Horror stories have an intimate relationship with isolation. While the terrifying can occur in crowded, urban spaces, it tends to find more room to grow, breed, and fruit in remote and enforced locations. From Dracula to The Castle of Otrano to The Turn of the Screw, we as audience members have been trapped in woods, remote houses, castles perched over Romanian passes, decrepit English manors upon the moors. We’ve found cultish terror in rural corn fields and horny ghosts and murderous fathers in haunted Rocky Mountain hotels that have been shut down for the winter. We’ve been surrounded by zombies in farmhouses and stuck in Antarctic research bases with extraterrestrial invaders.
But there is a certain odd trope that has come with modern society and technological advancement. And that’s the supernatural menace on various forms of man-made vehicles, whether planes, trains, automobiles and even boats.
It could be said that the first haunted horror story was on a ship: In The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s long form poem, a sailor kills an albatross and the curse that falls upon him afterwards changes the trajectory of his life. Since that story, horror on vehicles has been our constant companion. My new novel, The Night That Finds Us All, continues this tradition with a horror story set on a 137’ Tahitian ketch named the Blackwatch. (Spoiler: It’s haunted.)
Here are my current ten favorite horror stories set on planes, trains, automobiles, spaceships, subways, and all sorts of vessels and vehicles.
Let me know your favorites! Here we go!
10. TIE Nightflyers / Fevre Dream by George R. R. Martin
Media: Novella, Novel, Film, Television (Nightflyers) / Novel (Fevre Dream)
Vehicle: Spaceship (Nightflyers) / Steamboat (Fevre Dream)
Two works by George R. R. Martin tie for tenth place in sheer vehicular horror and isolation.. The star ship Nightflyer is a haunted ship drifting through deep space, carrying secrets that drive its crew insane. It blends supernatural horror and slashers with science fiction, turning the spaceship into a claustrophobic labyrinth of paranoia and psychic dread. Fevre Dream transplants gothic vampire horror onto the Mississippi River, following a haunted steamboat and a doomed captain navigating both supernatural terror and the dark currents of human greed. It’s not as isolated as Nightflyers but nevertheless both are crackerjack tales.
(Side note: GRRM cut his teeth writing horror, and like all fantasy greats (ahem, JRRT), he knows how to blend horror with swords. GoT is a zombie apocalypse story. Just toss in some dragons and incest. Welcome to my TED talk.)
9. “The Jaunt” by Stephen King
Media: Short Story
Vehicle: Spaceship
This very short story blew my mind when I was a teenager and got a copy of Skeleton Crew in my hot hands—a paperback with an organ grinding monkey leering at me and the name STEPHEN KING emblazoned across the top. (At that point, King was already a LARGE FONT author, his name SYNONYMOUS WITH QUALITY.) Anyhoo, “The Jaunt” is a terrifying vision of teleportation-based FTL (faster than light travel, for the uninitiated), in which the process can be more horrifying than the destination. This one is a mind-breaker for the reader and well… you’ll see.
8. Howl
Media: Film
Vehicle: Commuter Train
Simply, werewolves on a train. And yeah, that doesn’t sound incredibly promising, I get it, but what it lacks in marketing panache, it makes up for in a good story, characters you care about, a little bit of the kind of paranoia and psychological pressure that made The Thing or any zombie film where one-amongst-the-survivors-has-been-bitten work. Plus, there’s good practical effects. Lots of brits, including that kid from Eragon and Sean Pertwee, one of the Doctor’s sons.
