Plot
Mary and Roberto Valdi return home from a party to find a masked intruder ransacking their elegant country house. The masked man attacks and brutally kills both of them and then disguises their deaths as an auto accident by driving their dead bodies to an isolated hilltop in their car and pushing it over the edge.
At their parents' funeral, bereaved children Sarah and Marco exhibit a strange mixture of grief and stifled hilarity, chewing gum while weeping and giggling at the elderly priest conducting the graveside ceremony. The children's Aunt Marcia, Mary Valdi's younger sister, and Uncle Carlo, her husband, decide to stay with the children at the Valdi house. At the same time, arrangements are made to sell the property. When Carlo is called away on business, Marcia spends an uneasy night at the Valdi house without him. Disturbed during the night, she explores the attic and is frightened by a giant toy fly that seems to attack her.
Over the next few days, Sarah and Marco are adamant that they wish to continue living at the house and are openly hostile to Mr. Colby, the real estate agent whom Carlo brings to the house. When the overweight Mr. Colby suffers an accident after falling down a flight of stairs, the children laugh maliciously. Meanwhile, the Valdi's gardener, Guido, observes the events with suspicion. A flashback recalled by Guido reveals that he was the masked intruder who broke into the house to rob it, only to be surprised when his employers returned sooner than anticipated, and he was forced to kill them. Elsewhere, Marcia becomes more and more scared of the house, and supernatural presences make themselves felt.
That night, Sarah and Marco are visited by floating flames in their beds, which they suspect represent their dead parents. The following morning, Guido is about to accept a generous check from Carlo for the house's renovation when a violent flashback, brought on by the supernatural forces within the house, shocks him into screaming his guilt for all to hear. He runs off and accidentally gets run over and killed by an oncoming truck on the road.
The injured Mr. Colby returns the following day, but a violent windstorm attacks him in the hallway. Supernatural flames appear and heat up his crutches, burning his hands, making him fall down. Terrified but defiant, he leaves the house again. That evening, Sarah and Marco conduct a masked ritual to contact the spirit world. They ask their parents to manifest themselves and to look after them. Their wish is somehow granted, and their parents' ghosts greet them. Sarah and Marco are finally happy and able to spend more time with their loving but non-corporeal parents at any time they wish. But Marcia and Carlo cannot see the ghosts, and they try to bundle the children into their car, intending to leave the house and return to their own home. However, a ghostly fog prevents them from getting very far, and they are forced to return. The frightened couple brings in a medium, an arrogant, caped 'spirit challenger' to exercise the house of the children's parents.
After a brief skirmish with the ghostly forces in the house, the spiritualist returns with a wrecking crew and a giant bulldozer and again commands the spirits of Mary and Roberto to leave the house before it is smashed to rubble. For a while, the children try to inhabit an old lean-to playhouse they'd constructed, while the spiritualist, Mr. Colby, Marcia, and Carlo are outside trying to persuade them to leave the building. The spirits of Sarah and Marco's parents enter two small stones as a way of staying with them forever wherever they go. The children finally walk out of the house, where the spiritualist sees them hiding something in their pockets and tries to confiscate the stones. But when he picks up one, his right hand is melted away as he screams in agony. The family of living children and ghostly parents will apparently remain together.
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