Amityville, New York hosts a troubling mystery at a Bohemian boarding house after the death of Margaret East. Margaret’s passing draws Hank Denton, a loud and abrasive detective whose reputation precedes him, into a place where the living and the dead seem to linger at every door.
Most of Margaret’s friends find Denton rude and grating, but Sentinel Ernie stands by him, and through that loyalty Aphrodite, Selena Mars, the boarding house’s owner, agrees to let Denton stay as strange, eerie phenomena begin to unfold. The house seems haunted by a dual presence—a malevolent demon and Margaret’s ghost—turning ordinary creaks into warnings and turning the quiet rooms into a stage for something unseen.
Denton’s investigation is colored by vivid dreams and unsettling hallucinatory moments. He grows convinced, though lacking solid evidence, that a cult is operating out of the Amityville Boarding House, a theory that unsettles the entire community and pushes him toward dangerous, impulsive conclusions.
A tense moment arrives when Sentinel attempts to seduce him, and Denton responds with a violent outburst that hints at darker impulses simmering beneath his gruff exterior. The room holds a battered Keith Hernandez baseball card, a small detail that punctuates the odd, unsettling atmosphere of their encounter.
Brigitta, Amanda Flowers the lesbian lover of Bermuda and Aphrodite’s other daughter, becomes entangled in the night’s strange errands. A gravedigger and another resident steer Brigitta toward a cemetery, where a figure they mistake for Margaret guides them onward. The two then press Brigitta to help conduct a séance, which Denton attends, drawn by the mounting sense that the living and the dead are sharing the same space.
Brigitta’s efforts, along with a dream she experiences simultaneously, drive Bermuda to seek access to the sealed basement of the boarding house, pursuing a rumor of hidden danger by using an Ace of spades as a key. In the basement, Bermuda confronts an eerie tableau and discovers Margaret’s videotape, in which Margaret rambles about how the house protects its inhabitants and mentions the idea of being part of a group described by John B. Calhoun as “the beautiful ones.”
A gun-toting Denton bursts into the room, interrupts the tape, and drags Brigitta away from the basement, breaking the fragile moment of revelation. Bermuda, meanwhile, endures terrifying visions—an automated hand and enormous insect-like legs—that assault her sense of reality and almost push her to collapse under the house’s strange power. In the escalating chaos, Aphrodite’s ghost terrifies Denton and saves Brigitta from further harm.
The confrontation culminates with Brigitta, acting under distress and in a moment of protective resolve, garroting Denton while Aphrodite’s ghost holds him down, and Denton dies in the same place as Margaret. The haunting, it seems, has claimed him as its own, sealing the fates of those involved.
In the final image, Bermuda and Brigitta are left to pick up the pieces of their lives, reuniting on a train crossing the Manhattan Bridge as the haunting overhangs their future with both dread and a stubborn glimmer of hope.
