Chop. The Midnight Picture Show planned The Midnight Meat Train as the first of their 'Films of Blood' in 2005, backed by finance from Lakeshore Entertainment and distribution by Lionsgate. The morning rain had turned into a light drizzle by twilight. I think that the kind of fiction that I write is very much about the way that lots of different types of people deal with the invasion of the monstrous or the supernatural in their lives – and I don’t want them all to deal with it in the same way. They were too hot with the sight behind him, they boiled his tears away. He knew why not. This is Kitamura’s first American release, and there’s no question that it works. It was coming up to six when Mahogany woke. Then his body collapsed, and his hands, and his life, and his sacred duty folded up under a weight of grey flesh. Would he have been delivered to his family in New Jersey, and given a decent Christian burial? There were one or two bodies he contemplated following, but there was so much dross amongst them: so few worth the chase. Today I'll be looking at his short Story, The Midnight Meat Train. In the utter blackness he reached out for support and his flailing arms encompassed the body beside him. He must walk out like an innocent, arousing no suspicion. Each step he took was a torment, but the Butcher seemed far too engrossed in his conversation to turn round. The air was about as clear-smelling as it ever got in Manhattan. They had a scent all of their own. Not one, but a dozen or more, heaped haphazardly on top of each other, like pathetic trophies. Hostel? Maybe, at the back of his dozing mind, Kaufman half-registered that the doors between the second and first cars had been slid open. 1 The doors hissed closed and the sound of power surged through the train. The knife sped towards Mahogany’s eye, but an error of judgement buried it instead in his neck. The door was opening, and the face of the slaughterer came into view. It was a thin reflection, but Kaufman could see quite well enough how changed he was. The city would go about its business in ignorance: never knowing what it was built upon, or what it owed its life to. The man spoke. It’s now three decades since another acclaimed author from England’s North Western city of Liverpool, Ramsey Campbell, set down his introduction to the first editions of the three Books of Blood. Motes of dust hung in the beams, turning over and over. All he could hear was the hum of the tannoy. Nobody could possibly blame him. He would bleed to death, he decided, where he lay. In film, though, horror was very much the order of the day – Hellraiser and its sequels made his reputation, Nightbreed’s siding with the monsters confused a studio but found a huge audience that demands a forthcoming director’s cut fully twenty five years later and Lord of Illusions is an underrated treatise on magic and illusion. He had to believe it. The body hung upside-down, swinging back and forth to the rhythm of the train, in unison with its three fellows; an obscene dance macabre. “I was the ideal candidate for this film, being a huge meat eater. That was some improvement at least. Catch an Express to Far Rockaway. What I loved about the original story was the ending and how Barker went from telling a pretty straight forward slasher tale (ala Jack the Ripper) to something that was otherworldly (ala H.P. There was much more in the darkness, flickering and flapping. It looked a little small beside the Butcher’s paraphernalia. He stood on the platform and scanned his fellow-travellers critically. A swift arrest was promised, though none was made.This recent trio of corpses was not the first to be discovered in such a state; the very day that Kaufman had arrived a story had broken in The Times that was still the talk of every morbid secretary in the office.The story went that a German visitor, lost in the subway system late at night, had come across a body in a train. ‘See, they do all this cloning stuff and it gets out of hand. He lay under one of the seats now, sprawled along the vibrating wall of the car, hidden from view. He stayed at the door while the train rattled on, while his blood drained from his extremities, and his brain reeled from lack of oxygen. Clive Barker, its author, had arrived. There would need to be consultations with the Fathers, but sooner or later a replacement would have to be found, and it would be, he felt, a criminal waste of his experience not to take on an apprentice. A planned mid-2005 date to shoot in Montreal, though, came and went and Tatopoulos eventually dropped off the project and shortly afterwards made his directorial debut with the Underworld prequel, Rise of the Lycans. Bodies destroyed by excess and by indifference. Hide from me?’. His was a secret life, and it was merely pride that longed for recognition. And the butcher was still loose.The City Fathers, in their wisdom, declared a complete close-down on press reports of the slaughter. Boston was amazing… But I wanted to see New York. At least he thought it was a football, until he peered more attentively at it, and recognized it as a human head, the head of the Butcher. And with the great help of Clive, with my wonderful cast and great producers and my crew, I think I have.”