Saint Elizabeth's is portrayed as an elite Catholic girls' school with a chapel and boarding dormitories, where Sister Mary-Ellen keeps a careful eye on the students and routines unfold under tight, propriety-stitched rules. The newly arrived headmistress, Mrs. Sheffield, settles into the role alongside her husband, Myles Sheffield, the science teacher, as the school’s balance of power shifts. As the two schools—this one a girls’ institution and Winchester, a private boys’ school— drift into uneasy coexistence, the story sketches a growing tension between the two groups and the local youth, a friction that first erupts at the nearby Coopers Beach and later erupts again during a school dance where water cannons and gasps of alarm ripple through the crowd.
In the shadow of these conflicts, romance and secrecy intertwine. Lovers sneak away to the wooded “lovers’ lane” behind the grounds, and the forest becomes a tense stage where danger feels imminent. The first clue of danger appears when Gretchen, in a polka-dot dress, arrives with Winchester’s Stuart/Stewart, disturbing the intimate moment between the first couple and the unseen menace. Gretchen’s arrival upsets the fragile equilibrium, and soon after, a brutal act unfolds that shatters the dance and the peace of the campus.
The heart of the drama shifts to Sunday night, when Mrs. Sheffield slips into the teacher’s residence with a Winchester student, exposing a private life that Mr. Sheffield knows all too well. This tension is reinforced by the revelation that he is aware of her ongoing infidelities, a realization that crystallizes the sense that the house—and the school—are under a volatile strain. In a shocking moment, Mr. Sheffield takes a knife to a yearbook photograph of a student, Mary Huston, a moment that marks the escalating violence behind the school’s closed doors. Mary Huston, a sixteen-year-old who figures prominently as the narrative unfolds, shares a near-kiss in the waterfall and watering hole area with Kevin Lynch, a quiet thread in the web of students. Kevin is a figure whose presence intensifies the tension as the danger grows.
Within the science classroom, the story intensifies as two students, Michelle and Jennifer, stumble upon a ghastly discovery—the bottles containing fingers and eyeballs, and a barb-wire garrote hanging on a cupboard door. Michelle is assaulted, and Jennifer fights back with a knife, only to fall down the stairs and be killed in a brutal sequence that shatters any lingering sense of safety. Blood stains the shirt of Mr. Sheffield as he confronts the consequences of his actions, and Mary Huston becomes a focal point of the fragile, dangerous balance that still holds the school together. Mary and Kevin share a kiss, a moment that feels both tender and perilous in the midst of a murder investigation that links the Saint Elizabeth’s students to crimes in faraway California.
As the tension escalates, the local police become entangled in a larger web of deceit. A public payphone call from Linda to Kevin carries a message from Mary, authorized by Sheffield before Linda’s life is taken. The search widens beyond the campus as the officer connects the murders in California to the disappearances at Saint Elizabeth’s, a connection that deepens the mystery and raises the stakes for everyone involved.
Mary heads toward the forested lovers’ lane in the rain on Sunday night, watched from a distance by Myles Sheffield, who later vents his troubles to Virginia Sheffield as she pushes him to dinner and belittles him for past failures. He returns to the science room to fetch the garrote, only to be confronted by the Sister, and the tension in the building—its corridors and classrooms—becomes a pressure cooker of fear and hostility.
In a sequence of escalating violence, Mary arrives in the woods while a police officer discovers the murdered schoolgirl in a telephone booth. Kevin reaches the lovers’ lane again as Virginia Sheffield is seen packing, and her lover returns to her room; she warns that “all the goblins are coming out tonight.” The officer interrupts a choir in the school chapel and confronts Mrs. Sheffield, demanding truth, a moment that culminates in a tense standoff where a revolver is fired and the room fills with questions and danger. Myles Sheffield moves to garrote Kevin, and Mary tries to defend herself with a stick, all while the chaos continues to spiral out of control.
The confrontation peaks as Sheffield, driven by rage, closes in on Mary while the police officer draws his weapon, only to be fatally stabbed by Sheffield himself. Sister Mary-Ellen bravely intervenes, tossing a bottle of liquid that drives the killer back and briefly saves the moment of reckoning before she collapses. Bleeding and unsteady, Sheffield staggers to the residence of the local priest and retrieves a shotgun, a weapon he uses in a final flurry of violence that culminates in a return to his own home, where Virginia awaits and another shotgun is discharged, echoing through the night.
> all the goblins are coming out tonight
The film closes on a note of shattered trust and relentless fear, as the boundaries between authority, desire, and violence blur within the walls of Saint Elizabeth’s. The story remains focused on a core cast of figures—Mary Huston, Virginia Sheffield, Mary-Ellen, Gretchen, Michelle, Jennifer, Kevin Lynch, and the others—whose intertwined fates reveal the danger that lies beneath a veneer of schooling, propriety, and quiet suburbia. If you’re seeking a moody, tense puzzle set in a secluded institution where loyalties fracture under pressure, this tale threads together mystery, infidelity, and murder with a clinical, unflinching eye.
