Eccentric Frank Carlyle ran a horror shop in small-town Steeple Falls, which takes pride in and profit from its Halloween traditions. Frank’s widower grandson Richard grudgingly returns there from Boston with his own kids, bright Ian and bratty Claire, to settle the inheritance. Ian discovers great-grandpa’s house is really haunted, and not just, as legend holds, by historic owner Zachariah Kull, who was burned on the stake.

There’s a campus killer on the loose who’s making urban legends, like the one about eating pop rocks and soda at the same time will make your stomach explode and the one about a psycho with an axe stepping into the backseat of your car at the gas station when not looking, into reality.

A sleazy cable-TV programmer begins to see his life and the future of media spin out of control in a very unusual fashion when he acquires a new kind of programming for his station.