Head Canon: Stephen King's Graveyard Shift (1990)

Welcome to Head Canon - a collection of weird and wonderful films that live rent-free in my brain. Nobody's saying these are the best movies ever made, but every week, I'll deliver some thoughts on a new title that, for one reason or another, has set up shop in my consciousness for the foreseeable future.

The rats are coming in this minor King programmer, Graveyard Shift...

There are several great Stephen King movies. But mostly there are bad ones.

Sure, Stanley Kubrick may have made The Shining (’80) into a masterpiece, and Mike Flanagan pulled off the impossible by turning its shitty paperback sequel, Doctor Sleep (’19), into one of the best adaptations in the horror titan’s cinematic catalogue. Yet for every Doctor Sleep (or even Gerald's Game ['17], if we're sticking with Flanagan), there’s a Sometimes They Come Back (’91), or a 1922 (’17), or even an In the Tall Grass ('19). Mark L. Lester’s iteration of Firestarter (’84) is a problematic hoot, but Keith Thomas’ Firestarter (’22) should be, well, killed with fire.

Starting to get the picture, Constant Reader?

Even King himself made a stinker with Maximum Overdrive (’86) - a train wreck that’s been rightfully reclaimed as a deranged, coked-out nightmare of ‘80s excess that, no matter how much you enjoy it, is objectively horrible. This doesn’t even count the numerous TV mini-series that, in their time, seemed like groundbreaking pieces of small screen storytelling (see: It [’90] and The Stand [’94]), yet haven’t gotten any better with age. Thankfully, we’ve decided as a society to mostly forget the massive misfires arriving alongside those ABC Prime Time Frights, relegating dreck like The Tommyknockers (’93), The Golden Years (’91), and The Langoliers (’95) to languish as double-cassettes on the bottom shelves of Blockbuster Video horror sections in our collective mind’s eye.

That said, there’s still something soothing about watching one of the mid-tier King adaptations on a rainy afternoon; a sensation akin to faking sick so your mom wouldn’t make you go to school, and then just binging junk food on the couch after she goes to work for the day. It’s horror movie ASMR, allowing you to disconnect your brain for ninety minutes and let the soothing bliss of King’s blue-collar scare tactics wash over you in a cough syrupy haze.

Graveyard Shift (’90) is a perfect example of the mid-to-lower-tier Stephen King flick that delivers just enough spook show weirdness to be somewhat memorable, yet never transcends its own B-Movie ambitions. Adapted from the "Night Shift" short story of the same name, Ralph Singleton (a name fit for a Texaco manager, not a movie director) delivers something that sits halfway between a traditional monster movie and an earthbound Alien (’79) knock off, trading in xenomorphs for rats. Composed of grimy, haunted house theatrics, workers in a Maine textile mill discover that there’s something grosser than just rodents inhabiting their workplace's dilapidated basement.

In fairness, while Graveyard Shift may not be a great film, per se, it's a pretty terrific act of adaptation. The short story is barely a sketch of an idea: what if these janitors found rats and mutated bats in the basement at 5 A.M. and were helpless to do anything about it? Singleton milks King’s sparse, wet prose for all the atmosphere it’s worth, making you smell the moldy darkness of the death traps these men (and lone woman) have been hired to clean out. You practically want to scrub your own nails free from the same filth that coats their overalls, thinking maybe a second shower is necessary to get yourself feeling remotely clean again.

Singleton manages to populate his picture with copious lumpy faces; dudes who undoubtedly haven’t hugged their kids in years, and possessed bad breath since the day they were born. Leading this pack is Warwick (Stephen Macht, looking like Fred Ward and sounding like Viggo the Carpathian), the cruel foreman who’s just been informed the mill’s going to be shut down if he can’t get its subterranean shithole cleared of junk and gunk over July 4th weekend. To do so, he assembles a ragtag crew of dipshits gullible enough to descend into the darkness for double pay. You think he's breaking his back (or getting eaten by the critters' winged queen)? Absolutely-fucking-not.

At the top of his list is John Hall (David Andrews), a drifter who’s just rolled into town and is incurring the scorn of practically everyone but Jane (Kelly Wolf), a rough and tumble gal tired of Warwick’s eyes being all over her ass. Look, the pickings at Bachman’s Mill (which is right down the road from Jane’s hometown of Castle Rock) are pretty slim, and Hall’s mysterious nature has piqued her interest. Where did he come from? Why does he keep moving from city to city? Is he on the run? And what happened to the wife he used to have back home?

None of this is answered, mind you, because every character in Graveyard Shift is barely an idea of a person, let alone a fully formed human being, and Andrews’s lack of charisma at the center does Singleton's flick zero favors. It also doesn’t help that nearly all the other workers - which includes Andrew “Djinn” Divoff in an utterly thankless role - are giggling troglodytes, single-mindedly hellbent on making John’s life a waking nightmare. The rats in the basement are the ones given the most personality, as they gather around to choose which one of these dinguses is going to be their membraneous leader’s next blood bag to drain.

Except for The Exterminator. If Singleton gets one thing positively correct, it’s casting Brad Dourif as a psychotic rat catcher, at war with the vermin who keep getting shredded in the cotton gin. Dourif's in his own movie, spitting tobacco in between monologues about how the Viet Cong used these little monsters as torture devices during his time in The Shit. It’s another reminder - like The Exorcist III (’90) or Deadwood (’04 - ’19) - that, when he’s unleashed, Dourif is one of the true character actor greats; a demon possessed by whatever role he’s playing, who can make even the hammiest pulp dialogue sound like the USS Indianapolis speech from Jaws ('75).

What Graveyard Shift lacks in compelling characters, it more than makes up for in catacomb ambiance. No doubt, a pretty portion of the film’s budget was spent on the cramped, stinky sets that make you believe there's just as much a chance that these goons will get killed from a cave-in as they could get snatched by the devil lurking around the corner. Once they discover a trap door to the creature’s cavernous lair, it becomes a deftly interwoven combination of damp puddles and ominous matte paintings, skulls and bones piled like pillars of death to the spiky ceiling. There’s something rotten beneath Bachman’s Mill, and if it escapes, there will only be more death and carnage in its wake.

On a production level, Singleton’s film shares a lot in common with fellow Paramount King product Silver Bullet (’85) and Pet Sematary (’89). They look inexpensive to produce, but not cheap. The creatures are memorably designed. There are usually a few old pros (Lawrence Tierney, Fred Gwynne, Macht), surrounded by some solid, familiar faces (Gary Busey, Everett McGill, Dourif). The Maine accents are questionable at best. The gore is plentiful. Most of the filmmakers - except David Cronenberg doing The Dead Zone ('83) - are little more than sturdy, point-and-shoot technicians, delivering lurid thrills that'd live on via VHS, cable, DVD, Blu-ray, and (*gulp*) streaming. Horror programmers to their very core.

And that's perfectly fine. As a society, we've become boringly binary in how we judge everything, placing art onto polar ends of a competitive spectrum that ranges from "masterpiece" to "total trash fire" with little wiggle room in between. We've lost the ability to appreciate a two-star movie. Graveyard Shift and its ilk provide a quick fix not too far removed from actually reading one of King's short stories - decently crafted bursts with just enough sustenance to stick with you for a little while as you wait for the next epic to be published. Minor works whose major moments follow you for years, and sometimes, convince you that the movies as a whole belong to a better class than they actually do.

Graveyard Shift is available now on 4K and Blu-ray from Kino Lorber.