. The coffee? He went to the window. Finally, this all too naked slab had been hung by the feet from one of the holding handles set in the roof of the car, and a black plastic bucket, lined with a black plastic bag, had been placed beneath the corpse to catch the steady fall of blood from its wounds. It was small, more with a confusion of feelings than with fear. The tired flesh of their faces was pulled tight over their skulls, so that it shone with tension. Maybe he even heard the scuffle as Mahogany subdued the youth with the spaced- out stare. Only the previous week another three killings had been reported. The women who cleaned the offices were chatting down the corridor: otherwise the place was lifeless. His eyes, unblinking, could not close off the appalling scene through the curtain. Based on a short story by Clive Barker, The Midnight Meat Train was released in 2008 before being rushed to DVD, and honestly, it isn’t hard to see why. That's why I had a discussion with my costume designer Chris Lawrence, and with Vinnie himself. Maybe the driver was keen to be home, wrapped up in bed with his wife. He felt and heard the brakes being applied. King’s quote, stories like “The Midnight Meat Train” – and the simple connotation of ‘blood’ in the title of the collection – led to an early critical pigeon-holing of Clive as a simple purveyor of graphic violence, with sex and horror thrown in in abundance for good measure. What had been breasts were leathery bags hanging off the torso, the genitalia shrunken away. I know that this is too good to be true.’ But they sent me the script and it was excellent. He must dispatch this ragged creature immediately. And the driver? “He was an inveterate traveller – I think one of those people who liked to reinvent himself when he went places: he could tell monstrous lies about himself! He needed to live, and sleep, and shit like them, too. The head, lolling on its slit neck. The Midnight Meat Train (3 Stars) Leon Kaufman is infatuated with New York City, the city he had always wanted to live in. thought Kaufman. So I was like a kid in a candy store any time we filmed the scary bits. He was in the same train as the Subway Butcher, the monster who strung his victims up by the feet from the straps, hairless and naked. He had deadlines to meet, of course, like the people in the street. Lovecraft). " Kaufman surveyed the report that sprawled across the front page of the newspaper. In “The Midnight Meat Train,” Kaufman’s a real marginal, a disenfranchised accountant whose life doesn’t mean anything until he realises that there are greater forces at work than he had ever thought. The Midnight Meat Train, is so ridiculous, it’s the King of all horror movies... Look, you see me, right, and I get two passengers on the train, I hook them up and I skin them – you actually see me skinning them, pulling the skins off of human beings. All in all, he was content. He heard the cabin door open. Before he could prevent himself he felt his hands sinking into the lukewarm flesh, and his fingers grasping the open edge of muscle on the dead woman’s back, his fingertips touching the bone of her spine. It had two arms and two legs as he did; its head was not abnormally shaped. Nothing came but grunts. Los derechos de los textos que aquí aparecen pertenecen a cada autor. He had watched her in the hot afternoon, sluggish and ugly, indifferent to the atrocities that were being committed every hour in her throttled passages.It was no Palace of Delights.It bred death, not pleasure.Everyone he met had brushed with violence; it was a fact of life. What do you think I am?’, ‘You must do it for us, and for those older than us. Were these really its ancients, its philosophers, its creators? It stayed in notes for the next eight years. Surely the Butcher must hear, or smell? The little father who had spoken earlier stood in front of Kaufman. Midnight Meat Train is adapted from a short story written by Clive Barker. The driver had managed to separate Kaufman’s lips. So much detail, so much accumulated expertise. Mahogany made his way down Amsterdam towards the Subway at 145th Street. Production designer is Clark Hunter (The Astronaut Farmer, All the Pretty Horses). Hear no evil. A rain of dawn light was pouring through a grating in the roof of the station. They could be growing fucking monsters for all we know. It wasn’t until three-thirty in the morning that one Captain Davis, coming on duty, recognized the man as a retired flower salesman from the Bronx called Hank Vasarely. Home in an hour. There was a bad run in the mid-2000s, where … “One schoolboy was leading the laughter and applause,” he noted later. The two wounds spouted little arcs of blood. The door was pulled closed from the other side, and the footsteps receded again. Yes, a station. Nobody had boarded the train. The tricks of his extraordinary trade. The apartment was dark. It was great and I was utterly intrigued... this is an author… Somebody who really did this, really the first guy that I’d met who actually put words on paper. At the time he had just done some children’s books that he had just set up at Disney, and he thought it might taint that situation a little. This was the Midnight Meat Train. It shunted off from the station, the lights flickering as it used a surge of power to pick up some speed again. He turned away, and as he did so a football was pitched out of the train and rolled to a halt in front of the Father. The torches behind it threw its face into shadow, but its outline could be clearly seen. You won’t find any gentle, soft, entertaining, ‘just for the sake of it’ horror here. Mahogany felt the blade in his neck as a choking sensation, almost as though he had caught a chicken bone in his throat. Instinct took over. Kaufman looked up at the sunlight, now falling all around him. He hadn’t seen such a beautiful thing since he was a child. Instead, it was part of a longer observation that others at the convention, such as Peter Straub and Douglas Winter, were talking in glowing terms about these new Books of Blood, an indication to King that something was about to happen… He said “Well, I haven’t read this guy, but from what I understand it’s like what [Jon Landau] said ‘I have seen the future of rock-and-roll, and his name is Bruce Springsteen.’ Sounds like Clive Barker might be the future of horror.”, Clive shakes his head even today with something approaching disbelief, “He said, God bless him, that I was the future of horror. Then he sat down in front of the piles of orders he had been tussling with for the best part of three days, and began work. He got up, his head full of slumber, and almost fell over as the train rocked violently. A morning shift of cleaners were already busy hosing the blood off the seats and the floor of the train. I like to be excited. Relief made him careless. He’d want to let the rush pass anyway: just follow one or two choice pieces to the end of the line. His cheek was laid against the bald flesh of the thigh. Even the studs in her ears.More bizarre than the stripping was the neat and systematic way in which the clothes had been folded and placed in individual plastic bags on the seat beside the corpse.This was no irrational slasher at work. The article was unsensationally written, but the simple clarity of the style made the subject seem more appalling. The air seemed solid, it was so thick with the smell of ancient earth. Probably between the driver’s legs even now, Kaufman thought, his lip curling. In one stroke. But no: the man had gone. That was all Kaufman could see, and it was more than he wanted to see. Suddenly his tongue was seized tight and twisted on the root. In the bathroom the rain was dripping on the box of the air-conditioner, filling the apartment with a rhythmi-cal slapping sound. Click. Straight through. ‘Probably a fucking cop,’ he said, as his parting shot. Was the train even now hurtling through an unknown tunnel, a tunnel without a single station to identify it, towards its destruction? His eyes jerked open. The Midnight Meat Train is a 2008 horror film based on Clive Barker's 1984 short story of the same name, which can be found in Volume One of Barker's collection Books of Blood.The film follows a photographer who attempts to track down a serial killer dubbed the "Subway Butcher", and discovers more than he bargained for under the city streets.. The driver nodded, and led himup a steep flight of steps and through an alley-way and so out on to the sidewalk. Tales of Mystery and Imagination es un blog sin ánimo de lucro cuyo único fin consiste en rendir justo homenaje a los escritores de terror, ciencia-ficción y fantasía del mundo. Chop. Then the train began to slow. There’s something down there they won’t tell us about. Behind Kaufman, the other creatures had begun to unhook the bodies from the straps, their hands laid in that same delighting manner on the smooth breasts and flanks of flesh. The potential victim hadn’t looked that healthy anyway, he thought to himself, he was an anaemic Jewish accountant probably. Kaufman had reached the door. It seemed more geriatric than psychotic; generations of fictional man-eaters had not prepared him for its distressing vulnerability. It had clearly taken in the situation very quickly. He checked his appearance in the mirror. Whiter than any living man should be, covered in grime and blood. After all, wasn’t his career sanctioned by the highest possible authorities? Kaufman, in shock, dropped the cleaver. “It being a Barker creation only made it more interesting and dynamic. ‘As it is,’ he said, ‘I’ll have to do away with you.’ Kaufman raised the knife. He looked at the man with a slightly disdainful expres-sion on his face. It was now almost half past ten and he had not seen a single creature who was really ideal for slaughter. Kaufman looked around for a weapon, his eye steady and calculating. He glued his eye to it. It was a long time ago but I knew I wanted to get off an old Greyhound bus at Port Authority, which is what we did… Bill had lots of business in New York and I was on my own, which was wonderful. The pride he took in the genre contrasted forcibly with my own slightly furtive passion. . So short a time to lose so many treasured illusions.He was embarrassed now even to think of his naivety. The killings were so thoroughly professional that the police were interviewing every man on their records who had some past connection with the butchery trade. Kaufman was speechless. The Palace of Delights, he’d always called it, in the days of his innocence. Kaufman thrust himself further under the seat and tucked himself up into a tiny ball, with his sick-white face to the wall. He was saying something, but Mahogany’s ears were deaf to the remarks, as though he was under water. There was a blind drawn down over the window between the cars which hadn’t been down before as he remembered. ‘We all have to die some time,’ he said. The scream had cleared Kaufman’s head and he sud-denly felt released into a kind of strength. His