Producer Daniel Grodnik has one of those great how-did-this-get-made stories. Fresh off Halloween and Silver Streak, he woke up with the idea of putting a slasher movie on a train. His wife told him it sounded terrible, he scribbled “Terrible Train” on a notepad, improved the title by morning and had a deal that afternoon. A few months later, a train was mounted on a rocking rig inside a Montreal warehouse, and Jamie Lee Curtis had signed on just weeks after finishing Prom Night in Toronto.

The film opens with a fraternity prank aimed at a nervous pledge, and it goes very wrong. Three years later, the same crowd charters a steam train for an all-night New Year’s Eve costume party. There’s a live band, plenty of booze, a magician played by David Copperfield in his only acting role and enough masks to make everyone onboard look suspicious. Alana (Curtis, Freakier Friday) is back with prank ringleader Doc (Hart Bochner, Supergirl) and the rest of the old gang, while conductor Carne (Ben Johnson, The Town That Dreaded Sundown) tries to keep the train running and the college kids from tearing it apart. Somewhere along the route, their celebration stops feeling like a party.

Director Roger Spottiswoode, who had edited three films for Sam Peckinpah before making his feature directing debut here, keeps the movie visually tighter than its premise might suggest. His ace is Oscar-winning cinematographer John Alcott (Barry Lyndon), who rewired the train with dimmers mounted outside the cars and used pen lights to illuminate faces in close quarters. That care gives Terror Train a surprisingly polished look, full of narrow hallways, shadows, reflections and bodies moving past one another in costume. Spottiswoode would eventually direct the underrated Shoot to Kill and the Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies, and some of that precision is already visible here.

The train itself does a lot of the heavy lifting. There’s nowhere to go, nowhere to really hide and only so many people who could possibly be behind the next door. The costume-party setup makes that even better because faces keep changing. A mask disappears, another turns up, somebody passes through a compartment dressed differently than before, and the movie keeps making you question what you actually saw. It’s a whodunit that happens to carry a knife.

That’s what separates Terror Train from plenty of slashers that followed Halloween into theaters. The body count matters, but Spottiswoode is more interested in suspicion than splatter. He lets the train become a moving puzzle box, and Curtis gives the movie a strong center without having to repeat Laurie Strode beat for beat. She’s vulnerable when she needs to be, alert when something starts feeling wrong and believable as someone trying to make sense of a night that keeps slipping further out of control.

Then there’s Copperfield, who plays his magician with such intense sincerity that nearly every card trick starts to feel slightly threatening. It’s an odd performance, but it works in a movie where everybody is already pretending to be somebody else.

The script has gaps big enough to drive a locomotive through, and more than one character makes the kind of decision that only makes sense in a slasher. None of that bothers me much. The setting is great, Alcott makes the whole thing look far classier than a Canadian quickie has any right to, and the mystery gives the movie something to play with beyond waiting for the next kill. Best of all, the solution is truly unexpected.

Back in 2012, 31 Days to Scare called it an overlooked gem in Curtis’ early horror run. I’m even more convinced of that now. The masks, the train and the uncertainty do more for Terror Train than gore ever could.