In 1953, John Wayne Gacy, Jr. [Mark Holton] argues with his father, John Stanley Gacy [Adam Baldwin], who says he will
> never be brave enough
and kicks him, setting a tense tone for a life shadowed by family strain and hidden secrets.
By 1976, the adult Gacy is a controversial figure at work and at home. His lunch with family is interrupted by a neighbor pressing for action about a strong, disturbing stench wafting from the crawl space. Gacy responds with anger, insisting he will take care of it, and the tension in the household widens. At the same time, a worker named Steve warns that he hasn’t been paid for two weeks, prompting Gacy to demand payment and send him away. A friend suggests using lime to mask the smell, hinting at the darker things simmering beneath the surface.
As night falls, Gacy abducts a man, brings him to the garage to vent about his troubles, and then releases him, a troubling glimpse of the cruelty simmering beneath the surface. On the job site, he berates workers for smoking, and when a new employee asks if he enjoys wrestling, the two men end up sparring in the yard. The moment turns hostile when Steve and another man watch and one of them sneers that Gacy is a “faggot,” fueling a volatile escalation.
The next day, Steve and two others ambush Gacy outside a shop. Steve takes money from his wallet, hands some to the others, and quits. That night, Gacy’s wife, Kara Gacy [Joleen Lutz] wakes to find a car at the house; she discovers Steve, handcuffed, being dragged into the garage. When Kara investigates, she finds clothes scattered around the space and races toward the crawl space, only to be met by Gacy bursting out and claiming he had been laying down lime.
During a Fourth of July party, Gacy presents Tom Kovacs [Charlie Weber] with a job offer, and a public speech extols him as a valued member of the community. He also hires an exterminator to handle the maggots and roaches in the crawl space, a grim reminder of the mounting problems beneath the house. Police question him about Steve’s disappearance, and he evasively claims Steve told him he was heading to Costa Rica or Puerto Rico. Later, a blow to an employee’s head with a hammer leads to a payout for silence, and a troubling discovery by Kara—handcuffs and magazines with homosexual content in the garage—drives a wedge between Gacy and his wife. Kara, along with their two daughters, eventually leaves him and the home, while Tom Kovacs’s situation grows increasingly unstable.
As time passes, Gacy lures a male escort, chloroforms him, and detains him in the garage, where the man is restrained and left. Gacy then disposes of the body in a park, and he pours concrete into the crawl space to try to seal the foul odor. He arranges a meeting with James Burrell to buy a car, but instead drowns him in the bathtub after inviting him inside for a drink. With the crawl space running out of room, Gacy and Tom watch a home-video reel of Gacy’s early business ventures, the screen flipping to explicit material that unsettles Tom and leaves him wide awake.
Tom decides to leave, but Gacy traps him with handcuffs and begins to strangle him. Tom manages a harrowing escape and finds refuge with the police, who arrive as they search the house and eventually uncover dozens of watches and licenses. The investigation intensifies as officers exhuming the crawl space uncover evidence of the crimes, and Gacy is arrested.
The film closes on the aftermath of the arrest, as the killer’s last words before execution echo in the courtroom and the story underscores the human toll of his crimes—the family strain, the false sense of a safe community, and the chilling realization of what was hidden behind the doors of a seemingly ordinary home.
> Kiss my ass!
