Louise and Mark Come Home

Louise Joyner is a 39-year-old single mother and product designer living in San Francisco when her estranged younger brother, Mark, calls with devastating news: their parents, Nancy and Eric Joyner, have died in a car crash back home in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina.

Louise leaves her five-year-old daughter, Poppy, with Poppy’s father, Ian, and flies to Charleston. Returning to her childhood home is unsettling even before anything supernatural happens. Nancy, a former actress who became deeply involved in Christian puppet ministry, filled the house with hundreds of handmade dolls, puppets, and crafts. Now they stare at Louise from practically every surface. The attic hatch has been nailed shut, a hammer and cane have been left on the floor, and two enormous dolls sit watching the Home Shopping Network.

Then Roland Agutter, who owns a junk-removal company, arrives with a truck and workers in hazmat suits. Mark has hired him to clear out the entire house.

That immediately reignites the siblings’ long-standing hostility. Mark wants their parents cremated and their belongings disposed of as quickly as possible, while Louise is horrified by his attitude. Their argument becomes physical enough that Louise spits in his face, and Roland wisely decides he wants nothing to do with the family dispute.

Louise retreats to the Isle of Palms beach house belonging to Aunt Honey, Nancy’s elderly aunt. There she reconnects with other relatives, including Nancy’s sister Aunt Gail, Gail’s daughter Constance, and Constance’s sister Mercy, a successful real-estate agent.

Pupkin Returns

When Louise goes back to the house that night, she discovers the television has somehow turned itself on again. Sitting in Eric’s chair watching it is Pupkin, Nancy’s beloved childhood puppet.

Pupkin is a red-and-yellow glove puppet with a white face, permanent smile, and pointed hood, and Louise has been terrified of him for most of her life. Disturbed by seeing him again, she stuffs him into a plastic garbage bag and throws him into the garage trash.

The family soon gathers for Nancy and Eric’s funeral at Mount Pleasant Presbyterian Church, where Nancy’s fellow Christian puppeteers arrive with puppets on their arms. Afterward, Constance’s husband, Brody, goes over the wills.

Because Nancy survived Eric by several minutes after the crash, Nancy’s will controls the estate. She left the house and virtually everything in it to Mark, while Louise received only her “art collection.” Mark is delighted—until Louise notices a loophole. Nancy considered her handmade puppets, sculptures, and crafts to be art. That means Louise legally owns the enormous collection filling the house.

Louise makes it clear she intends to take her time sorting through everything. Until her property is removed, Mark cannot simply empty and sell the house.

Their inheritance battle soon becomes the least of their problems.

The House Fights Back

As Louise begins cataloguing Nancy’s creations, bizarre events become impossible to dismiss. A taxidermied Squirrel Nativity comes alive, and Louise crushes one squirrel’s skull under her foot while trying to escape it. Later, the apparently destroyed squirrel turns up intact in the trash. Pupkin, meanwhile, has escaped the garbage bag.

When Mercy visits to evaluate the house for sale, she experiences phantom footsteps coming from the attic and mysterious noises inside the bathroom vanity. She refuses to list the property, declaring that the place is haunted.

Louise and Mark attempt one of their old family traditions, a “Pizza Chinese” dinner, hoping to calm whatever is happening. Instead, old resentments surface. Mark accuses Louise of trying to kill him when they were children by leading him onto a frozen pond when he was only two.

Then two giant dolls modeled after Mark and Louise move into the bathroom by themselves and scrawl “MARK KOM HOM” across the wall in red lipstick.

That night, the threat becomes unmistakably violent. Pupkin attacks Louise and drives a long sewing needle directly into her left eye. She manages to pull it out. Mark bursts into the room with a gun and repeatedly shoots Pupkin until the puppet is shredded.

The siblings can no longer pretend they are dealing with ordinary family baggage.

What Pupkin Did to Them

At three in the morning, Louise and Mark retreat to a Waffle House, where Mark finally explains what really happened when he attended Boston University.

As a freshman, he became involved with an experimental group called Organ Puppet Theater, led by a puppeteer named Clark and including Sadie and Richard. Clark took Pupkin and began wearing him constantly. Under Pupkin’s influence, the group became increasingly disturbed and violent. They mutilated neighborhood pets and went on destructive rampages through houses.

Mark eventually tried to escape by setting fire to the group’s papier-mâché masks in the basement. The fire spread, burning down the house, and Mark fled.

His confession pushes Louise to reveal what she has hidden since childhood. When she was five, Pupkin spoke directly inside her mind and ordered her to take two-year-old Mark onto a frozen pond and leave him there. Horrified by what she had done, Louise later buried Pupkin deep in the backyard.

