Plot
In 1987, Sara Campbell is driving her son Matt home from a Connecticut hospital where he has been undergoing experimental cancer treatments. Sara and her husband, Peter, a recovering alcoholic, discuss finding a rental house closer to the hospital. On another hospital visit, Sara finds a man putting up a "For Rent" sign in front of a large house. The man is frustrated and offers her the first month free if she rents the house immediately.
The following day, Peter arrives with Matt's brother Billy and cousins Wendy and Mary, and they choose rooms. Matt chooses the basement, which is divided by a partition wall with a locked door. After moving in, Matt suffers a series of visions involving an old, bearded man and corpses with symbols carved into their skin. The next day, Peter learns that the house was originally a funeral home; the room behind the mysterious door in the basement is a mortuary.
Matt tells another cancer patient, Reverend Nicholas Popescu, about his visions. Nicholas advises him to find out what the spirit wants. Later, Matt encounters a burned figure in his room who begins to move toward him. When the family comes home, they find a shirtless Matt with his fingers bleeding from scratching at the wall.
The family begins to disintegrate under the stress of Matt's illness and bizarre behavior. The children find a box of photographs, which show Jonah, a young man from Matt's visions, at a séance, emitting ectoplasm from his mouth. They also find a container of desiccated human eyelids. Wendy and Matt discover that the funeral home was run by a man named Ramsey Aickman, who conducted psychic research and would host séances with Jonah acting as a medium. At one séance, all those attending, including Aickman, were found dead, and Jonah disappeared.
Nicholas theorizes that Aickman was practicing necromancy in an attempt to control the dead and bind them to the house. That night, Nicholas finds human remains in the house and removes them. Matt awakens to find Aickman's symbols carved into his skin. He is taken to the hospital, where he encounters Jonah's ghost. Nicholas and Matt begin to have simultaneous visions revealing Jonah's fate: During the séance, a demonic presence burnt all the attendees in a flash of light. Jonah fled, using a dumbwaiter to escape the basement, but inadvertently became trapped in the crematory, where he was cremated alive.
Peter and Sara learn that Matt's cancer treatments have had no effect. They then discover that Matt has escaped the hospital. At home, Nicholas leaves a message telling the family to get out immediately, as it was Jonah's spirit that protected them. Matt breaks through the walls in the front room with an axe, revealing the dusty corpses Aickman hid in the walls. He forces Wendy and the children outside before barricading himself in the house and tearing down the other walls as corpses begin to tumble into the room. Jonah seemingly possesses Matt, who lights the bodies and the room on fire. Later on, investigators arrive at the house only to find it engulfed in flames.
As the fire department arrives, Sara and Peter frantically try to get in to save Matt. The spirits, finally freed, disappear. Outside, everyone watches tearfully as the emergency crew attempts to revive a dying Matt. As Matt slips away, he experiences a vision of himself standing in the graveyard where he sees Jonah, no longer appearing burnt. He seems about to follow Jonah when he hears his mother's voice. Matt returns to his body, and Jonah's spirit leaves him.
An intertitle reveals that after the events, Matt's cancer miraculously disappeared. The house was rebuilt and resold with no further reported incidents of haunting.
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