Based on Books - Clive Barker's "Midnight Meat Train"

There are spoilers all over in this text!

I LOVE the metro, subway, UBahn, underground, metro, métro, metró, metroul, whatever you call it. As long as a city has underground trains and a plan to go with it, I can find my way around and feel safe too. It takes me where I want to go, it shields me from the weather, it provides me a space to (hopefully) sit down and read my book... I feel like getting out that door and running to the next UBahn station just writing this, it's just extremely cozy down there.

But I hear there are people who don't share my enthusiasm, especially the dark tunnels and their supposed secrets animating the darker corners of their imagination - notably Clive Barker... whose iconic 1984 short story collection Books of Blood Volumes 1-3 even opens (as far as I remember) with a novelette/short story set in the New York City underground: The Midnight Meat Train.

The striking story worthy of the title of the collection revolves around not one, but two protagonists; office worker Leon Kaufman and a figure known as Mahogany, the midnight butcher. 

The tension in NYC is palpable; a serial killer has been committing extremely gruesome and, for the lack of a better word, unusual murders in subway trains, troubling and terrorizing the good people of the city. Two unassuming New Yorkers have their own troubles in mind; Kaufman, who feels his love for the city he always dreamed of diminishing and Mahogany who feels his age and considers finding a younger successor for his profession of chosen slayer for the Fathers of the City. When Kaufman falls asleep in the last train of the day the both of them have a fateful encounter which will lead Kaufman to the root of the killings and to much further.

The Midnight Meat Train is one of those writings which doesn't lose any time to get straight to the point - personally I really dig this narration which provides the bare minimum of background information as to the two characters, so the focus is totally and completely directed towards the climax where the two men clash in the gory train. What we have here is a Caravaggio painting disguised as short story, the light is only and solely directed towards the atrocious, the murder, the gore and the rest is obscured. I feel this is important to state because the movie being a movie changes that. More on that later though.

Another significant contrast point between novelette and movie is the unlikability of Kaufman. It is unclear to me why details like him thinking the noises in the train are from rape and goes there "with no more than a mild voyeuristic urge" or the disdain with which he looks at the guy at a cafe who is missing three teeth are added to the story - Do most guys think like that and he's supposed to be "everyman"? Is he supposed to be unlikable? Is it a New Yorker way of interaction? Did Barker want us to be less disturbed by the end that awaits him or to even hint at an underlying corruptibility already inside him? Who knows. Incidentally I liked Mahogany more since he was a quiet, focused, no-nonsens kind of person trying to do his job, it didn't matter to me what job.

Switching to the end - little monsters, abominations as the driving force behind our world and our city certainly isn't something Barker invented, but so masterly applied by him as to constitute, together with secret pacts and interactions between humans and these supernatural masters, a big chunk of the essence of Barkerian horror from that time. Just think of Cenobites or the Yattering or the monsters who ascend to the surface of the Earth to have their festival and rape women and make babies, there are so many and I don't remember all the stories in the Books of Blood, but I hope you get my point.

Let us now look at the movie The Midnight Meat Train (2008) by Ryûhei Kitamura, starring Vinnie Jones as Mahogany and Bradley Cooper as Kaufman - I'm actually not sure whether or not the characters have the same names in the movie. I have seen the movie on German late night TV some years ago and re-watched it for this blog post, but I watched it while sick and feverish in Bucharest (I really don't know how to heal myself, the movie probably added to my overall malaise), so I don't really remember some details. What I do remember, though, are some blatant differences to Barker's story and not always favorable differences they are.

The bareness of the story, the theatrical nakedness is taken away - we have a fully fleshed out main character here with a life - his job, aspirations, drives, girlfriend, best friend are known to us. Even the unlikability I mentioned above is gone - Cooper is a perfect, 100% Hollywood lead, no bumps, no jaggedness or such - he's Spongebob in that episode he turns all flat and clean and smooth and shiny. And in the context of the kind of movie this aspires to be, it works. Added subplots like him looking for the perfect foto in the subway or his girlfriend are superfluous and only distract from the breathtaking simplicity of the plot, but hey, you need to fill those 100 minutes with something.

Furthermore, the same focus isn't being given to Vinnie Jones' character, and the equal distribution of the focus on two characters is gone. Although I am not a football fan, I am  Vinnie Jones fan ever since I saw the crazy Christmas movie Survive Style 5+ - watch it. And he's great here too, in my opinion even better than Cooper, he just does that psychopath thing so well. Him being casted as Mahogany is a clear plus on the part of the movie, but isn't enough to save it when compared to the book.

My final verdict: The movie is still worth a watch, even though in this case, Clive Barker's novelette/story is the clear winner for me!