A woman searching for her boyfriend in an abandoned house discovers his body, stabbed with scissors, and is then killed with a French knife, dragged through a cellar door by a monstrous figure.
Norman Boyle, Paolo Malco, moves with his wife Lucy Boyle, Catriona MacColl, and their son Bob Boyle, Giovanni Frezza, into Oak Mansion in New Whitby, Massachusetts. Norman plans to study old houses, while the family settles in. The previous owner is Dr. Peterson, Norman’s ex-colleague, who murdered his mistress before taking his own life, and whose shadow lingers over the place. In the quiet days that follow, a real estate office worker mentions that the Freudstein keys should be used for access, and Laura Gittleson, Dagmar Lassander, promises to find the Boyles a babysitter.
Across the street, Mae Freudstein appears to Bob and warns him to stay away. She is not buried where he thinks, and the eerie sense of a hidden past deepens as Lucy sweeps and discovers the tombstone of Jacob Tess Freudstein indoors—an odd feature of the old mansion. That night, Norman taps into Peterson’s materials in the library, only to be interrupted by the staff who seem to recognize him, a clue that Peterson conducted private research on disappearances in the area. He learns that Peterson’s work touched dangerous, long-buried secrets connected to the house.
The babysitter arrives as announced, Ania Pieroni as Ann, and begins to tidy the kitchen and unseal the cellar. Mae shows the boy a cryptic tombstone and recounts that Mae Freudstein is not actually buried there; the unease only thickens when Ann begins cleaning a fresh bloodstain and anxious questions are raised about the house’s history. Peterson’s name surfaces in odd whispers, and the librarian mentions that the Freudstein legacy is more than just a local legend.
Ann’s presence in the cellar becomes a nightmare when Freudstein, the malevolent figure behind the horror, moves through the shadows and decapitates Ann. Bob, terrified, flees upstairs, while Lucy returns to find her son shaken and at first refusing to believe his story. Meanwhile, Norman, worried about the increasing danger, travels to New York to hunt for Freudstein’s origins and to uncover the full truth about Peterson’s madness. He finds an audio cassette documenting Peterson’s descent, but in a moment of resolve, he destroys the evidence by dropping it into a furnace pipe.
The terror escalates as Ann’s fate is confirmed, and Bob is trapped in the cellar. Norman returns just in time to hack the door open with a hatchet, and the path to the cellar reveals a macabre chamber filled with mutilated bodies, surgical tools, and a long, decayed laboratory. Freudstein is a living corpse, aged and rotting, who survives by regenerating blood cells from the parts of his victims. Norman fights him, but Freudstein twists the hatchet away and mortally wounds Norman with a brutal attack, ripping open his throat as Lucy and Bob scramble to escape.
Lucy and Bob climb a ladder toward the cracked tomb above. As Lucy strains to move the stone, Freudstein drags her back down the stairs, and her head strikes each step on the way to a gruesome death. Freudstein advances toward Bob, but Mae, now revealed to be connected to the house’s haunted past, appears with her mother, Mary Freudstein, and Mary leads Mae and Bob down the grove toward an apparent ghost world, suggesting a possible escape beyond the fatal yoke of the house.
In the end, the mansion’s curse remains, and the Freudstein legacy feels both ancient and inexorable. The living dead, the buried past, and the spectral figures of Mae and Mary Freudstein intertwine with the fates of Bob and Lucy, leaving behind a chilling impression of a house that feeds on memory, courage, and the boundaries between the living and the dead.
