Taken aback by his mother’s wedding announcement, a young man returns home in an effort to stop her from marrying his old high school gym teacher, a man who made high school hell for generations of students.

A boy preacher named Isaac goes to a town in Nebraska called Gatlin and gets all the children to murder every adult in town. A young couple have a murder to report and they go to the nearest town (Gatlin) to seek help but the town seems deserted. They are soon trapped in Gatlin with little chance of getting out alive.

Mort Rainey (Depp), a writer just coming off of a troublesome divorce with his ex-wife, Amy (Bello), finds himself stalked at his remote lake house by a psychotic stranger (Turturro) who claims Mort stole his best story idea (changing just the ending)… (Hutton plays Bello’s new boyfriend; Dutton plays a private investigator hired to make Turturro’s character leave Mort alone.)