Kevin Leahy, an alcoholic Catholic priest who has strayed from his faith, dies in a car crash and is sent back to Earth as penance to fight evil as an exorcist, returning to life. He steps into a world where spiritual conflict bleeds into the everyday, and his reentry hints at a larger battle between faith and darkness that will unfold through a small, haunted town.
At the Helen Page School, a Catholic all-girls college in Salem, Oregon, graduation season is approaching and the school is on the cusp of going coed. Ellen Sumner teaches there, and her daughter Weezie attends, binding the two generations together in a place already twitching with secrets. One evening, the typewriter in Ellen’s office erupts in flames without warning, a crackling flame that seems to carry a message or threat from somewhere beyond ordinary explanation.
A cruel prank by Lane, Alex, Celia, and Marty targets Weezie, smearing ketchup and other liquids under her bedsheets and disturbing the quiet of the dorm. Louise Gelson, Ellen’s sister and the headmistress, arrives and orders the girls to evacuate, setting the stage for a series of intensifying incidents. Weezie returns to her dorm just in time to witness the curtains bursting into flames, a moment that Ellen dismisses as the product of smoking—yet the fear lingers.
During graduation practice, disaster strikes again when Lane’s gown bursts into flames. Ellen and Paul Winjam, another teacher, manage to extinguish the flames, but Lane is badly burned in the process. The police, led by Sergeant Taplinger, begin to examine what looks increasingly like a pattern of supernatural events. Ellen urges Leahy to investigate, insisting that ordinary explanations won’t suffice. They visit Lane in the hospital, where the supernatural thread of the happenings tightens around the people involved.
Weezie confides to Leahy that the night of the dorm fire she had gone to the biology room to study with Mr. Winjam, and the two may have been more than just colleagues. That night, Weezie and Mr. Winjam meet in the biology room, and his jacket bursts into flames; Weezie is locked out and watches through the window as he burns to death, a haunting image that intertwines romance, betrayal, and a furnace-like fate.
The next day, Leahy discovers Ms. Gelson crying in Winjam’s office—revealing she and Winjam had also been romantically involved. Gelson suspends classes and several students leave the college, as fear and rumor spread like smoke through the corridors. That night, Weezie encounters Gelson wandering the hallways in a disturbed, almost spectral state; Gelson screams and slaps Weezie, and the girl tells Leahy about the unsettling encounter. As more smoke is detected, Leahy searches the school for Gelson, while Ellen and Weezie begin to smell the growing threat.
With the remaining students gathered in a dormitory, the house itself feels besieged. The girls are left in fear as Gelson unlocks the rooms and leads them away. Leahy moves through the dormitory and finds it emptied, then frees Ellen and Weezie from Ellen’s locked office so they can attempt an escape. The trio encounters the possessed Gelson at the college’s swimming pool, surrounded by the frightened girls. Ellen orders the girls to flee, and Gelson seizes Leahy, setting his jacket aflame; the fire seems to have a life of its own and sputters out only to be reignited by Gelson’s chilling laughter and nails she spits toward him.
In a final, terrifying act, Leahy embraces Gelson as the flames engulf him, and he plunges into the swimming pool, disappearing in a blaze. The college reopens for graduation, and Sergeant Taplinger asks Ellen about Leahy’s identity and whereabouts. She responds that she does not know who he truly was or where he went, a line that leaves the mystery unresolved. Lane is able to return for the graduation ceremony, aided by a now healthy Gelson who leads the school back into the light, suggesting that the danger has been confronted even if the exact truth remains hidden beneath the surface.