But Nancy found him.

Rather than recognizing what Louise believed had happened, their mother dug Pupkin up, cleaned him, and put him right back in Louise’s room.

With both siblings finally comparing their experiences, they reach another horrifying conclusion: Pupkin attacked Eric shortly before their parents died. That attack caused the medical emergency that led to the fatal car crash.

Pupkin Takes Poppy

Louise leaves Charleston and returns to San Francisco, hoping to put the nightmare behind her. Instead, she discovers it has followed her home.

Ian’s mother has made Poppy her own duplicate Pupkin puppet, and Poppy is already falling under its control. The little girl screams Pupkin’s “Kakawewe!” catchphrase, bites adults, and uses a kitchen knife to carve deep scratches into her own arm.

Realizing her daughter is in immediate danger, Louise takes Poppy back to Charleston. She and Mark turn to Aunt Gail, who brings them to her friend Barb, an energetic woman who considers herself an expert on cursed dolls.

Barb gathers Louise, Mark, Poppy, Gail, Constance, Mercy, and Brody into a spiritual circle surrounded by her doll collection. During the ritual, Pupkin begins speaking through Poppy.

Instead of confronting him aggressively, Barb tricks Pupkin into talking about himself. What emerges completely changes the family’s understanding of the haunting.

Pupkin says he is Freddie, Nancy’s younger brother.

According to the story Louise and Mark grew up hearing, five-year-old Freddie died from lockjaw after stepping on a rusty nail. But that story was never true.

The Joyners’ Buried Secret

The family rushes to the hospital, where Aunt Honey has been admitted with breathing problems. Louise confronts her, demanding the truth about Freddie.

Aunt Honey finally breaks down.

When Nancy was seven and Freddie was five, the two children were at a hotel pool in Columbia. Nancy wandered away to count ice cream flavors, leaving her little brother unattended. Freddie drowned.

The loss devastated the family, but instead of acknowledging what happened, Nancy’s parents created a false story that Freddie had died of lockjaw. They secretly buried the boy’s body in the backyard of the family home.

That secret explains years of strange family behavior. Freddie’s remains were still on the property, which was why the family could never build a deck there or simply leave the house behind.

Louise now understands what she has to do. Freddie has never truly been laid to rest.

The Final Battle for Freddie

Louise, Mark, and Poppy drive back to the house during a storm, determined to find Freddie’s body and end the haunting.

Pupkin responds by unleashing everything in the house.

Nancy’s enormous collection of puppets joins together into a grotesque seven-foot-tall puppet golem made from hundreds of intertwined bodies. In response, something equally impossible happens: Spider, Mark’s imaginary blue six-legged dog from childhood, manifests as a real creature and tears into the puppet monster.

Pupkin then takes control of Mark himself.

Mark comes after Louise with a claw hammer, and she realizes she cannot stop him without physically separating him from the puppet. In desperation, Louise grabs Mark’s circular saw and cuts off his right forearm.

The horrific act works. Pupkin is severed from Mark, and Mark is rushed away for emergency medical treatment.

Louise stays behind to finish what they came to do. She digs beneath the cypress tree in the backyard until she finds an old tin traveling trunk. Inside are the bones of five-year-old Freddie, still dressed in a red sweater.

Instead of fighting him, Louise speaks gently to the child whose death has haunted her family for decades. She explains to Freddie that he is dead and that nothing real can last forever.

At last, Freddie accepts the truth. His spirit and Pupkin leave together for the fantasy world of Tickytoo Woods.

With Freddie finally gone, Louise burns Pupkin’s physical puppet body to ash on the backyard grill.

Louise and Mark Finally Let Go

Six months later, in October, Freddie receives the funeral he was denied as a child. His remains are properly buried beside Nancy and Eric at Stuhr’s cemetery.

Mark survives losing his arm and is adjusting well to a prosthetic. He also renovates the family house, transforming the cluttered, oppressive home into a modern open-plan property. Mercy finally finds a buyer, a software engineer from Toronto, and the house sells for a high enough price to help secure Poppy’s financial future.

More importantly, Louise and Mark are no longer the bitter, estranged siblings who returned home after their parents’ deaths. By confronting Pupkin and finally telling each other the truth about their childhoods, they have reconciled.

Before leaving the house for the final time, Louise, Mark, and Poppy stand together in the kitchen. For a moment, they smell their father’s stollen baking in the oven.

Then Louise and Mark lock the door behind them and walk away together, leaving their childhood home—and the secrets buried inside it—behind.