| Director | Gary Sherman |
|---|---|
| Budget | $5 million |
| Box office | $216,166 |
Amateur photographer George LeMoyne arrives in coastal Potters Bluff. Lisa, a beautiful local woman, offers to model for him. When he accepts her invitation to have sex, a mob of townspeople beats and immolates him. George survives the attack, but is later killed by Lisa posing as a nurse in the hospital.
The townspeople murder more visitors. Sheriff Dan Gillis—assisted by William G. Dobbs, the eccentric local coroner-mortician—works hard to discover a motive for the killings. Gillis becomes increasingly disconcerted as a grisly death occurs every day. In each case, the killers photograph the victims as they are murdered. Gillis's investigations are complicated by his wife Janet's bizarre behavior.
Gillis accidentally hits someone with his squad car following an attack. On the grill of the car, Gillis finds the twitching severed arm of the accident victim. The victim attacks Gillis and flees with the arm. After the attack, Gillis scrapes some flesh from the vehicle and takes it to the local doctor, who tells him that the tissue sample has been dead for approximately four months. Gillis grows suspicious of Dobbs and conducts a background check. He discovers that Dobbs was formerly the chief pathologist in Providence until he was dismissed 10 years before for conducting unauthorized experiments in the county morgue.
Gillis confronts Dobbs. Dobbs admits he has developed a secret technique for reanimating the dead, and all of the townspeople are reanimated corpses under his control. Dobbs considers himself an "artist" who uses his reanimated hordes to create more corpses for him to create art with. Even Janet is a reanimated corpse. When she appears in Dobbs's office, Gillis shoots and mortally wounds her, then shoots Dobbs. Gillis follows Janet into the cemetery, where she pleads with him to bury her in an open grave. After he does as she asks, the townspeople come to pay their respects.
Gillis returns to Dobbs's office to discover that Dobbs has used his technique on himself. Dobbs shows Gillis a film of Janet stabbing Gillis to death as the townspeople and Dobbs watch. As Gillis stares at his own decomposing hands, Dobbs offers to repair them.