Italy, 1252
Inquisition. Accusation. Fear. Torture. The guilty and the innocent
dying for sins real and imagined, in the flames of the burning stake...
Neilsville, 1978
Peter Balsam has come to this sleepy desert town to teach its youth, and
finds a mystery of mounting horror.
Something is happening to the young girls of St. Francis Xavier High
School--something evil.
In bloodlet and terror a suicide contagion has swept the town...while a
dark order of its holy men enacts a secret medieval ritual.
Is hysteria manipulating these innocent children into violent
self-destruction? Or has a supernatural force, a thirteenth-century
madness, returned to...Punish the Sinners?