Deranged

Ezra Cobb grows up on a rural Midwest farm under his mother Amanda's fanaticism. She indoctrinates him to hate women and even instructs him to contact a supposed one woman after her death in Maureen Selby. Her grim maxim about sin and punishment shapes Ezra's outlook from a young age.

Amanda dies after a protracted illness, and Ezra withdraws from social life and others around him. The loss deepens his isolation and cements his troubling worldview. He retreats further into the macabre preoccupations that have guided him.

Nearly a year after Amanda's death, Ezra begins hearing auditory hallucinations that compel him to exhume her grave at night. He digs up her decomposed body and brings it back to his home. Using discarded fish skin and wax, he cobbles the corpse together to keep his mother company.

Having repaired his mother's corpse, Ezra reads about obituaries and realizes he could potentially dig up other bodies for parts to sustain both himself and his mother. This realization marks the shift from necrophilia as a fixation to a serial-killing trajectory. He begins to scheme more killings.

Ezra becomes acquainted with Maureen Selby, an eccentric middle-aged woman who proclaims herself psychic. During a one-night sexual encounter, he murders Maureen, an act that sets off his spree of killings. The murder catalyzes his escalating criminal behavior.

Ezra fixes on Mary Ransum, a 34-year-old waitress. He slashes her tires and strands her at the restaurant after hours, then offers her a ride to his house under the pretense of help. At his home, he reveals the disturbed spectacle of his dead mother and other corpses, threatening Mary.

Mary is bound in a closet and seated at a dining table surrounded by corpses. Ezra molests her while she struggles, and she smashes a bottle over his head in a desperate bid to escape. Enraged, he kills her with a human femur bone after she throws his mother's corpse at him.

Ezra visits his friend Harlon, who discusses Mary's disappearance in casual terms. Later, Harlon's teenage son Brad arrives with his girlfriend Sally Mae, catching Ezra's eye. The scene hints at the growing danger in town.

Ezra later visits Sally Mae at her cashier job in a local store and shoots her with a rifle; the bullet grazes her head, but she survives the ambush. This demonstrates Ezra's escalating violence and his fixation on Sally Mae. The encounter foreshadows the peril to come.

Ezra places Sally Mae in the bed of his truck and drives away, but she awakens and escapes into the woods. She inadvertently steps into a bear trap set by Harlon and Brad, mangling her foot and hindering her escape. Ezra tracks her down and shoots her to death.

Ezra drags Sally Mae's corpse to his farm, where he hangs it upside down in the barn and begins skinning the body. Harlon, Brad, and the sheriff arrive and find him laughing over a bowl of blood. The image captures the town's mounting horror at the killer among them.

A few days later, a group of townspeople led by Harlan Kootz burn the Cobb farm to the ground. The scene marks the community's attempt to purge the terror from their midst. The film closes on the burning homestead as the narrator alludes to the aftermath.