Mark and Chris, old friends bonded by a shared love of making films, reconnect over a project that nods to their high school moments and to their classmate Eduardo Sánchez, who directs a movie called The Blair Witch Project. To honor that memory, they craft a sly parody that lets them relive their early camaraderie while wading into the lore that swirled around their circle.
In one quiet, unsettling moment, the film introduces the Man in Parking Garage, portrayed by John Amplas, a small but chilling figure that hints at the creeping dread to come.
Years later, during a retrospective interview with Sánchez, a rumor surfaces about an underground Maryland filmmaker named [Karl Atticus]. The archival revelation suggests that Atticus, a little-known Baltimore creator from the late 1960s with two grim horror films to his name, vanished after a brutal premiere of his second work—Mortal Remains—and is thought to have taken his own life in the wake of that violence.
Motivated by the rumor, Mark and Chris set aside their Blair Witch project to trace Atticus’s origins, chasing a thread that seems far more ominous than a simple exploitation tale. What they uncover is not only a career built on shock, but a lineage drawn from the works of Vernon Blake, a shadowy 1920s horror writer whose novels are dense with occult symbolism and cryptic ciphers. A historian on their quest explains how these ciphers function as markers, hints planted by the author or the filmmaker to signal hidden meanings, and the investigators soon spot a cipher "in the wild," a clue that appears outside any obvious frame of reference.
As they dig deeper, glimpses into Atticus’s world reveal a distinctive, unsettling filmmaking style. Culture Shock, a segment from Atticus’s first film, depicts mercenaries who come to a brutal end at the hands of a tribe of native women, a sequence that showcases the director’s relentless and disturbing approach. The film’s subjects—friends, relatives, and collaborators—start to demur, receiving stalker-like telephone calls that heighten the sense of danger and obsession around the investigation.
The pursuit grows increasingly personal and perilous. Mark endures a violent beating during a nighttime expedition through a sprawling cemetery, a moment that underscores the physical risk of chasing clues that feel almost elusively real. Meanwhile, Chris becomes more and more consumed, pressing forward with an almost feverish insistence to dig up a grave in the hope of uncovering a crucial connection between Atticus’s fiction and the mysterious cipher material. As the pair uncovers each layer, the line between documentary inquiry and something far more ominous blurs, leaving them to confront the possibility that Atticus’s art concealed a truth that outreaches ordinary horror and into something far more perilous.
