Graveyard Shift (1990 film)
Graveyard Shift, AKA Stephen King's Graveyard Shift (1990)
Summary
"Stephen King took you to the edge with The Shining and Pet Sematary. This time......he pushes you over." In a very old textile mill with a serious rat infestation, the workers discover a horrifying secret deep in the basement.
Details
- Release Date: 1990
- Country/Language: US, English
- Setting: 1980s Maine
- Genres/Technical: Horror, Fantasy
- Runtime: 1 hr 29 min
- Starring: David Andrews, Kelly Wolf, Stephen Macht, Brad Dourif
- Director: Ralph S. Singleton
- Writer: Stephen King (short story), John Esposito (screenplay)
- Producer/Production Co: Paramount Pictures, JVC Entertainment Networks, Graveyard Productions
- TV Tropes: (link)
- IMDB Page: (link)
- View Trailer: (link)
Ratings
MPAA Ratings
- Rated: R (Violence, Profanity, Adult Content)
Tentacle Ratings
A rough measure of how "Lovecraftian" the work is:
- SS___ (Two Tentacles: Barely Lovecraftian; could be a very loose adaptation)
Stephen King channels a little bit from Lovecraft stories like "The Rats in the Walls (fiction)", "The Statement of Randolph Carter (fiction)", "The Lurking Fear (fiction)", and perhaps some descriptions from Lovecraft's Dreamlands stories, to create this morbid tale about a work crew on a hellish clean-up duty which sends them plunging deeper and deeper under the basement of a decrepit textile mill while surrounded by vast swarms of mutant rats and other bizarre forms of life, until at last they discover a trapdoor which is locked from underneath. In both the story and the film, the mill begins to take on an increasingly fantastic and less objectively realistic quality, with an unlikely labyrinth of sublevels beneath it, an impossibly vast empire of mutant rats thriving beneath it, an outlandish number of human skeletons appearing in a pit beneath the film version, ans so on: this is less the realm of reality, and something more like a subjective nightmare reality existing just beyond objective reality, one of those thin borders upon Lovecraft's Dreamlands, such as the Vale of Pnath where the Ghouls cast the mountains of human bones from their feasting....
Note: This rating is not intended as a measure of quality, merely of how closely related to Lovecraftian "Weird" fiction the work is.
Reviews
Review Links:
- Bryant Burnette at The Truth Inside the Lie, (link) - "...I kinda love it. It's a terrible movie, but for whatever reason, I have an affection for it...."
Synopsis
Spoiler Section (Highlight to Read)
A work crew at a decrepit textile mill in a small town in Maine is recruited to assist with a massive cleaning effort in the long-abandoned basement of the old mill, where, over the years, a monumental infestation of rats has taken hold. This rat empire, cut off from the rest of nature, has allowed the animals to evolve into a strange and varied combination of vicious mutant creatures - some have even gained rudimentary flight. The men eventually come across a sub-basement, locked from the inside, that harbors something more terrifying and hideous than any of the men could have dreamed....
Notes
Comments, Trivia, Dedication
Associated Mythos Elements
- fiction: Stephen King's short story "Graveyard Shift"
- fiction: compare to "The Rats in the Walls (fiction)"
- race: mutant rats of various forms (including huge flying rats)
- race: strange fungi, "...a colony of huge white toadstools poking their way up through the shattered cement. His hands had come in contact with them as he pulled and yanked at a rusty gear-toothed wheel, and they felt curiously warm and bloated, like the flesh of a man afflicted with dropsy...", "...with a convulsive grunt the man on the ringbolt pulled the trap back and let it drop. The underside was black with an odd fungus that Hall had never seen before...."; strange and sightless beetles
- deity: Rat King, referred to in the story as a supernatural composite creature consisting of a tangled mass of rats fused together into a single entity
- deity: Rat Queen, appears in the short story as a blind, limbless, cow-sized rat whose sole function is to endlessly breed more rats
- location: Bachman Mills, a textile mill in Gates Falls, Maine, near Castle Rock (Stephen King's entry into "Lovecraft Country"); the mill was abandoned, but recently reopened, with a troglofauna ecosystem of blind, albino, mutant rats, fungi, and beetles apparently breeding and evolving out of control even before the mill was abandoned; the baroque system of basements and sub-basements of the mill border on a subterranean river used by smugglers and are filled with decades or centuries of buried and decayed debris leftover from the mill's mysterious history; in the short story, the last sub-basement explored was locked from the inside, and contains the remains of a human skeleton; in the film the sub-cellars are connected via the river with an ancient cemetery which supplies the rats with vast numbers of decayed human corpses to eat....
- location: Vale of Pnath
Keeper Notes
- The maze of sub-cellars, subterranean river tunnels, bootlegger tunnels, cemetery crypts, etc. beneath the mill, stocked with a variety of rats, bats, giant and dire rats and bats, strange fungi and beetles, and other vermin, is essentially a dungeon, and might lend itself naturally to adaptation as a "dungeon crawl" adventure for Pathfinder, Dungeons and Dragons, D20 Call of Cthulhu, or other adventure/exploration/survival-heavy role-playing games.
- The film and short story provide subtle hints at a larger story that might fit a more investigatory/research style game like standard Call of Cthulhu, though a scenario writer would have to fill in a lot of blanks on his/her own.
- The history of the mill before it was reopened is implied to go a long way back, and the mill may have been built on the foundations of a much older structure, allowing the rats centuries of evolution underground in isolation. (Perhaps the sub-basements were built before white colonists arrived?)
- Though they probably were meant to come entirely from the cemetery, some viewers interpret the pile of bones under the film version's mill to have at least partly been supplied by victims of the bootlegging operation, perhaps even human sacrifices, which suggests interesting possibilities for the sorts of hidden secrets uncovered in a Call of Cthulhu investigation. (Perhaps earlier in the mill's history, the mill owners and cultist workers performed human sacrifices to keep the rats appeased?)
