her blank eyed corpse. Her perfect light is gone now, she is just meat to be cleaned and prepared.
The tungsten lights of the night alleys vs the blue white subway gallows, cold and sterile waiting for the red blood to cover its floors. Vinne waits, tool bag on his lap. He waits for a certain train, as all pass him by, he waits for the Midnight Meat Train.
I grew up watching this little British-German horror gem known as Creep. It was one of those findings I stumbled upon while changing the channel and I became enamored to the point I stopped whenever they play that movie, which normally was around midnight, so I guess that somehow shows my dedication. Around the same time I started seeing TV spots about this Vinnie Jones-starrer film and not knowing the name of Creep, I always confused the two.
See below for the exact times and descriptions of the 1 jump scares in The Midnight Meat Train, which has a jump scare rating of 0.5.Jump Scare Rating: A relatively bloody slasher flick that is pretty much free from jump scares.
Synopsis: Leon, an amateur photographer, develops an interest in a series of missing person cases that lead him onto a midnight train ride.Contributor: Anthony Wilson contributed all the information on this page (Sign up now to become a contributor too! Learn more)
These are, of course, two totally different mediums. You can't compare the images conjured up in your limitless imagination as you absorb words and turn pages with those that a film forever fixes in place. When reading a book, you control it all. You control how that newspaper rolls down the street, how the train screeches into a station, the faces on that train as they angle themselves for the fastest route to the exit, and just how dark and dank those shadows in the tunnel are... On film, this is all dictated to you, the newspaper's dance is choreographed, the train has a limiter on it, the faces are actors and the shadows are cast. With a film, what you see is what you get.
So predictably, our celluloid train journey starts with the obligatory character introductions. There is the starving photographer Leon trying to capture New York on film and his lovely, supportive girlfriend who exploits her connections to the high-brow art world to land Leon a meeting with a prominent art dealer. The dealer encourages Leon to get more involved in what he's shooting and really get to the heart of the city.
All in all, I guess the true triumph of this film is the support that it has garnered before anyone even saw it. Everyone just had faith in Clive Barker and with good reason! Those aspects of his original story which survive in the film are brilliant, and makes this otherwise local train ride an express.
In 1984 the Books of Blood by Clive Barker were published and quickly gained a following worldwide. Literary eminences like Stephen King noticed early on the creativity and powerful prose throughout the Books of Blood, bringing Clive Barker's stories to the forefront of horror fiction. One of these stories was "The Midnight Meat Train" following one Leon Kaufman as he discovers the origins of a series of grisly subway train murders in New York City... and the controlling forces behind it all.
Nobody believes Leon, but he knows this guy is for real. He follows him off the subway and finds out he works at a meat factory. He stalks him through a jungle of hanging beef, has to climb up one of them to hide, gets chased by him.
Film Examples:
- The Conductor states that "We protect them and nurture them" in reference to the elders... why do that when you could probably eradicate them instead?
- Sort of explained at the end of the short story. The ancients' immortality is ensured by the human flesh (they are themselves degenerate humans), and said immortality is needed for them to continually serve the Eldritch Abomination they made a deal with so New York would prosper. It's also implied that similar deals were brokered with similar abominations at the site of every major city in the world. Even yours.
- And beyond that - why human flesh? Is there suddenly something wrong with beef/pork/chicken or any other type of meat?
- Sort of explained at the end of the short story. The ancients' immortality is ensured by the human flesh (they are themselves degenerate humans), and said immortality is needed for them to continually serve the Eldritch Abomination they made a deal with so New York would prosper. It's also implied that similar deals were brokered with similar abominations at the site of every major city in the world. Even yours.
- it's also implied that all myths of Gods, ever, including the Abrahamic deity, are sanitized accounts of these abominations.
- That's only Paranoia Fuel if you live in a big city.
- Or its suburbs, but, this being Clive Barker, do you really think the countryside is better?
- It is not, unless you feel a burning need to run across the Nightbreed or Rawhead Rex.
- Which doesn't, in itself, explain why they need to be immortal in order to serve the whatever-it-is. Mahogany certainly didn't get immortality out of the deal; indeed, him getting old is the main reason he screws up enough to get himself killed in the short story. The Elders claim they have to be cannibals, but there's no evident reason why their role couldn't likewise be filled by consecutive generations of mortals: they, personally, just plain don't want to die, and are making up excuses, same as the Elder spokesman in the story denies liking human flesh while drooling over a corpse.
- So at the end, Leon goes to work for the Elders... why, exactly? What part of anything that's happened makes this seem like a good idea?
- In the original short story, he directly meets the Eldritch Abomination the Elders work for, which drives him insane with a mixture of terror and instinctive drive to worship it. It breaks him so thoroughly that he is incapable of doing anything else. It even ends with his now loving New York when he used to despise it.
- If the Gods need human meat as a part of the deal with the humans, why they don't just use human meat from criminals or bodies of people that is about to die in hospitals/ dead bodies from morgues? Killing random people on the Subway seems to be a questionable choice
- They probably do that too, but only so many criminals and hospital corpses can vanish before they need to do something else. Though perhaps if they took the corpses of people set to be cremated and replaced the ashes...