5 Creepy Night Shift Horror Movies
Working Late
Night shift horror movies are about the perils of working alone in darkness and isolation. Have you ever had a job where you had to work the late shift by yourself? Was the extra pay worth it? Not if you aren’t alive to spend the money!
Here are five creepy night shift horror movies ranked. They’re set in a variety of locations, but all of them are about unfortunate protagonists with public-facing jobs that require them to work late into the night.
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5. Lookout (2025)
Determined to escape her humdrum life, Melissa (Megan Carrasquillo) signs up to be a forest ranger and accepts a several day and night long shift in a fire watchtower in the middle of a vast forest. She thinks her job will be a challenging new adventure, but she gets more than she bargained for.
Melissa isn’t as alone as she thinks. Strange supernatural events occur. A malevolent otherworldly presence is stalking the forest and Melissa is determined to find the truth before it’s too late.
Lookout has a solid premise, but it never really captures the eerie isolation or folk horror vibes of the best supernatural forest horror movies and shows like Yellowjackets or The Witch. Carrasquillo tries her best, but the messy script does her no favors. This movie feels flat and anticlimactic.
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4. Night Shift (2023)
Night Shift is about Gwen Taylor (Phoebe Tonkin), a mysterious young woman who shows up for her first day as the new evening shift employee at a seedy, isolated motel. After a brief training session with the motel manager, Gwen is left by herself to work overnight.
This movie tries to be both a ghost story and a stalker flick. Unfortunately, it fails on both accounts. The ghosts are rarely frightening and neither are the living people. The most disturbing thing in this movie is the used condom that Gwen finds when she’s cleaning up a room. It tries to subvert conventional expectations, but the way it does this, which I won’t reveal since it’s a major spoiler, wasn’t convincing to me.
Night Shift uses every hoary horror cliché you can think of. Even the rusty old “main character gets startled when supporting character puts a hand on her shoulder” jump scare gets trotted out.
Tonkin does fine in the lead role, and Madison Hu is entertaining as a spunky hotel guest. Other than that, this movie is forgettable. If you want more of my thoughts, I wrote a full review of this movie a couple years ago.
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3. Intruder (1989)
In Intruder, grocery store employees working after closing time are stalked by a shadowy killer. The group is supposed to help close up and inventory the shop before it goes out of business.
But someone doesn’t want the store to close just yet. The maniac finds innovative uses for the store’s trash compactor and meat hooks. He even livens up the beer fridge by adding a decapitated head.
Jennifer (Elizabeth Cox) is being stalked and harassed by her ex-boyfriend. She believes that he’s responsible when she finds the mangled corpses of her coworkers.
The grocery store setting sets this movie apart from other slashers. The creative location earns Intruder a place among the best underrated slasher movies of the 80s. Fans of the Evil Dead series will enjoy the cameos by Sam Raimi, Ted Raimi, and Bruce Campbel
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2. Open 24 Hours (2018)
After serving time in prison for attempting to murder her serial killer boyfriend, Mary (Vanessa Grasse) is released on parole. Desperate for a job, she accepts an offer to work the night shift at a convenience store.
Open 24 Hours is the first of two gas station horror movies on my list. There’s something inherently creepy about gas stations at night, especially if they’re located in some dusty, out of the way area.
Mary struggles with terrifying gory hallucinations involving her boyfriend (who is still incarcerated) and his victims. He forced Mary to watch when he killed girls, which traumatized her. But is there some part of her, hidden deep inside, that actually enjoyed watching the murders?
Mary, who would have been right at home on my anti-hero final girls list, has trouble differentiating between her visions and reality, and so do we. If you enjoy the unreliable narrator story device, you’ll like this movie.
Open 24 Hours repeatedly subverts expectations. The story keeps you on your toes the whole way through, and that makes it one of the most effective night shift horror movies.
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1. Body Bags – “The Gas Station” (1993)
Gas stations are a classic setting for night shift horror movies, and the #1 movie on my list uses this setting to full effect. Body Bags is an underrated anthology horror comedy directed by John Carpenter and George Romero. How’s that for a combo? The frame story is about a coroner, played by Carpenter in heavy makeup, who tells the audience a series of stories about the dead bodies in his morgue.
The first story is “The Gas Station.” Anne (Alex Datcher) is a pretty college psych student working her first night on the job at a convenience store located in the vicinity of (cue ominous music) Haddonfield, Illinois. Her customers are an assortment of creeps and weirdos, including a strange and horny old man played hilariously by Wes Craven.
A serial killer shows up (unfortunately he’s not Michael Myers) and Anne is soon embroiled in a desperate fight to survive her first night at her new gig. “The Gas Station” is an entertaining and dementedly funny segment that captures the essence of what makes night shift horror movies fun: an isolated location and a tough heroine who is easy to root for and identify with.
Body Bags is obscure because it had the misfortune of being released in the early ’90s, when horror’s popularity was in steep decline. To put this era in perspective, Jason Goes to Hell, which grossed a paltry $16 million (the equivalent of approximately $36 million today), was the highest-grossing slasher film of 1993 in the United States.
Check Body Bags out if you haven’t had the chance to see it yet. It’s worth a watch.
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