For Allison Cook, the weekend trip to a horror convention in Virginia is a fun break from work and humdrum reality. Then she meets a guy who shows her a movie that shouldn’t exist, one that upends everything she thinks she knows about reality itself. The movie on the old VHS tape is an unseen and unknown installment of a legendary slasher franchise she’s loved since the dark days of her unhappy adolescence.

On a cold winter’s night, a pair of runaway lovers stop to refuel their car in a remote Pennsylvania town hours away from any major population center. The town has gone to rot after the death of its main industry, and the remaining citizens are kept in line by a powerful few who refuse to let the dwindling community die, no matter what the cost. The rare wayward travelers who come to the town are rarely ever allowed to leave, as the lovers discover when they are forced to play a deadly game of kill or be killed. A game called The Gauntlet.

The abandoned house at the end of Millhaven Road stands on blighted and barren ground, as if nature itself shuns this tainted place. It is known simply as Dead End House, and unspeakably terrible things happened there long ago.

It’s Halloween night in 1987. The era of fast cars, big hair, and glam metal is in full swing. A group of young friends push their appetite for destruction to the limit as they race along dark and dangerous back roads in search of a rumored epic spook night beer bash out in the boonies. But things take a tragic turn when they encounter a smirking villain in a sinister black car. They become trapped in haunted nightmare country with no obvious way out. Before long, it’s time to strap in tight, grab another cold one, and race with the devil. First to the finish line might even get to live.

Welcome to Hopkins Bend, the remote little Tennessee town where the backwoods inhabitants are cannibals and the local law operates a sex-trafficking ring. Unlucky travelers are frequently ensnared in the town’s sinister web. Some are held captive and tortured while others face even more gruesome fates. And beneath it all is the town’s darkest secret, the curse of the depraved and mutated Kincher clan.