This John Carpenter horror movie simultaneously honors and pokes fun at the work of author Stephen King as it depicts a violent and chaotic real world that his been strongly influenced by a horror writer. John Trent, an insurance investigator, has gone off the deep end. The film opens with he and a psychiatrist in a padded cell. There the demented Trent tries to tell his story of violence and confusion. The shrink recognizes that his story is by no means unique, for such events are happening everywhere. Trent believes that the cause of the chaos lies within the writings of author Sutter Cane who recently disappeared. Trent was hired by the writer's publisher to find him, and this lead him to his conclusion that Cane was somehow behind it all. Trent was assisted by Linda Styles, Cane's editor. Together they went to find Hobb's End, the fictional location of Cane's tales. They found it in New England. What was even stranger, is that all the terrifying events mentioned in Cane's books came to pass in this innocuous village.