A low-level drug runner named Cruz finds himself exiled from sunny Miami to frigid Chicago. He holes up in a decrepit rooming-house, the Kenilworth Arms, in the dead of winter. There he meets Jonathan, a yuppie struggling to get over a failed romance, and Jamaica, a prostitute on the payroll of the drug kingpin Bauhaus. When Cruz and Jamaica are forced to drop two kilos of cocaine down a ventilation shaft in the rooming-house to escape a police raid, strange things begin to happen...
David J. Schow's The Shaft features a unique mingling of supernatural horror with the very real dangers involved in drug-running, creating a uniquely compelling atmosphere. Amid the inexplicable terrors of a building that seems weirdly animate and of some loathsome monstrosity lurking in the bottom of the ventilation shaft, the pursuit of Cruz, Jonathan, and Jamaica by Bauhaus and his minions seems by turns insignificant and chillingly immediate.