At the prompting of his diplomat friend, Alex, writer Ted Fletcher takes his wife, Laura, and daughter, Amy, on an extended working holiday. Alex finds a house for them in Kyoto, Japan, and the Fletchers move in, laughing off rumors that the place is haunted. But the ghost of 19th-century samurai Shigero turns out to be very real, and is intent on making the family re-enact an ancient murder-suicide.

Loosely based on an infamous 1984 Long Island murder case involving Satan-worshiping, teenage drug freaks (Knights of the Black Circle), David Wojnarowicz and Tommy Turner’s Where Evil Dwells is a low-budget D.I.Y. movie that walks the jagged lines between splatter flick, experimental film and transgressive art. The original footage was destroyed in a fire and the only footage that survived is this 28 minute preview that was put together for the Downtown New York Film Festival in 1985.

In 1989, the schizophrenic son of a serial killer is remanded to house arrest after attacking a man, but when his allegedly-slain father reappears to him and threatens to resume killing, he must grapple with the question of what is real and how he will survive.