7. How Zeke Got Religion
Media: Television, Animated Short – Love Death + Robots (Netflix)
Vehicle: B-17 Bomber
This one is batshit crazy. It takes place on a B-17 bomber whose mission is to bomb a *checks notes* church in Nazi-occupied France during the WWII. For pure carnage, How Zeke Got Religion is a 17 out of 10, and the demon design (and animation) is just incroyable. Don’t believe me? Here’s a screenshot:
6. Devil
Media: Film
Vehicle: Elevator
This is an oddball movie, for sure, and one I didn’t think I’d like going in because the premise is so goofy. Imagine the pitch session for this film:
Producer: we’ve had snakes on a plane
Studio Suit: sure
P: we’ve had vampires on a plane
S: mmm, I’m not –
P: we’ve had zombies on planes and trains and boats
S: I’m not aware of –
P: but picture this *fans hands in the air* the DEVIL on an elevator
S: here’s a bucket of money
Despite all that, I found myself really enjoying the ride. And of course I love me the devil.
5. Train to Busan
Media: Film
Vehicle: Commuter Train
When this one first crossed my radar, probably in some late-night desperate scroll in whatever streaming service I first found it, I was skeptical, having been burned by the trash (save for Sam Jackson) that was Snakes on a Plane. But Busan has great, heartfelt characters, a father’s redemption, a desperate race against time as a zombie outbreak overtakes a moving train. Every car becomes a battleground, and every stop a potential death trap. The tension grows as passengers fight not just for survival, but for humanity itself. Also, it’s got this guy, who is awesome (his name is Ma Dong-seok).
4. Jaws
Media: Film & Novel
Vehicle: Fishing Boat
Name: Orca
A book-turned-movie that has probably done more harm to the natural world (sorry sharks and our 50-year vendetta for you having fins and large teeth, courtesy of a John Williams score going duh-DUH duh—DUH da-duh da-duh da-dah) than global climate change and the depletion of feeder fish. Jaws traumatized generations—my generation included. I did not submerge myself in any water deeper than a bathtub for two years after my father took me to see Spielberg’s first big blockbuster at far too young of an age. I think I was seven.
3. “The Captain’s Log” Chapter 7 of Dracula by Bram Stoker)
Media: Novel Excerpt
Vehicle: Boat
This single chapter in ostensibly the greatest horror novel of all time spawned a movie of its own (The Last Voyage of Demeter) and many novels, but none can rival that single chapter for the growing horror and menace of being trapped on a ship with a certain cargo comprised of boxes of soil from far off Transylvania.
2. Event Horizon
Media: Film
Vehicle: Spaceship
Name: Event Horizon
Another locked room spaceship movie! Hard to beat a horror movie where a phrase in Latin—the creepiest of ancient languages, according to screenwriters—offers a very nice plot twist. Event Horizon is the story of a deep-space rescue mission that uncovers a ship that vanished into another dimension and is now orbiting Neptune. The ship (also called Event Horizon) returns with something far more sinister than its crew expected. Despite a troubled production, the ship design is eerie and very effective and the dread builds nicely throughout. I’m due for a rewatch of this one and if you haven’t seen it, well, you’re in for a treat. Sam Niell and Lawrence Fishburne are great as well, per usual.
1. Alien
Media: Film
Vehicle: Spaceship
Name: Nostromo
What’s there to say that hasn’t been said before? The greatest of the Alien movies, the one that started a huge universe and introduced the world to the Nostromo, xenomorphs, Weyland-Yutani, synthetics and more. They’ve tried to exceed the surprise, the terror, the aesthetic of this first entry over the years, though none did it better. (I don’t want to hear you whiners talk about Aliens; yes, it’s great, but it’s just Alien dialed up to 11 and this list is about stories that place on VESSELS and VEHICLES.)
Honorable Mentions
Blood Red Sky – Vampiric mayhem on a hijacked airplane.
The Scar – Novel by China Miéville, an odyssey aboard a floating pirate city. Technically fantasy but Miéville packs more horror in his fantasy novels than most horror novels.
“Three Miles Up” by Elizabeth Jane Howard, where a narrowboat canal boat trip drifts into ghostly despair. This one is hard to find but you can get it if you’re willing to drop 40 euros at Tartarus Press in a collection called We Are For The Dark. I am not taking a commission here and have no affiliation with Tartarus other than I like to support indie presses when I can.
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