Night Shift (1978)

Episode

Jerusalem's Lot

(Michael)

  1. This Lovecraft pastiche takes the form of a diary left by a 19th-century New England man who has recently taken up residence in the ancestral home of an estranged branch of his family, only to discover that his ancestors worshipped a monstrous worm god and now live with it in the catacombs beneath the nearby deserted village of Jerusalem’s Lot.

Graveyard Shift

(Cameron)

  1. In this story, an overeducated factory worker is hired by factory bosses to clean the basement of the factory.
  2. There he discovers that he can fight rats or lose his job.
  3. They discover a hidden basement beneath that basement, older than the factory, where giant mutant rats live.
  4. He feeds his foreman to the rats, and he also dies.

Night Surf

(Michael)

  1. After a global pandemic has apparently wiped out most of humanity, a bunch of shitty 70s teenagers hang out on a deserted beach and slowly realize that they too will eventually die.

I Am the Doorway

(Cameron)

  1. Man goes to space, comes back infected with aliens, hijinks ensue.

The Mangler

(Michael)

  1. A police detective investigates strange events surrounding an industrial laundry press that, it turns out, through a string of bizarre coincidences has become possessed by a demon.
  2. It does not go well for anyone.

The Boogeyman

(Cameron)

  1. A traditional American man’s children die one by one, because he cannot be anything other than a traditional American man.
  2. The boogeyman’s getting them.

Gray Matter

(Michael)

  1. A bunch of crotchety old Maine men who hang out at a local store learn from a young boy that his father, a known alcoholic, has turned into a massive blob creature after drinking some tainted beer.

Battleground

(Cameron)

  1. A hitman is attacked by a bunch of toy soldiers.

Trucks

(Michael)

  1. A group of people in a roadside diner watch as all of the trucks in the world apparently become sentient and autonomous, and human survivors, including the narrator, are eventually forced into servitude operating the gas pumps.

Sometimes They Come Back

(Cameron)

  1. A teacher gets beaten up by some greaser students as a kid, and his brother dies.
  2. When he’s an adult, those greasers come back, and he summons a demon to kill them.

Strawberry Spring

(Michael)

  1. A narrator recounts a series of Jack-the-Ripper-like murders that occurred on his college campus during a strange, early, foggy spring when he was an undergraduate.
  2. Now that he is an adult, that strange kind of spring has come again, the murders have resumed, and the narrator suspects he may be the killer.

The Ledge

(Cameron)

  1. A man is threatened with jail, or a walk around a building on a ledge.
  2. He goes for it, and he has to fight some pigeons.
  3. He makes it, and the guy who put him up to it tries to double-cross him.
  4. The guy wins a fight, and then offers the double-crosser the exact same deal.

The Lawnmower Man

(Michael)

  1. A bitter middle-aged man hires someone to mow his lawn, but the guy is a huge weirdo, might not be fully human, and strips naked and crawls along the ground behind his automated lawnmower, eating the grass clippings and any small animals the lawnmower happens to run over.
  2. When the main character objects to this, the lawnmower man turns his sights on him, and it does not end well for him.

Quitters, Inc.

(Cameron)

  1. A man who smokes meets an old friend, and that old friend says, “Hey, if you want to quit smoking, here’s how you do it,” and gives him the information of an organization that will torture his family and him if he continues to smoke.
  2. He stops smoking.

I Know What You Need

(Michael)

  1. A young woman in college finds herself courted by a nerdy boy who seems weirdly prescient about her moment-to-moment whims, needs, and desires.
  2. After her current boyfriend dies in a mysterious accident, she starts dating the weird guy, only to discover he killed her boyfriend with magic, and has been forcing the romance on her also with magic, and also kind of with psychic powers.

Children of the Corn

(Cameron)

  1. A T-bird owning couple on the brink of divorce turn off the main road and end up deep in the corn.
  2. They run into a fundamentalist cult of children who worship some kind of corn god.
  3. There’s also some Logan’s Run in here.
  4. They get sacrificed to the corn god at the end.

The Last Rung on the Ladder

(Michael)

  1. The narrator, a successful corporate lawyer still reeling from his sister’s suicide by jumping from a roof in L.A., recalls an instant when, while growing up poor on a farm in Nebraska, he saved her from falling to her death from a broken ladder in their hayloft.
  2. They became estranged as they grew up, and the narrator has just received a letter from her where she intimates her decision to complete suicide.
  3. However, the letter was delayed because he never updated her on his addresses when he moved.

The Man Who Loved Flowers

(Cameron)

  1. A man is buying flowers for his lover, but really she’s been dead for ten years and he’s killing women with a hammer.

One for the Road

(Michael)

  1. A couple of old Mainers, waiting out a blizzard in a bar, encounter a man from out of town who says his car went off the road a few miles away, leaving his wife and daughter trapped and waiting on the edge of an abandoned village known as Jerusalem’s Lot, and the sun has already gone down.

The Woman in the Room

(Michael)

  1. “The Woman in the Room” is a story about a man whose mother is dying from stomach cancer, and she’s recently had a procedure that, on the one hand is supposed to lessen her pain, and on the other hand has ruined her motor skills and her hand-eye coordination, because it involved doing something to her brain.
  2. The main character feels very, very sad about his mother dying and her being in this—she’s dying very slowly, it’s very hard for him to watch, and he reminisces on his growing up and sort of—this is the woman who raised me and my brother, right, after our father left, or died or whatever—the father’s not in the picture—and at the end of the story, the main character gives his mother some pills that she shouldn’t be taking, and definitely more of them than she should be taking, and it’s very strongly suggested—they have a conversation about this, she knows what he’s doing, and he knows what he’s doing, and it’s euthanasia, and so he leaves the room and then walks down the hall and waits for him to be called back because something had happened.