Image: Everett
Airports are packed during the holiday season, highways are jammed, and, yes, even railroad stations get filled up with travelers eager to see friends and family members in far-flung corners of the world. While frequent flyers and other constant travelers are well accustomed to the rigors of modern-day transportation, the experience for everyone else can range from surprising to discomfiting to downright horrifying.
Filmmakers are quite aware that travel can be terrifying rather than tranquil, and so they have often drawn on the very common fears that many of us share in order to conjure up frightening features set on all types of transportation devices, most especially planes, trains and automobiles. Here are a few of our favorites; see if you can watch these videos all the way through without breaking into a cold sweat of recognition.
Snakes on a Plane (2006)
As if flying from Honolulu to Los Angeles wasn't traumatic enough, the passengers on this flight become the innocent victims of a gangster's evil plot to eliminate a federal witness. Don't worry, though, FBI agent Samuel L. Jackson won't let the plane go down.
Twilight Zone: The Movie -- "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" (1983)
John Lithgow has a little problem. Well, OK, a big problem: he doesn't like to fly, and yet he is flying, and he is disturbing the other passengers with his outsized anxieties. To make matters worse, he happens to notice a nasty creature on the wing of the plane. George Miller (Mad Max: Fury Road) directed this memorable segment of the anthology film.
The Midnight Meat Train (2008)
Photographer Bradley Cooper decides to track down a serial killer who likes to prey on people traveling via subway train late at night.
Terror Train (1980)
Jamie Lee Curtis regrets her participation in a mean prank against a nerdy fellow college student, but three years later she's really sorry when it seems that the victim of the prank is taking murderous revenge against all those responsible while traveling on a raucous party train.
Joy Ride (2001)
Paul Walker, hoping to finally get intimate with longtime friend Leelee Sobieski, offers to drive them cross-country to visit their families for the holidays. What should be a romantic road trip turns nightmarish after Walker picks up his brother Steve Zahn, who then instigates a prank via CB radio, infuriating a trucker with murderous intentions.
Christine (1983)
Director John Carpenter adapted Stephen King's novel about a 1958 Plymouth Fury that's "bad to the bone," somehow starting to kill while still on the assembly line in Detroit. Years later, nerdy student Keith Gordon is inexorably drawn to the broken-down vehicle fixes her up, and voila! He's restored a killer machine that makes driving a fatal experience for someone, if not the driver.
