| Director | John McTiernan |
|---|---|
| Budget | $2.3 million |
| Box office | $2.3 million |
In a Los Angeles city hospital, Jean-Charles Pommier, a French anthropologist, is brought into the emergency room. Despite being badly beaten, he keeps resisting the doctors' attempts at treating him and does not stop shouting at them in French. However, no one can understand him. Moments after he dies, one of the physicians treating him, Dr. Eileen Flax, becomes possessed with his memories. While seeing bits of Pommier's life through his eyes, Flax has an accident and gets knocked out. When she wakes up, she gets out of the hospital without telling anybody and continues reliving Pommier's life, visiting the places he was at as they come up in her visions.
Flax's flashbacks tell the story of the final week in Pommier's life. At the start of it, after years of travelling around the world and studying the religious beliefs and spiritual rituals of non-Western cultures, Pommier finally settles down with his wife Niki in Los Angeles to teach at UCLA. His home in the suburbs is vandalized one night by a gang of street punks who travel around in a black van. They are very interested in his house and he finds that they have built a shrine in his garage to a murderer who recently killed two girls who lived there. He studies them because their nomadic subculture exhibits similarities to the ones he has studied abroad.
Pommier begins to observe the street punks, following them and covertly photographing them. While doing this, he witnesses them killing a man and hiding the body in a dumpster. However, when he checks the dumpster later, the body has disappeared. Despite being afraid of them, he is also fascinated, as he misses his own nomadic lifestyle and has qualms about complying to Niki's wishes and settling down in the United States.
One night, Pommier develops the pictures and is puzzled to find that the street punks do not show up in them. He realizes that they are actually demonic Inuit trickster spirits that take human form, commit acts of violence and mischief and are attracted to places of violence and death. They become aware of him and start appearing at his house. A frightened Pommier is eventually chased through the streets by the spirits. To hide from them, he gets inside an abandoned building and meets Bertril, a nun who already knows his name. She offers to help him and he accepts, until the ghosts of more nuns appear and start chasing him. Pommier returns to his house, where he sees a punk standing outside. Disturbed, Pommier grabs a metal rod and seemingly beats him to death. When Pommier enters his house and looks through a window, the body is gone. In the bedroom, Pommier wakes up Niki and has sex with her.
Flax awakens in Pommier's bedroom, in the arms of Niki. They try to flee the city to escape the spirits but the house is surrounded by an army of leather-clad bikers and punks. The spirits storm the house, forcing the women to flee to the attic. One of the nomads, Dancing Mary, breaks into the attic but leaves after scaring them. The nomads later leave the house and the women come out of the attic to find everything destroyed. After packing their bags, they flee the city. As they are driving down a back road out of Los Angeles, a leather-clad man on a motorcycle rides near them. Flax warns Niki that whatever she sees, she should not stop. As they drive past him, they are horrified to see that the man is Pommier, who is now one of the nomads.