Stephen King Dislikes A '90s Adaptation Of His Work With A 0% Rotten Tomatoes Score

With an astoundingly prolific career spanning over 50 years, bestselling author Stephen King has seen a remarkable number of his novels and short stories adapted for the big screen. For almost as long as Stephen King has been writing, there have been Stephen King movies –- some famous, and some (including his own directorial debut and frequent Worst Horror Movie list guest, "Maximum Overdrive") truly infamous.

His first novel "Carrie" inspired a critically acclaimed 1976 Brian De Palma horror film, starring Sissy Spacek as a tormented teenage girl with psychic powers. King's irresistible, incredibly filmable premise has since been remade three times. But for every classic King adaptation like "Carrie" or its polar opposite, the profoundly uplifting "The Shawshank Redemption," there are disappointing clunkers like "Dreamcatcher," "Thinner," and "Secret Window."

But there is one film that Stephen King has singled out as his least favorite adaptation of his work. That dishonor goes to "Graveyard Shift," a mostly-forgotten '90s horror flick based on one of King's earliest short stories. Considering that King is well-known for disliking Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of "The Shining," which is now considered to be one of the greatest horror films ever made, "Graveyard Shift" must be one seriously bad movie -– and its 0% score on Rotten Tomatoes backs him up.

"There are a number of pictures that I feel like, a little bit like, yuck," Stephen King told Deadline in a 2016 interview, naming "Graveyard Shift" as "just kind of a quick exploitation picture." Released in 1990, "Graveyard Shift" is a low-budget monster movie about a dilapidated textile mill overrun by flesh-eating rats. Drifter John Hall (David Andrews) takes a job at the mill under the boot of the angry and abusive Warwick (Stephen Macht). Warwick hires eccentric exterminator Tucker Cleveland (Brad Dourif) to handle the rat problem, unaware of the true horror scuttling underneath their floorboards.

Critics deemed "Graveyard Shift" dead on arrival. The Washington Post's Richard Harrington was unimpressed by the film, predicting that it would "pass quickly into that great video graveyard in the suburbs." Kevin Thomas of The Los Angeles Times dismissed "Graveyard Shift" as a "piece of silly horror schlock," though he did praise production designer Gary Wissner for his work on the filthy, vermin-infested Bachman Mill (named after King's pseudonym, Richard Bachman, in one of the film's few witty touches).

The one positive element of "Graveyard Shift" that reviewers could agree on was horror movie icon Brad Dourif, with Thomas enjoying his "over-the-top" performance as the exterminator. Film Frenzy's Matt Brunson declared him to be the movie's "lone bright spot." Unfortunately, Dourif is absent from the film's muddied conclusion, where Hall and Warwick struggle in dank, dark tunnels against an enormous, mutated rat queen. As Stephen King himself said: yuck.