| Director | William Malone |
|---|---|
| Budget | $40 million |
| Box office | $18.9 million |
Mike Reilly is an NYPD detective who is called to the scene of a mysterious death in the subway system. The victim, Polidori, exhibits bleeding from his eyes and other orifices and, by the frozen look on his face, appears to have seen something horrifying before being hit by a train. Department of Health researcher Terry Huston is intrigued by the find as well, particularly when several more victims show up with identical symptoms.
When a contagious virus is ruled out, Terry and Mike team up to discover what might be killing these people. Initially they are unable to find anything to connect the deaths; after some more digging for clues, they eventually discover that all of the victims' computers crashed shortly before their passings. They send each of the victims' hard drives to Mike's friend, Denise Stone, a forensic specialist, for analysis. Denise discovers that all of the victims had visited an interactive website called Feardotcom.com, which depicts voyeuristic torture murder. Upon viewing the site herself, Denise is subjected to various sights and sounds of torture that eventually drive her insane, resulting in her falling to her death from her apartment window.
Mike feels guilty, thinking that he should have never gotten Denise involved in the case. Terry figures out that people who visit the website die within 48 hours, apparently from what they feared most in their lives. Despite such dangerous knowledge, both she and Mike visit the site in order to figure out what is happening. As they begin to experience paranoia and hallucinations, including that of a young girl and her inflatable ball, they race against time to figure out if any of it has any connection to an extremely vicious serial killer, Alistair Pratt, who has been eluding Mike and the FBI for years.
It is revealed that Feardotcom is, in fact, a ghost site powered by the vengeful spirit of one of Pratt's first victims, Jeannie Richardson, seeking revenge for her own exploitation as a subject of one of Pratt's snuff films which was shared on the internet. Jeannie was tortured by Pratt for 48 hours before she begged him to kill her, which explains why the victims have 48 hours to live. Following a clue, Terry locates Jeannie's mutilated corpse in the bowels of a flooded steel mill where she once played as a child. Terry wrongly assumes that the recovery of Jeannie's body will put her soul at rest.
Mike and Terry track down Pratt to his torture chamber in a building basement, where he is preparing to kill another victim. Mike shoots Pratt in the leg, but Pratt returns fire, shooting Mike in the abdomen. Pratt incapacitates Terry and attempts to kill her before a dying Mike manages to use Pratt's computer to log onto the website, releasing Jeannie's spirit. Along with the ghosts of other victims, Jeannie descends upon Pratt, killing him. Moments later, Mike also dies.
Some time later, while lying in bed with her pet cat, Terry's phone rings. Upon picking up the receiver, she hears only online static.