The Most Popular Sewers in Movies
Sewers are the least attractive thing about a location. It’s where our poop and other body wastes go to, and it’s so dirty that just the thought of going down there will already make anyone cringe. It’s why we should laud those who chose a career in sewer line repair.
Franklin, Indiana, is one of many cities across the country with large sewer systems, and yet we know little about these things because frankly, sewers are disgusting. But Hollywood doesn’t think so because it has featured these underground mazes in several popular films. So if you want to know the most iconic sewers in Hollywood movies, then read on.
1. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
No other Hollywood movie or cartoon character features New York City’s sewer system as prolific as the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Created as a comic book in 1984, these characters have used the underground labyrinth of Manhattan as their home.
The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have been using New York City’s gigantic underground labyrinth as their base of operations and their passageway to other parts of the city. They even use it to get their favorite food (pizza) without being detected by the humans aboveground.
2. The Italian Job
Michael Caine’s film used the sewer system of London as a getaway route. The film is about an ex-convict who plans a thrilling heist that involved escaping the authorities and everyone else by driving Mini Coopers in the sewer system.
The sewer system featured in this movie was the Sowe Valley Sewer Duplication in Coventry. The Mini Coopers were integral in the film because they were small enough to be driven at breakneck speed in the tunnels.
The 2003 remake, which starred Mark Wahlberg and Charlize Theron, used the sewer system in Los Angeles.
3. It
Stephen King’s iconic novel is about a demonic clown that terrorizes children in a fictitious town in Maine. The clown hides in the sewers of Derry, Maine, and only ventures out into the open when it is targeting a human victim.
The 2017 film provided one of the goriest and scariest opening scenes when the demonic clown, Pennywise (Bill Skarsgård), bit off a child’s arm when the child tried to retrieve his paper boat that went into the storm drain. After Pennywise bit off the child’s arm, he dragged the poor soul into the storm drain, never to be seen again.
4. The Shawshank Redemption
Finally, here is a movie that features a sewer not just as a cesspool where all human waste from a prison facility goes to; it also served as a gateway to freedom for a wrongfully convicted man. In the film, Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) has been chipping away the wall in his cell for several years. When he finally breaks through the wall, he crawls through 500 yards of fecal matter because the sewer system was his only way out of the prison.
Despite crawling through 500 yards of human poop, Dufresne emerges on the outside of the prison facility, triumphant and happy. So for some people, albeit fictitious, crawling through the sewer isn’t so bad.
So the next time you think about the sewer and how gross it can be, try to give it some credit because Hollywood thinks that it’s a great prop for movies.
