George Tatum, Baird Stafford, has spent many years incarcerated in a New York City psychiatric facility after sexually mutilating and murdering a family in Brooklyn. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, amnesia, and epilepsy, he undergoes an experimental procedure that reprograms his brain, reforming him into an upstanding citizen. Yet hazy nightmares of the childhood violence linger, hinting at a past he cannot fully escape.
Upon his release, George visits a peep show in Times Square, triggering vivid flashbacks to his father’s murder. The pull of those memories shadows his every step as he navigates a world that wants to see him as a reformed man rather than a danger still simmering beneath the surface.
The next day, he obtains a car and heads south to Florida to visit his ex-wife Susan Temper, Sharon Smith; their daughters Kim Temper, Kim Patterson and Tammy Temper, Tammy Patterson, and their mischievous young son C.J. Temper, C.J. Cooke. Their carefully maintained domestic routine is fractured by a broken-down car in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where he spends a harrowing overnight period and, in a brutal act, follows a woman home from a bar and slashes her to death. Back in New York, George’s psychiatrists realize he has fled and they begin tracking his movements across state lines.
In Florida, Susan is in a relationship with her boyfriend Bob Rosen, Mik Cribben, and struggles with the responsibilities of a single mother. Her house begins receiving a stream of disturbing phone calls, and no one realizes that these calls are coming from the man who vanished from the city. Kathy the Babysitter, Danny Ronan, takes on the night shift, only to be unsettled by the relentless ring of the phone. C.J. begins claiming he is being followed by a strange man—his father George—though Susan writes it off as one of his pranks. As the danger intensifies, George murders Tony, a classmate of C.J., and a teenage girl named Candy in an abandoned house during a game of hide-and-seek.
Kathy agrees to babysit the children the following night, and the house becomes a site of terror as George infiltrates the home and murders Kathy and her boyfriend with a rock pick. After donning one of C.J.’s Halloween masks, an old man—[George] himself in disguise—pursues the children, who barricade themselves in the upstairs bedrooms. C.J. manages to obtain a revolver from his mother’s dresser and fires eight shots at George, ending the immediate threat.
In his dying moments, George experiences a full memory of his childhood, including the moment he caught his father, William Kirksey, engaged in sadomasochistic acts with another woman, and the terrible murder that followed with a felling axe. Susan rushes home to find police removing George’s body, and she hysterically identifies him as her husband. The closing image lingers on C.J., sitting in a police car, winking knowingly at the camera.
