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.

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.

Burnstow is an ordinary little town populated by ordinary people. Farthing is an ordinary guy that has just inherited an ordinary mobile home in an ordinary trailer park. Farthing looks forward to a nice, quiet, ordinary life.

The TV ads promised a festival of cheap and bloody fright films, all of them thinly disguised knockoffs of well-known movies with much better pedigrees. One film features a family of chainsaw maniacs, another a zombie uprising. In yet another, a cult of vampires lives in a creepy old mansion. The whole thing is hosted by the mysterious Dr. Ominous.