Description
In 1955 in Portland, Oregon, a businessman finds his wife in bed with another man, and commits a double murder-suicide. His young son, Paul, witnesses the three deaths, and is traumatized. Twenty-five years later, in 1980, Paul is incarcerated at a psychiatric institution near Stanford Bay, a small town on the Oregon Coast. One day, Paul manages to murder an orderly, and subsequently retrieves a beloved wooden flute given to him by his father before escaping the institution.
Meanwhile, Stanford Bay teenager Marion is struggling to adjust to her disability: She survived a car accident several years prior—caused by her drunken father, Frank—which left her unable to walk without the help of a leg brace. Marion's home life is troubled, with her father being verbally abusive to her and her mother, Bea. She dreams of leaving Stanford Bay once her fisherman boyfriend, Joey, obtains a job in Portland.
Paul manages to hitch a ride with a truck driver. When the driver becomes annoyed by Paul's flute-playing, Paul bludgeons him in the head with a hatchet, killing him, before stealing his vehicle. He subsequently picks up a female hitchhiker, who he brings to a local motel in Stanford Bay. The two begin to engage in sex, but Paul strangles her to death after he fails to charm her with his flute-playing, and proceeds to dismember her body. Marion is concurrently plagued by bizarre dreams and visions of the murders, which she comes to discover are in fact premonitions. While in the hospital after her accident, she had received a blood transfusion from Paul, which has given her extrasensory perception of Paul's actions in the present.
Marion's psychic visions of Paul's actions increase in frequency and intensity, and she eventually runs into him in person disposing of the female hitchhiker's dismembered corpse on a rural beach, making her his next target. Marion manages to elude Paul, but he later discovers where she lives. He infiltrates her home, killing her father. Struggling to walk, Marion manages to flee her home to an adjacent sawmill, and is pursued by Paul. While chasing Marion, Paul impales a worker with a forklift, and then inadvertently crashes through a barrier, driving the forklift off the pier and into the bay.
Later at the police station, Marion is questioned about her attacker, who she identifies as the "man she dreamed about." Unable to find any trace of Paul, the police assume that Marion is mentally ill and responsible for the murders herself. She is committed to the same psychiatric institution from which Paul had earlier escaped. While lying bound to a hospital bed, Paul enters her room posing as a doctor. She awakens, and screams in horror.
