After a family tragedy in the chaotic city, Chris and Maggie Conley, in a last-ditch effort to save their dying marriage, purchase an isolated home in the deepest woods, to which they quickly discover evil has a key.

Chrissie and her friends set out on a road trip for a final fling before one is shipped off to Vietnam. Along the way, bikers harass the foursome and cause an accident that throws Chrissie from the vehicle. The lawman who arrives on the scene kills one of the bikers and brings Chrissie’s friends to the Hewitt homestead, where young Leatherface is learning the tools of terror.

After picking up a traumatized young hitchhiker, five friends find themselves stalked and hunted by a deformed chainsaw-wielding killer and his family of equally psychopathic killers.

Max Fischer, a precocious and eccentric 15 year-old, who is both Rushmore’s most extracurricular and least scholarly student; Herman Blume, a disillusioned industrialist who comes to admire Max; and Rosemary Cross, a widowed first grade teacher who becomes the object of both Max’s and Herman’s affection.

Grace Rhodes, who is studying to be a doctor, returns to her hometown as a strange illness is afflicting the local children. The symptoms include a high fever and spasms, but even weirder is what happens the next day: All those with the illness claim they are somebody else — then they begin murdering the grown-ups. After her sister undergoes the same sinister metamorphosis, Grace comes to believe there is some connection to an evil cult figure who may be returning from the grave.