In 1955, in Portland, Oregon, a businessman discovers his wife in bed with another man and commits a brutal double murder-suicide. His young son, Paul Foley, Frankie Avalon witnesses the carnage and is left with lasting trauma that threads through the years. A quarter of a century later, in 1980, Paul is incarcerated at a psychiatric facility near Stanford Bay, a quiet town on the Oregon Coast. One day, he violently murders an orderly and, seized by a desperate impulse, retrieves a wooden flute his father gave him and escapes into the world outside.
Across town, Marion, Donna Wilkes is a Stanford Bay teenager fighting to adapt after a car crash that left her unable to walk without a leg brace. Her home life is tense; her mother, Bea, Antoinette Bower tries to stand by her, while Marion’s alcoholic father, Frank Hauser, Richard Jaeckel verges on verbally abusive. Marion clings to the hope of leaving Stanford Bay when her fisherman boyfriend, Joey, William Kirby Cullen, lands a steady job in Portland, dreaming of a new start somewhere else.
Paul steals a ride with a truck driver, but the journey ends violently when the driver tires of Paul’s flute and Paul bludgeons him with a hatchet, killing him and stealing the vehicle. He then picks up a female hitchhiker; when his flute fails to charm her, he strangles her and dismembers the body, a scene that unfolds with a chilling calm.
Meanwhile, Marion is plagued by strange dreams and visions of the murders, which she gradually realizes are premonitions. A blood transfusion she received while in the hospital after her accident has granted her extrasensory perception of Paul’s actions in the present, intensifying as the pattern of violence grows closer to home. Her psychic warnings become clearer as she encounters Paul disposing of the dismembered hitchhiker on a rural beach, making her his next target. She manages to escape the encounter for the time being, but Paul learns where she lives and infiltrates her home, killing her father in a brutal blow to the family.
Marion, who struggles to walk even with her brace, flees to a nearby sawmill and is relentlessly pursued by Paul. In the ensuing chase, Paul impales a worker with a forklift and, in a fit of frenzy, drives the forklift off a pier into the bay, a moment that seals the harrowing dynamic between hunter and survivor.
Back at the police station, Marion is questioned about the attacker, the “man she dreamed about.” With little evidence, the officers find only the body of the forklift worker in the bay and suspect Marion’s own mental instability, even as the truth of Paul’s escape casts a shadow over the investigation. A new vision of Paul hitching a ride with Joey prompts Marion to react with alarm as she is escorted to an ambulance and committed to the same psychiatric institution from which Paul had fled years before. The story crescendos as Paul, now posing as a doctor, enters her hospital room while she lies bound to a bed, and Marion awakens screaming in terror.
