One of the things about having read Paperbacks From Hell is that Grady Hendrix does a really solid job of laying out that for all the ways that the horror genre can be progressive, it can also be tremendously conservative as well, drawing the root of the threat of the horror from societal prejudices. The same lies with the thriller and disaster genres – a place where The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974) falls. When a screenwriter or author succumbs to the temptation to make bystanders and victims into archetypes as a shorthand, what archetypes are used matter.