The idea for Terror Train (1980) came from a dream that Daniel Grodnik had. One weekend night after seeing the films Halloween (1978) and Silver Streak (1976), Dan woke up and said to his wife, "What do you think about putting Halloween on a train?" His wife answered, "That's terrible." He jotted down "Terrible Train" on a piece of paper on his nightstand. In the morning, he changed the title to "Terror Train", wrote up 22 pages, and made a deal on it with Sandy Howard's company at 3:00 in the afternoon.
Magician David Copperfield once said of this movie that he appeared in: "Film is a magnifying glass for magic, so I had to be very careful. What you see on screen is exactly what the extras saw during shooting."
Jamie Lee Curtis shot this film back to back with the similarly themed slasher film Prom Night (1980) in late 1979. Prom Night in Toronto, in August and September 1979, and released in July of 1980; and TERROR TRAIN in Montreal, in November and December 1979, and released in October of 1980.
The train was rocked back and forth on a rig inside a warehouse in order to simulate train locomotion.
Reportedly, veteran actor Ben Johnson asked director Roger Spottiswoode to give his character Carne less dialogue rather than more. Spottiswoode once said that Johnson said to him: "'Now Roger. I'm sure I've told you this before but on my first day working with John Ford, he took me aside and said 'Ben, when you're in front of the camera, you're not going to need too many words...you just won't need them. They can get in the way'. 'So Roger,' Ben says, 'you go through and take out all the extra dialogue you can.' He told me that was sound advice from Mr. Ford and he wanted me to take it. He wanted me to go through the script and get rid of all the extra words he didn't need! He said, 'I know most of your actors want more words and more scenes but that's not me. I listened to Mr. Ford and he was pretty right about things. You can just take most of the words away.'"