Blood Night: The Legend of Mary Hatchet 2009

In 1978, Mary Hatchet comes of age amid a storm of fear and violence. After her first period triggers a terrifying outburst, she murders her parents with a hatchet. Deemed mentally unfit, she is confined to Kings Park Psychiatric Center, where the system treats her with cruelty and neglect. In 1989, she is raped and impregnated by a guard, a crime that is quickly covered up. Believing her child was a stillbirth, she endures another wound to her spirit and erupts in a brutal rampage through the hospital’s sterile corridors. The police confront her as she roams the grounds, and in a final act of horror, she hurls the severed head of her rapist at them, bringing an abrupt end to her killing spree. The grisly events fuse into a terrifying folklore, and locals begin to celebrate a Blood Night in her name, a mischievous echo of the horror that still lingers.

Decades later, in 2008, a group of teenagers set out for their own Blood Night by convening a séance at Mary Hatchet’s grave on Sweet Hollow Road in Huntington. The cemetery is guarded by the old King’s Park lore told to them by Gus, the caretaker who once worked at the asylum and who lingers in memory as a haunted witness to what happened there. Graveyard Gus insists that Mary’s spirit will keep coming back until she finds her child, a child said to lie buried near Kings Park. The teens return to a house party, where the night turns sinister as guests begin to disappear under the pressure of unseen forces and escalating supernatural phenomena. Panic spreads as bodies turn up, and the survivors flee into the night, their nerves frayed by the uncanny pressure of the haunting.

The remaining teens stumble back toward the truth with Gus by their side, and he leads them to the abandoned Kings Park Psychiatric Center to unearth the baby’s grave. The coffin is empty, and a pile of official papers reveals a chilling revelation: Mary’s child is Alissa, a missing party guest from Chicago. Through a series of flashbacks, it becomes clear that Alissa either acted under Mary’s influence or is already succumbing to a disorder echoing her mother’s legacy. Alissa returns in the present, and the terrifying hunt resumes as she kills Gus and pursues the others through the decayed halls of the asylum. The cat-and-mouse chase pushes to a brutal climax, with Alex and Lanie left scrambling for an exit. After a ferocious struggle, Alex winds up strangling Alissa to death, only to face a final, shocking turn as Mary’s enraged ghost decapitates him, turning the asylum into a chamber of echoes and doom and finally lurching toward the frightened Lanie.