In an unnamed town, a young art student and aspiring model named Daisy leaves a club after a heated argument with her beatnik boyfriend, Max. As the night drains away, she walks the empty streets, drawn to a gallery window where grim, unsettling paintings catch the eye. The artist behind the canvases, Antonio Sordi, happens to be nearby, stopping to inspect his own work as if searching for someone he might have lost. After a cordial, almost cinematic exchange, they retreat to Sordi’s studio tucked beneath an ancient bell tower. The mood is intimate yet unnerving, and Sordi persuades the young woman to pose for him, the room heavy with the scent of oil paints and candle wax.
What begins as a creative session quickly twists into a nightmarish revelation. Sordi reveals a darker identity—one that is not simply human. In a horrifying transformation, his face shifts as if a century of secrets have threaded themselves into his features, and he becomes a vampiric figure, a vessel for an ancestral madness. Daisy’s life ends in a brutal moment of violence as he hacks her with a cleaver, the scene cut with a sense of feverish inevitability. Her body is then disposed of in boiling liquid, a grotesque ritual that seems to erase her from the living world in an incredibly cold, methodical way.
The terror does not stop with Daisy. In a colder, more clinical fashion, Sordi’s vampiric self has already claimed another victim in the town square—a lone woman who is taken to a waiting car and, through a chilling ruse of affection, creates the impression of a private moment between lovers. The danger continues at a party, where a guest is chased into a pool and drowns as the revelers drift back indoors, unaware of the surrounding horror. The women who vanish are traced back to Sordi’s studio and reimagined as painted, wax-covered figures—an eerie museum of murder that keeps the truth about the killer safely hidden behind a mask of artistry. No one who sees the paintings connects the dots to the reclusive artist, for Sordi’s vampiric form bears no resemblance to the man they know.
Meanwhile, Max is left to face the anxious reality that Daisy is missing. He eventually recognizes her likeness in a painting displayed at a beatnik cafe, a startling clue that drags his quest deeper into Sordi’s orbit. He seeks out Daisy’s sister, Donna, who shares his concern and lays out a family legend that might explain the pattern of disappearances. Donna tells Max about Erno, a 15th‑century ancestor of Sordi who was burned at the stake for stealing the souls of his subjects through his paintings and who is said to have become a vampire himself. Despite this chilling folklore, she confronts Sordi at his studio, hoping to force a confession or at least an explanation, but the artist responds with anger and dismissiveness, leaving Max with more questions than answers.
That same night, the threads converge in a deadly echo. Sordi, still pretending to be the gentle artist who once charmed Donna, tracks Daisy’s absence to the streets and eventually to a carousel where Donna is trying to escape him. The pursuit ends with a fatal strike as Sordi murders Donna in the open, a stark reminder that the killer’s violence does not stay contained within his studio walls and can spill into public spaces.
Behind this human facade lies a divided soul. The “human” Sordi harbors a complicated love for Dorian, an avant‑garde ballerina who also directly mirrors Daisy’s former roommate and a lookalike for Donna and for Meliza, a past love whose loss may have driven the artist to madness. At first, he tries to shield Dorian from his darker urges, warning her that his studio is a cold, joyless place and even breaking a date in a moment of self‑control in order to maintain the fragile balance he craves. On a sun‑bleached afternoon at the beach, Dorian reveals she is attracted to him and asks him to be intimate. He attempts to comply, but fear and guilt overpower him, and he flees the moment, leaving Dorian to continue her day alone.
The chase resumes when Dorian returns to town and is suddenly invaded by the vampiric Sordi, who pursues her while she seeks safety. Max and two of his beatnik friends step in, pursuing the creature through streets and shorelines as Dorian, shaken and unaware that the monster is the man she once met as a painter, makes her way back to the bell tower for understanding and perhaps forgiveness. The plot threads tighten around the bell tower—a symbolic nexus of memory, art, and mortality—and the questions about who Sordi truly is continue to haunt every character who crosses his path.
In a tense confrontation back in Sordi’s studio, the artist’s dual identities collide in a last, desperate attempt to maintain control. He entangles Dorian in a net, his knife poised as if to strike at what he believes to be Meliza, the former love that haunts his memories. But fate intervenes in a most macabre way: the room’s living wax figures, reanimated by some unknown, otherworldly force, rise from the floor and attack Sordi, turning his own studio into a trap for the killer. The threat to Dorian is averted as Max and his friends crash into the scene, breaking through the trap and freeing her from the terror that threatened to consume them all.
What unfolds is a story built on the tension between art and violence, memory and amnesia, desire and death. The town’s quiet exterior masks a storm of supernatural hunger that feeds on the lives of those who cross paths with Sordi. The paintings—once mere representations of what the artist sees—become vessels for the souls he has damaged, while the wax figures serve as a final, uncanny jury that decides the fate of the perpetrator. In the end, Max and his circle succeed in ending the immediate threat, but the scars left by the night’s events linger in every corner of the town, a reminder that beauty can sometimes hide a hunger that refuses to be sated.
