West Berlin. A peculiar man, his face half-covered by a metal mask, invites Sharon and her friend Katie to watch a film at the ‘Metropol’ cinema. A horror film is being screened, in which a group of young people, having entered the caves beneath a cemetery and discovered and desecrated Nostradamus’s tomb, fall victim to an evil mask found in the tomb itself. But an identical mask is on display in the cinema foyer; a young black woman puts it on as a joke, sustaining a tiny scratch, but the trickle of blood that flows from it does not stop and she is very quickly transformed into a monstrous and ferocious creature. Little by little, all the guests at the screening are infected: attacks and violence begin, along with blood and repulsive slime; the cinema seems to have no exits, and panic spreads. Only at the end do a couple of survivors – Sharon and Giorgio, a young man she met in the auditorium – manage to escape the carnage, thanks to a helicopter that has crashed into the building. The jeep, belonging to a small family fleeing a city already in chaos, set ablaze and overrun by hundreds of thousands of monsters, picks them up. But even Sharon, now infected by the terrible pus, must die at the hands of her casual companion, who is forced to leave her horribly transformed on the tarmac to flee towards a predictable fate.
