Genre: Horror
Director: David F. Sandberg
Writer: Jack Slipter
Based on the 1973 film Messiah of Evil
Cast: Melissa Benoist, Neil Patrick Harris, Rose Leslie, Michael Sheen, Juno Temple, Wilmer Valderrama, Mike Epps
Plot: A man (Michael Sheen) frantically runs along a deserted residential street at night, from an invisible threat. A door opens in a fenced yard and a girl leaves the man without words enter. He collapses next to a pool, exhausted, and the girl comes to his side, apparently to help him. Instead, he suddenly produces a narrow razor and cuts his throat.
A vague female figure walks along a long corridor, as we hear her voice narrate. He is Arletty (Melissa Benoist), confined to a mental institution. Warn of a city called Point Dune, where the moon turned blood red and caused a kind of change that affected residents. "They will take you one by one and nobody will hear your cry!" she says. There is a flashback.
Arletty explains that she was originally traveling to Point Dune to get in touch with her father (a man at the beginning of the film), a painter who lived and worked there in a beach house. He had stopped communicating with Arletty after a series of letters that became increasingly bizarre, as he seemed threatened by an unexplained illness or madness. On the way to Point Dune, he stops to get gas at an isolated rural service station, where he finds the solitary assistant (Wilmer Valderrama) who shoots a gun in the darkness against an invisible target. Holster the gun and get to pump Arletty's gas, when even a pickup truck driven by a strange albino man gets up. During the refueling of the truck, the operator furtively looks under a tarp in the back and discovers two corpses, one with torn eyes and the other is the man from the beginning of the film with a torn throat. He says nothing, but tries to get rid of Arletty quickly, sending her away without even paying for his gas. Some time after his departure, the assistant is murdered inside the gas station when a strange figure suddenly jumps out of the car he is working on.
Arletty goes to her father's beach house and finds her abandoned. The walls are richly decorated with eerie murals depicting life-size human figures, and Arletty finds a diary kept by his father where he talks about a disease that seems to endure that borders on madness. He left a diary in which he specifically addresses her. In it she complains about the darkness that consumes the city and the horrible nightmares she is experiencing, and begs Arletty not to look for it ever ever. Her letter tells her to talk to the owner of the art gallery, who sells her paintings. In a desperate attempt to get in touch with someone who might know where he is, the next day he goes to the city to an art gallery that sold his works, only to find that they now claim to have never sold his works. He says that Point Dune is "an artistic colony" and vaguely recalls his father (his paintings are disturbing pop art portraits of groups of people in black, white and gray, standing; men are always dressed in black clothes, white shirts and black ties, like dead men at the funeral). It is never clear whether they are citizens, figures of his visions or both. The curator of the gallery refers her to three people who say they were in the gallery at the beginning of that day also looking for her father, and Arletty finds them in a local motel. They are Thom (Neil Patrick Harris), Toni (Rose Leslie) and Laura (Juno Temple), and when Arletty is entering their room she is approached by an eccentric local tramp (Mike Epps), who tells a story transmitted by her father about a time when the moon turned blood red and made the locals return to violent acts of violence. At that point Thom opens the door and urges him to elaborate, but the tramp gets scared and leaves in a hurry.
Thom explains to Arletty that he is a foreign aristocrat, a collector of regional legends and a fan of his father's work. He says he stopped near the gallery and that their work was displayed at the window, but they refused to sell it to him, which contradicts the waitress's claim that they never brought his father's work. After Arletty leaves, she is stopped again by the tramp, who warns her that if she meets her father, she must burn him to avoid becoming his victim. The next day, Arletty wakes up and finds Thom and the two women are at his father's house with her. Thom explains that the old man was found dead that day, apparently eaten by animals, and all local motels suddenly refused to rent them a room, so they had nowhere to go. Arletty allows them to stay, and Thom seems to be interested in her as a gentleman, which annoys Laura.He tells Toni he is leaving and, after leaving on foot, a vehicle stops to offer her a ride. It is the same truck pulled by the albino, with a small group of men sitting in the back looking at the sky without emotions. Laura decides to accept the pass, but changes her mind when the albino pulls a mouse from his pocket and eats it alive. She asks to be let out and walk the rest of the way on foot into the city. Find the deserted city and follow a solitary figure in a supermarket. Unable to attract the man's attention, he follows him to the market until he discovers a group of citizens gathered around a meat cooler, greedily devouring raw meat like animals. Suddenly they notice her and pursue her until they have cornered her, dragging her to the floor and eating her alive.
The next day, Arletty is summoned by the police to identify his father's body, which was discovered on the beach. Arletty is upset, but behaves strangely. Toni gets bored and Thom sends her to the city with the car so he can go to the cinema. Upon returning home, Arletty discovers that he is bleeding from his ear and has a strange experience in which he burns his hand on the hot stove but feels no pain. He confides to Thom that the body on the beach was not his father, something he knows because he did not recognize his hands. Thom suddenly worries about Toni.
In the city, Toni participates in the screening of a film entitled "Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye". Buy a ticket from a clerk who barely recognizes it and finds the rest of the abandoned lobby. The moment he enters, the assistant puts a "closed" sign and the lights on the tent go out. Toni finds the big theater empty except for one or two other clients. Sitting in the middle near the front, he watches the film as the camera reveals an increasing number of clumsy citizens who gather in the seats behind her, until the theater is almost full. Eventually two of the ghouls sit on either side of Toni, and notice that they are bleeding from their eyes. Suddenly he turns around and realizes how many strange people are there with her and begins to panic, running towards the exits, which are now blocked on the other side. Trapped inside with demons, the film ends and the cinema screen turns white, and suddenly they rush towards her and eat it while screaming. Thom, who has arrived in town too late to help Toni, sees some of the strange townspeople. After the crowd advances on them. They are firing into them, but the people are unaffected by the bullets. Suddenly, one of the infected officers by the same thing the townsfolk have. The normal officer fires him and runs off, but the other shoots him in the back. The mob descends on him and they eat his body. Thom runs off and is chased by a few of the mob. One of them attacks him and his neck, but he is able to break away. He encounters a normal woman, but she transforms as they speak, bleeding from her eyes.
Meanwhile, Arletty discovers that the signs of her infection have worsened. She is a painter, she is not able to feel it, and she has vomited into the sink. Finding someone else in the house, she realizes she is her father, who is talking about the town. A survivor of the Donner party, this stranger brought with him a strange curse of cannibalism, after which he walked into the sea, promised to return in 100 years when the moon turned blood red. He warns Arletty to leave, but she refuses to go without him, at which point he becomes violent and tries to attack her. Remembering the words of the vagrant, Arletty sets him on fire and frees him from the undead curse.
Thom returns to the house and discovers the charred body, at which point to terrified Arletty attacks him and stabs his arm with scissors. Thom managed to calm and bandage his wound, but ghouls start breaking into the house and trying to surround them. They are waiting for the arrival of the "dark stranger". Trapped by the mass of ghouls, they swim in the water, where Thom drowns two to his wounded arm.
The movie ends with his voice-over narration informs the ghouls of the story, who returned as predicted. She said she was institutionalized. Unable to convince anyone that she's healthy, she is forced to wait in the asylum until the beginning of the infection that began in Point Dune reached the rest of the world, plunging it into chaos and bloodshed.
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