Plot Details
The film opens with Henry Morrison washing blood off himself in a bathroom before shaving his beard, replacing his glasses with contact lenses and putting a few of his belongings into a suitcase. After packing his things, Henry leaves through the front door of his house, nonchalantly passing the butchered remains of his family and others. Boarding a ferry, Henry throws the suitcase containing the objects from his former life into the ocean.
One year later, Henry (now operating as a real estate agent named Jerry Blake) has married the former widow Susan Maine. Jerry's relationship with Susan's teenage daughter Stephanie is strained. Her psychiatrist, Doctor Bondurant, advises her to give Jerry a chance.
Meanwhile, amateur detective Jim Ogilvie, the brother of Jerry's murdered wife, runs an article about his sister's slayer in the newspaper. While hosting a neighborhood barbecue, Jerry discovers the article and is disturbed by it. Jerry goes into the basement of the house and begins maniacally rambling to himself (possibly recalling memories of his unhappy childhood), unaware that Stephanie is also in the basement. Discovering his stepdaughter, Jerry brushes off his outbursts by saying he was simply letting off steam. Stephanie finds the newspaper mentioning Jerry's earlier killings and comes to believe her stepfather is the murderer Henry Morrison mentioned in the article.
Stephanie writes a letter to the newspaper requesting a photo of Henry Morrison, but Jerry finds the photo in the mail and replaces it with another, allaying Stephanie's suspicions.
Curious about Stephanie's stepdad, Doctor Bondurant makes an appointment with Jerry under an assumed name, saying he wants to buy a house. During their meeting, Jerry realizes that Bondurant is not who he says he is, and beats him to death with a wooden board, and then blows up the doctor's car with his body inside it. The next day, Jerry sympathetically informs Stephanie of Bondurant's death in an apparent car accident and succeeds in bonding with her. Jerry's newfound relationship with his stepdaughter is quickly cut short when he catches Stephanie kissing her boyfriend. Jerry accuses Paul of attempting to rape Stephanie, which causes an argument with Stephanie and Susan, and drives the boyfriend away. Thinking that all hope of having a happy life with Susan and Stephanie has been ruined, Jerry quits his job and creates a new identity for himself in another town, where he begins to court another widow while planning to get rid of Susan and Stephanie.
Having discovered where Jerry is now living, Jim Ogilvie begins going door to door through town in search of his former brother in-law. After Jim stops by, Susan phones the real estate agency to tell Jerry that someone was looking for him, only to be informed that Jerry had quit several days ago. Confronting Jerry when he returns home, Susan is told by Jerry that there must have been a mix-up. While explaining himself to Susan, Jerry confuses his Jerry Blake identity with the new Bill Hoskins one he had crafted and bashes Susan with the phone before knocking her down the basement stairs after she realizes Stephanie was right about Jerry. Content that Susan is dead, Jerry then sets out to kill Stephanie.
Ambushing Jim when he enters the house after recognizing him, Jerry kills him by stabbing him in the stomach with a knife as Jim pulls out a Smith & Wesson Bodyguard .38 Special snubnosed revolver, before attacking Stephanie. Sustaining a wound to the arm when Stephanie stabs him with a piece of glass, Jerry follows his stepdaughter into the attic, where he corners her. Before he can kill Stephanie, Jerry falls through the weak floor of the attic, but recovers from the fall quickly and renews his attack on Stephanie when she tries to escape. Before he can harm Stephanie, Jerry is shot twice by a still living Susan, who had regained consciousness and retrieved Jim's gun. Feebly trying to reclaim his knife after being shot, Jerry is stabbed in the chest by Stephanie, who grabs the knife before he can. Uttering a weak "I love you" to Stephanie, Jerry falls down the stairs, seemingly dead. The film ends with Stephanie cutting down the birdhouse she and Jerry had put up during the brief time they had bonded with one another.
Read more about this topic: The Stepfather (1987 film)
Famous quotes containing the words plot and/or details:
“There saw I how the secret felon wrought,
And treason labouring in the traitor’s thought,
And midwife Time the ripened plot to murder brought.”
—Geoffrey Chaucer (1340?–1400)
“There was a time when the average reader read a novel simply for the moral he could get out of it, and however naïve that may have been, it was a good deal less naïve than some of the limited objectives he has now. Today novels are considered to be entirely concerned with the social or economic or psychological forces that they will by necessity exhibit, or with those details of daily life that are for the good novelist only means to some deeper end.”
—Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964)