mother vanished. There’s no accounting for time in a dead faint. From day one, I was determined to make a classic – something that after 20 years people would want to watch. Mahogany wandered into the bathroom and turned on the shower. It was a topic of conversation in every Deli and bar; and, of course, on the subway. In fact he had a woman’s mouth. Writing in May 1983, he issued an eloquent but heartfelt warning to curious readers: and, with particular emphasis on one story, he noted. No one could walk out of the film claiming they’d been misled. He was not prepared for this last horror. It would only take one more night’s labour, he felt sure, to break the back of the job, and he found it easier to concentrate without the incessant clatter of typists and typewriters on every side. He was quick, though, to defend the accusation that he was only interested in a single genre – or of evoking a single type of reaction from readers. The film was based on Clive Barker‘s The Midnight Meat Train (1984) which is in Clive Barker’s Volume One of Books of bl**d.The movie contains s**ual content, nudity, butcher, m**ders, serial killer, extreme violence, bad language, gore, suspense, thrills, mystery and a good plot. The meat-packaging plants on the water-front were being watched, the slaughter-houses scoured for clues. He could, he thought, still be taken for a man of forty-five, fifty at the outside. The regurgitated breath of a million travellers circulated in this warren, mingling with the breath of creatures far older; things with voices soft like clay, whose appetites were abominable. My creatures are not shadowy, ethereal things – you can count their tentacles, you know where they’ve got snot running from their noses. Hace unos días inicié un proyecto que pretende ser colectivo. It is my best film to date and I am proud of myself, my crew, my cast and my producers.”, Clive’s appeal to Lionsgate – and the clamour from fans – for a wider theatrical release went unheeded but the DVD release went some way to appeasing his anger, adding two and a half minutes of additional footage as well as three featurettes and an audio commentary.The enduring disappointment for Clive, though, was that the movie’s strangled release effectively ended a grander cinematic vision: “It frustrates me because we would have had a trilogy out of this. He felt his vocal cords trying to form a scream. It was intolerable: and yet to scream was to become in a short while like the creatures in front of him. On the other hand, if he were to move from his hiding place he would risk being seen and pursued. Kaufman gagged on the intruder, but had no will left to repel the attack. He weighed the cleaver in his hands, getting the balance of it, ready for the battle with these antique monsters. The movie isn’t special effects driven, but there are a lot of effects in the final reel – physical effects, not CGI effects. In an inversion of Rose’s transplantation of the Liverpool-based story, “The Forbidden,” to Chicago for Candyman, here he swapped the subways of New York for the London Underground and Leon Kaufman became police constable Kathy Blake. No trains disgorged all their passengers at Jay Street; the line ran to Mott Avenue, via the Aqueduct Race Track, past JFK Airport. He rubbed his hot eyes with the cushions of his palms till his head filled with colours. I’m not here to reassure you.’ I always thought that was a strong horror title – you know, like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: there are two words in that title, ‘chainsaw’ and ‘massacre,’ and the two words ‘midnight’ and ‘meat’ – they are words that signify you’re going to see some no-holds-barred horror.”. Some of them carried torches, which burned with a dead brown light. To be part of that great tradition was enough, would always have to remain enough. Beyond that body were the strung-up corpses of two young white women and a darker skinned male. Kaufman’s gaze followed the pointing finger into the gloom. He had seen her late at night, her dirty back streets shamelessly courting depravity. ‘What are you?’ He remembered the bearded man in the Deli. The noise was perhaps their feet on the damp earth, or perhaps their tongues clicking, or both. I was 19, maybe 20 years old. After recounting a true story about the impact he’d seen a book of tattoos have on others, he noted: In large part, the placing of “The Midnight Meat Train” right up front was an overt statement of intent. Tears blotted out the shambles he stood in. This was the Palace of Delights, after all, and everyone had their right to a little love in the dark. It was a good feeling. He was, after all, not one of the common herd. He’d heard them so often; a panacea. “Over the years,” he noted, “we’ve had a few of the stories turned into movies – Candyman came from a story in the Books of Blood – but the great bulk of the stories have remained unfilmed because I wanted to find a time when I had a team around me who would allow me to make a series of movies. Whether he was capable of fulfilling his threat was doubtful. Some greedy cop had leaked the salient details to a reporter from The Times. There would be no pursuit down the train, he knew that: there would be no cowardice, not now. He was getting old. He was only small in his dream and was looking up at her radiant face while she worked. There was no avoiding it. 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