Douglas Elmore, a burned-out investigative reporter who has never fully recovered from his wife’s suicide, accepts a temporary caretaker job at a crumbling apartment complex known as The Hagstone. What starts as a dreary, alcohol-soaked routine devolves into something far more unsettling as the building seems to breathe with him. Late one night, the ghost of Julie Elizabeth Elmore materializes, stepping into his bleak world with a cold presence that shatters his fragile grip on reality and fills his days with a growing, paralyzing fear.
Early the next day, an odd tenant named Mr. Thompson corners him with a blunt demand: remove Karna from the basement, along with her hairless cat Victoria. Moved by Karna’s fragile dignity, Douglas offers her a small apartment near the laundry room, hoping to give her some shelter from the Hagstone’s strange dynamics. The act of kindness feels at once noble and dangerous, drawing him deeper into a web of secrets he barely understands.
Seeking guidance, Douglas visits his priest brother-in-law Fr. Carl Becker. He recounts Julie’s spectral visits and the uneasy atmosphere seeping from the Hagstone, but his concern only grows when he returns to the building to find one of the tenants brutally murdered. An unfeeling Karna then asks Douglas to repair something in her apartment, which foreshadows the complicated, intimate entanglements that will soon consume him.
That night, Douglas shadows Karna through the city’s labyrinthine streets, witnessing a disturbing encounter between Karna and a pale, sinister man in a deserted alley. The scene disturbs him deeply and raises questions about Karna’s true nature, even as he remains drawn to her magnetic presence. When he returns, the tense mood among the tenants intensifies, and accusations begin to fly—Mrs. Brennan’s suspicions about Karna surface, fueling a tense confrontation that Douglas adopts and then tries to ignore.
The next day, Douglas moves through his duties in a fog of post-coital euphoria, only to discover Mrs. Brennan’s blood-streaked corpse in the rear stairwell. Detective Willis questions him with unwavering bluntness, making it clear that Douglas is now the prime suspect in both murders. Willis also hints at a plan to dig up Julie’s grave and reopen the case, a move that would unearth even darker truths beneath the Hagstone. Determined to clear his name and to protect Julie, Douglas confronts Karna and accuses her of the killings, yet finds himself overwhelmed by her overwhelming sexual power. Karna slips a drug into Douglas’s drink and carries him away to a bizarre satanic sex ritual that culminates in a human sacrifice.
Douglas wakes up in Barbara Halloway’s apartment, where she urges him to abandon the Hagstone for good. He refuses, and in a surge of desperation, breaks down Karna’s apartment door only to find an empty, abandoned space. Barbara ferries him to his brother-in-law Carl, and the trio grows convinced that demonic forces are using the police to exhumate Julie’s body for some unholy purpose. They travel to the cemetery, where they find Detective Willis murdered at Julie’s grave and the stakes suddenly feel impossibly high.
Returning to confront the dark powers inhabiting The Hagstone, Douglas, Barbara, and Carl face off against the fully demonized versions of Karna (the succubus) and her incubus pimp, Mr. Thompson. In a brutal cascade of revelation, Douglas discovers Julie’s corpse buried deep within the Hagstone’s sub-basement. The body re-animates, overpowers him, and escapes, killing Carl in the process. The trio then challenges Karna’s monstrous transformed cat Victoria in the boiler room, and with the last of the demons defeated, they flee the Hagstone for the final time. Julie’s apparition lingers, watching with a cold, calculating gaze as she contemplates her next victim, leaving the fate of those involved—and the building itself—shrouded in a chilling, unresolved silence.
