An American soldier (Backus) is killed in Vietnam. His parents and sister are then shocked to find him standing at their front door in his dress uniform, apparently alive and well. Their initial joy is replaced by creeping terror as local people are found murdered with their bodies drained of all blood. The boy's father (Marley) eventually comes to believe his son to be a murdering vampire setting the scene for the film's climax. The script is a reworking of the tale "The monkey's paw" and relies on mood and tension to convey the terror. It uses the horror genre to explore the difficulty of post-Vietnam adjustment and the disintegration of the American family in the 1960s.