As the streets of Los Angeles overflow with camera-wielding gawkers seeking to capture images of a bizarre police pursuit, the same people who sought to exploit the suffering of others for amusement on the Internet become the stars of a gruesome viral video from which no one gets out alive.

After years of rotting in Joliet, Les, a wrongfully imprisoned street legend known as "The Ghoul", is released into a mad search through Chicago's back alleys for the man who slaughtered his mother and robbed him of his soul. Aided by mysterious benefactors, he must delve beneath the city into a modern labyrinth of gutters whose tendrils have grown deep while he was gone. What unfolds is a desperate tale of brute force tragedy set in the supernatural underworld of Chicago, where heroes are reduced to horror-shows, villains dream of their own demise, and good and evil prove to be antiquated concepts.