Scream Bloody Murder

As a child, Matthew starts his father's tractor and accidentally kills him. He also cripples his own left hand in the process. He is placed in a psychiatric hospital, where his mangled limb is replaced with a hook, signaling a permanent break from ordinary life.

At eighteen, Matthew is released from the asylum and returns to his family home. He finds that his mother has remarried their neighbor Mack Parsons during his absence. He harbors incestuous feelings for his mother despite his aversion to sex, a tension that already distorts his view of family life. His return unsettles the town and foreshadows the violence to come.

Matthew immediately dislikes Parsons and murders him with an axe in Parsons' home. The killing marks his first adult murder and cements his isolation from others. He returns to the house where he grew up without showing any remorse.

The following morning, Matthew hitches a ride with a young couple and kills them. He beats the man’s head with a rock and drowns the woman in a roadside stream. The brutal spree demonstrates his escalating willingness to kill indiscriminately.

Matthew reaches a town and meets Vera, a painter and prostitute who reminds him of his mother. He becomes obsessed with her, and his fixation deepens as he drifts further from sanity. Vera's presence pulls him further into a dangerous path.

In a jealous rage, Matthew slits the throat of one of Vera’s clients, a drunken sailor. The murder reinforces his control over Vera and signals a descent into even greater brutality. This act foreshadows the coercive violence he will wield later.

Matthew bluffs his way into a mansion, smothers the owner with a pillow, and hacks the maid to death with a cleaver. He even beheads the owner's pet dog, showing no mercy for anything or anyone. The mansion becomes a stage for his escalating assault.

He brings Vera to the mansion, but she refuses to share his dream of a new life there. She is kept prisoner as he tries to impose his control over the house and its inhabitants. The situation reveals his increasingly fragile grip on reality.

Realizing his aversion to sexuality, Vera uses the moment to push him toward intimacy and asserts her own autonomy. She stabs him with a loose door hook and tries to escape while he is distracted. The confrontation ends with the threat of violence looming over them.

Matthew catches Vera during her escape attempt and rips her throat out with his hook, killing her. The murder marks the final collapse of his humaneness and solidifies his transformation into a completely unhinged killer.

With Vera dead, Matthew becomes completely unhinged and runs through town, haunted by hallucinations of his victims. The phantoms chase him down the streets as his grip on reality slips away.

Matthew breaks into a church, surrounded by phantoms, and uses his hook to kill himself. The final act is a suicide born of madness, sealing his descent from a broken psyche.