Beyond the Door

A group of American students, including Beverly Putnic, travels to Yugoslavia to meet Professor Andromolek and witness a sacred pagan ritual performed once every hundred years. They hope to document the ceremony and study the locals' beliefs. The trip sets the stage for the cultural clash and the peril to come.

In Los Angeles, Beverly's mother is killed when a construction beam beheads her as Beverly heads to the airport. A telegram informing Beverly of the tragedy is intercepted and destroyed by Professor Andromolek, preventing Beverly from learning of her mother's death. The professor's action seeds Beverly's vulnerability and the mystery around the ritual.

The students are ferried by boat to a remote Yugoslav village. The villagers nail shut their ramshackle rooms, mark them with blood, and set them on fire as a ritual test. The surviving students escape through the doors, but one student burns to death in his bed.

The remaining students flee the village and board a passenger train hoping to return to safety. The ride soon becomes a nightmare as the train shifts from transport to threat. The group’s sense of security dissolves as darkness closes in.

In the chaos, two students fall from the moving train and are left behind on the tracks. Their absence marks the beginning of the train’s deadly pursuit and foreshadows the doom awaiting the others.

The train is driven by a malevolent force, slaughtering the crew: the driver is beheaded by the cowcatcher, the fireman is dragged into the engine's firebox and burned, and the conductor is crushed when the engine detaches. The engine continues as if nothing happened, driving the passengers toward doom.

The two students who fell from the train are eventually run over by the runaway locomotive in a swamp as it jumps off its tracks, then returns to the rails undamaged. The eerie persistence of the train underscores its supernatural nature.

Yugoslav train authorities make some efforts to stop the train, but their attempts have no effect. Signals and blockades fail to slow the spectral engine as it speeds toward its destination.

The train collides with another train, causing an explosion, but the possessed engine remains undamaged as it advances toward the profane altar where Beverly is doomed to be Satan's bride. The ritual’s culmination hangs in the balance.

Beverly resists her fate by having sex with Marius, an 11th-century monk who is also aboard the train, making her unfit to be Satan's bride. Marius is long dead, but he returns briefly with a book that Beverly's mother gave her before she left Los Angeles.

Marius vanishes, and Beverly returns alone to America, feeling homesick after a journey that lasts only a few days. The strange events of the trip increasingly feel unreal once she is back on solid ground.

As Beverly's plane flies through a storm, Satan's arm crashes through the window and tries to drag her out. A flight attendant wakes her, revealing that the terrifying episode may have been a dream. The line between nightmare and reality blurs as she proclaims, 'I just want to go home.'