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On Halloween, why settle for generic horror movies when we’ve selected a slate of frightening films dedicated specifically to the construction industry?
While the noble construction workers featured in these films often strike heroic poses and vanquish evil, the tables are sometimes turned as construction workers turn to the Dark Side and prove they can dish it out as well as take it.
Killdozer (1974)
A glowing meteor strikes a Caterpillar D9 bulldozer, imbuing it with a murderous alien intelligence.
A construction crew on a remote tropical island is incrementally crushed, battered and rammed by the dozer, which pursues them relentlessly — at about 10 klicks. Survival tip: don’t hide in a length of corrugated pipe. Square-jawed Clint Walker plays the construction foreman who defeats the alien by electrocuting it, but violates the CAT warranty. This TV movie also spawned a comic book and a rock band.
The Crater Lake Monster (1977)
When a meteor crashes into Crater Lake, it heats the water to just the right temperature to hatch a mummified dinosaur egg. A Plesiosaurus emerges in record time and eats everyone who inconveniently decides that now’s a great time for a lakeside picnic.
A local construction company lends the town sheriff a motor scraper to do battle with the dino, which turns out to be a bit of cream puff on land. Two whacks of the blade and the dinosaur’s extinct.
The Beyond aka Seven Doors of Death (1981)
It doesn’t pay to work on a building containing one of the seven gateways to hell. Anyone who takes on a contract to renovate an old Louisiana hotel meets a grisly fate — painters are knocked off scaffolds by spooks while a plumber trying to stop a river in the basement is attacked and killed by an ancient corpse. The architect gets the worst of it though, as he’s consumed by a horde of tarantulas.
The Carpenter (1988)
Ed the carpenter (Wings Hauser) blows a construction deadline and naturally kills the repo men who attempt to repossess a stack of two-by-fours. Ed is executed in the electric chair, but returns from the dead to finish off the project — and anyone else who gets in the way — cutting no slack to the current inhabitants of the house.
They Live (1988)
Rowdy Roddy Piper plays Nada, a construction worker between jobs. The economy is on the skids because aliens masquerading as humans are gaming the system to enrich themselves. Nada joins resistance fighters who have developed sunglasses that allow them to see the aliens in all their ugly splendour. Spoiler warning: he’s killed by the aliens, but not before exposing their true appearance to the world — and uttering the classic line:
"I have come here to chew bubble gum and kick ass, and I’m all out of bubble gum."
The Twelve Months of the Summer (1988)
Swedish construction workers are offered 10 years’ pay for a year-long construction contract in a remote Scandinavian location where winter never arrives. The catch: nobody cares about the building. It’s just a government ruse to see what happens to the crew in a cursed location plagued by psychic phenomena. All of the suffering might have been avoided if the contract had been structured as a public-private partnership.
Session 9 (2001)
The owner of the Hazmat Elimination Co. optimistically offers to clear the abandoned Danvers State Mental Hospital of asbestos in record time to earn $10,000 bonuses for five crew members. Instead of cash, they earn several bad cases of demonic possession, a lobotomy and assorted murders — in addition to likely violations under Massachusetts regulations covering asbestos disposal.
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